Stephen Chambers RA, The Big Country (detail), 2012. Screen print, 56 x 76 cm. © Stephen Chambers. Published by the artist. Printed at the Print Studio, Cambridge.
Artists’ Laboratory 06: Stephen Chambers RA
24 October–2 December 2012
Royal Academy of Arts
Burlington House, Piccadilly
London W1J 0BD
Lifting the title from William Wyler’s 1958 film The Big Country, Stephen Chambers has made a colossal print stretching across two walls of The Large Weston Room dealing with expanse, journeying and migration.
The work is made up of 78 screen-prints configured in an eccentric, irregular format.
Each of these blocks of images constitutes a vignette; depictions of encounters or solitary individuals. On a technical level, it is the fusion of the analogue and the digital.
Facing The Big Country is a series of 20 etchings: Trouble Meets Trouble. The work derives from imagined liaisons between individuals who could never have met in reality, but were they to, the results would be combustible; Kali and Loki, Angela Merkel and Don Quixote, Ned Kelly and Clarrie Grundy.
The exhibition also includes A Year of Ranting Hopelessly, a book of 365 lithographs, as well as a number of Chambers’s other graphic work.
