ABOUT

Multimedia artist Harley Price, also working under the nom du guerre Paleface, is a London born and based artist.  His practice combines both 2 and 3 dimensional work installation and performance.

 

Through a solemn dissent and refusal to sentimentalize conflict and abuse his work seeks to memorialise those we habitually conceive to be "the other" - the hoary generic concept of a homogeneous “Us” versus an alien “Them”, inculpating everyone and no one.  His work often iconoclastically seizes and appropriates pan-historical and pan-anthropological references as metaphors for oppression and injustice, attempting to explore meaning and affect on past, present and future, disturbing preconceptions and expectations, questioning and challenging the subconscious desire to be absolved of guilt and complicity and our role within duality the system,.   

 

His practice deals with issues of permanence and transcendence, manifesting formally as objects, characters, or ideograms, as part of an esoteric aesthetic system.  Often reminiscent of universal human constructions and edifices, although conditioned by the inevitability of its ephemerality within a geological time scale, these objects -signs- acquire an historical significance by virtue of juxtaposition against the original they seek to recall or resemble and are an interpretation of, be it the premeditated and coincidental accumulation of stones in a cairn or the engineered simplicity of bunkers or the ceremonial /ritual construction of the totem. As with monuments of worship or fortification, their meaning is altered by displacement or dislocation, while the essential quality, the metaphysical pathos, remains unchanged. The deconstruction of the symbol into elements of similar characteristics does not reveal a commonality, for this is not the intention driving the exercise, but a quality of alienation. Deprived of their original context, Price´s ideograms and objects - in whatever manifestation they might take- belong to an arcane language where the touchstone and canon required for deciphering is in turn permanently and transiently hidden and exposed by their aesthetic value.