Artist's Statement by Claire McGee :
My work explores the relationship between excess and control. The pieces depict the Revolutionary period in late-18th century France, where the world was said to witness the death of one era and the birth of another. However, the world portrayed is as if a new one was never born - the old simply died and continued isolated and separated, pointless and lost in its own grandeur and excess. Through disengaging from reality, a greater understanding of the limits of social order and the nature of power is achieved. Its symbols of opulent redundancy merely add to the overall sense of isolation and delusion. This is an opulent fortress within a fortress - a transgressive space. To the imagination, it is a perverse and carnivalesque world. This excessive world has become the bacchanal of the imagination, but only of the imagination. If we truly look at the figures, we can see that their pleasures, pomp and voluptuousness are purely superficial. They invite the viewer into this world yet remain disengaged from their surroundings - lost, even bored. Excess can only truly be understood in an environment of control. When the methods of control become one with the environment, control becomes omnipresent. When the institution becomes the new power, the balance of excess and control becomes confused and the rationale of modern thought is lost.