Shezad Dawood | Harvest Moon

The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity too great for the eye of man.

William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Harvest Moon presents a new series of works by Shezad Dawood especially conceived for his solo show at Paradise Row. Comprising textile paintings, sculptures and neon work, Dawood’s installation plays with the gallery space suggesting doubling and assonances.

Seduced by an ambiguous Blood Moon, the visitor is introduced into a suspended mysterious eco-psycho-landscape inhabited by the ghostly figure of the wolf, mythological omen of destruction, war and death.

In a conceptual balance between the decorative and the perverse, the treasured still life sculptures function as vanitas evocative of a sense of emptiness. Here the predator becomes the prey like in a shamanic journey or 'wolf trance' of transition to undergo a spiritual re-birth. Through this transformation knowledge and consciousness emerges.

Shezad Dawood's work explores the multiple possibilities engendered by the play between cultures, histories and fictions. Notions of authorship and representation are deconstructed by working with a steady stream of collaborators mapping cross cultural influences and trajectories.

Working through film, video and painting Dawood questions the performative process of image making and dissemination, moving through various points of identification and visual systems such as science fiction and the occult.

Dawood openly engages with various devices from avant-garde theatre, the conventions of art-house and low-budget filmmaking, to notions of appropriation and a global archive.