The VAULT Gallery re-opens it’s doors with new solo show: DNR (do not resuscitate) by emerging artist Rachael Allen, featuring Iris Priest.

Preview: 8th April 2010, 7-9:30pm, VAULT Gallery, Lancaster.

This new exhibition at Lancaster’s Church Street space marks the first in a new series of exhibitions after an absence of nearly six months.

Allen, an emerging artist based in the north of England, harnesses the catalystic forces of Social ethics, spiritual beliefs and attitudes towards death to represent our collective obsession with mortality.

Miniature model making and drawing provide a stage for the exploration of mortal existence, where the fine line separating youth and age, birth and death, highlights our vulnerable condition as human beings. DNR (do not resuscitate) probes our collective response to viewing images and iconography of death, and exposes us to a public (and collective) act of meditation as opposed to experiencing private thoughts in very private realities.

Allen is an artist with an obsession for antonyms: presence and absence, pleasure and pain, love and hate, life and death: the ‘grotesque’ is exquisitely drawn; the ‘undesirable’ is beautifully sculpted in miniature- functioning on a level of seduction that invites the viewer to enter a diminutive world that speaks about the universal mortal condition.

The Exhibition runs from the 9th-24th April 2010, with a preview taking place Thursday 8th April 2010, 7-9:30pm, where the artist will be on-hand to talk about the work. Normal opening hours are Fri/Sat 1-6pm or by appointment; admission is free to the general public.

Rachael Allen is a British Artist Based in the North of England.

For more information about the artist and her work, please visit www.rachaelallen.com