The Unholy Trinity

Count, roughly, how many student exhibitions you have seen in the last year. The number is unimportant, but hold it in your head. Now, of those exhibitions, how many displayed work involving, in some way, a dead animal? Compare those numbers. I can probably say with some confidence that they are the same.

Those visiting The Unholy Trinity—not an adolescent rock band, but an exhibition at the Forest Café—will be able to chalk up another. The ‘trinity’ is the work of three artists just out of art school in Dundee: Jamie Fitzpatrick, Rich DD Cormack and Omar Zingaro Bhatia. It is in Fitzpatrick’s ‘Unnatural History Museum’ that we see the token student ‘dead animal’, or animals in this case, to have crawled out of the degree show and made it into the exhibition room.

The ‘museum’ is a series of animals taxidermied together to create ‘new’ species. This, Fitzpatrick writes, is a comment on “transgenics”, the “commodification of the natural”, the “realising of mythology” and the Victorians’ ghoulish interest in novelty taxidermy. This confused set of associations finds some reflection in the work itself, but I imagine not always as the maker intended. Looking across at the duck’s head emerging awkwardly from the rabbit’s body, or the rabbit head poorly attached to the plastic toy, Fitzpatrick’s unwholesome creations seem about as well put together as his muddled concepts.

Hanging from the roof is an albatross skeleton constructed from plaster. Though it appears to be part of the taxidermy series, it in fact belongs to Rich DD Cormack, whose paintings and drawings are shown on the back wall of the gallery. His two-dimensional work has in it the same kind of quirkiness as the skeleton, though the tone of the work at times creeps towards the uncomfortably personal. His small painting ‘Cryptic tree’ is accompanied by a block of text almost as large as the painting itself, and, in a very ‘un-cryptic’ way, he details his infection of mumps and subsequent frustrated ‘unspoken desire to have children’. No doubt this holds a certain kind of seriousness for the artist, but the absurdity of his images, himself as a “ragged fox”, “sitting unmotivated” while “woodpeckers steal my eggs” does not communicate anything of this kind.

The work of Omar Zingaro Bhatia forms the final part of the exhibition, with a series of paintings and his installation pieces ‘Yes, but that’s books’ and ‘Bottles I found in an old dump hanging by alpaca wool in a failed attempt at meaning’. The latter—crudely presented as it is—shows an ironic self-awareness that the other works, while also tending to the comic, sometimes lack. As has already been suggested, the “failed attempt at meaning” is by no means limited in the exhibition to Bhatia’s hanging bottles, but here, at the very least, the failure is recognised.