Triptych at LA SALLE DES TAUREAUX: Phillip Adams, Mikala Dwyer and Paul Yore

Mikala Dwyer & Paul Yore have invited Phillip Adams, recent Artistic Director of Ballet Lab at Temperance Hall, to respond with a performance to the exhibition LA SALLE DES TAUREAUX at the exhibition opening event. 

Join us at Glasshouse this Thursday 25 January from 6 – 8pm for a one-off performance of Triptych by Phillip Adams – performed by Ben Hurley and Oliver Savariego.

Initially presented by Temperance Hall and Phillip Adams BalletLab as part of the final Frame: biennial of dance, “Triptych”, from which this performance is excerpted, presented a divine intervention of queer crucifixions inspired by Francis Bacon’s triptych paintings (1944–1986). Choreographer Phillip Adams draws parallels with Bacon’s use of life and death, beauty and violence, civilisation and barbarism.

LA SALLE DE TAUREAUX enmeshes the overlapping interests of the two artists, who have both established richly experimental practices that draw deeply from the idea of queerness, mysticism, ritual and the transmutability of diverse materialities. Bringing together a suite of Dwyer’s sculptural work in clay and mixed media, and a sound work by Yore, this exhibition also features a collaborative wall painting, drawing diversely from the tradition of Socialist murals, Picasso’s Guernica, street art, and abstract and hybrid motifs from the cave painting at Lascaux itself, such as the quizzical half bird, half man figure.

This ensemble of forms in clay, sound and paint issues from the idea of the cave as a site of refuge, shamanic ecstasy and metamorphosis, and by extension, posits art as a radical and transformative space for encountering the unknown, and for a collective healing of sorts.