THE LOVE OF LOOK curated by Kirsty Bell Opening: 1 February, 2001, 7pm Exhibition: 1 February to 16 March 2001 In a city like New York, ruled by the power that the dollar can buy you, there is little room for idealism. The utopian concepts of establishing a better order through social structure, urban planning, thought or revolution have no place here. But the one means of escape from the harsh reality of New York society’s positioning, available to all and exploited by a seam of canny artists, is the liberating power of styling. The art/fashion cross-over is old news, of course, but the artists in THE LOVE OF LOOK show us instead the wholesale consumption of fashion by art. These artists are the heirs of the Warholian mantle where fame, glamour, success and beauty are all there for the making and taking. Style is used as a means of self-definition, a route of escape, a tool with which to carve out a new utopia. Turning their back on the fashion industry, these artists trade instead in the fantasy of fashion: the power of self-made style, kitchen-crafted accessories and simulated celebrity. PATTERSON BECKWITH gives us a group of portraits of New York’s perfectly put-together artists: drinking, smoking, cell-phoning and wearing shades against the backdrop of the city’s most photogenic locations. BERNADETTE CORPORATION takes us into a Brooklyn bedroom fantasy where the stars in the eyes of the languishing girl and the aeroplane reflected in her sunglasses are the closest shell get to her long-distance club-class dreams. RACHEL FEINSTEIN casts herself as the helpless damsel and sleeping beauty in her own versions of Hollywood’s favourite fairy tales. WADE GUYTON´s glossy sculptures make sideways allusions to Morris and Smithson while giving us an indulgent glimpse of our own reflection, like the chromed lobby of an upper east side door-manned apartment building. SISSEL KARDEL paints herself into the picture postcard worlds of classic American landscapes. ROB PRUITT fetishes the glamour of dead celebrities and toasts their mortality with a series of monogrammed bottles of wine. But PIOTR UKLANSKI offers us the most redeeming vision - a group of lovely young people unified by the colour of their clothes, sitting together on the grass in an idealized fiction of an artists community.