Carter Presents is delighted to exhibit the first solo show in the UK of Austrian artist

Thomas Draschan who will be presenting his new installation:

"Resemblances Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics"

In this new piece the film and video work is not only accompanied bylarge-scale collages, but has expanded out into the gallery. An altar-like totemic TV monitor shows the colourful flickering
results of the quick fire editing of two commercials. Draschan has united the two films with around 1000 hand-made splices that almost make the TV set explode. The resulting collision of images a cacophony of stimuli is driven beyond the monitor frame by its sheer kinetic energy in to the room and beyond.

The whole installation can best be seen from a seat especially made for this purpose: a florence knoll design classic that has been seriously abused by glueing on to it all the images that form Thomas Draschan's cosmic universe.

The complex symbolic language of Draschan's work is inspired by such thinkers and writer as j.k. huysmans, c.g. jung, gustave flaubert and Sigmund Freud. The exhibition refers both to Freud's collection of antique fallic figures surrounding his desk at the Freud Museum in London and to his book 'Totem and Taboo' (1913)

Freud writes " If the totem animal is the father, then the two principal ordinances of totemism, the two taboo prohibitions which constitute its core - not to kill the totem and not to have sexual relations with a woman of the same totem - coincide in their content with the two crimes of Oedipus, who killed his father and married his mother, as well as with the two primal wishes of children, the insufficient repression or the re-awakening of which forms the nucleus of perhaps every psychoneurosis.. "

Thus the multi layering interdisciplinary and transgressive nature to the work reaches in to our primitive and damaged psyches, through barely known apocryphic religious writings, pulp novels, classic Italian
porn and saccharine mass produced comics which inform and become the work. Thomas Draschan embraces the deviant pubescent miscreant in us all and This installation at its core is both savagely neurotic and neurotically savage.

The works in this exhibition contain sexual and violent conten and may cause offence. Any persons under the age of 16 may only enter if accompanied by an adult.

Thomas Draschan born 1967 Lives and works in Vienna. He studied at the Academie of Fine Arts in Frankfurt and at Cooper Union in NY. He is working with Video, Film and Collages. The re-combination of existing images into a new, condensed and enriched form is one of his main concerns.

Draschan has exhibited widely in Europe and The USA since 1998, he has been the recipient of numerous awards for his experimental films.His films include documentaries on Herman Nitsch The Viennese Actionist and music videos for New Order "Turn"

This is his first solo exhibition in the UK.