May 24th to July 27th 2002

Is it possible to postpone an arising panic? Is this the helpless well-meaning advice of a helpless well-meaning friend or the inner voice that still says: don’t get nervous now!,
_ even though your forehead is already bathed in sweat?

_Let’s panic later is an exhibition that deals with the fear of losing control of oneself and the outside world.

_ Let’s panic later presents 8 artists from Scotland and Wales,
whose artworks investigate extreme emotional conditions, fear, depression, neurosis
and the ways in which people try to handle them.

participating artists:

Paul Carter, Neil Coombs, Kate Gray, Michelle Naismith, Janie Nicoll, Shani Rhys James,
Simon Robertshaw, John Timberlake,

Close Encounter (1999)

Neil Coombs In the projection of his "Cache Machine" Coombs uses modern digital possibilities
and criticizes them at the same time.
He spies out hard disc cache and uses the rests of images that can be found there to create
an ever-changing crucifix. The connection between the loss of identity through surveillance and a fear of persecution that can turn into paranoia becomes visible in Coombs’ work.

Kate Gray"Earthquake" is the title of Gray’s video sculpture, in which a crawling human figure is projected into a small scale model apartment. The spectator’s angle of vision - looking at the situation from above - fills the seemingly playful constellation with a strange tension between passive omniscience and compassionate sympathy.

Michelle Naismith Though perceived as a monitor piece at first glance, one subject of Naismith’s work pushes its way into real space: the baseball bat, the dark impending presence of which is not explained by the video, has its real-life counterpart in the exhibition space. The viewer's impressions waver uneasily between the sensation of a hardly describable mental pressure and the enigmatic violent prospects that result from it.

Janie Nicoll Death and menace play an important role in Janie Nicoll’s installations. Using images of dead flies she works out sceneries in space and for windows, that deal with desertedness, deprivation and the horrors of empty apartments. She will create a new site-specific work for the Künstlerhaus exhibition.

work in progress (2001/02)

Shani Rhys James In an obsessive series of portraits titled "facing the self", Shani Rhys James again and again circles her own face in painting and tracks down the injuries, the threats and the insecurities there. She succeeds in creating a universal picture of contemporary feeling that goes far beyond the individuality of the painted person.