Christopher Chapman's concern in curating ambient (male) identity, was with how artists communicate identity through abstract and conceptual means - in particular, how they communicate 'male identity'. The six artists involved, all male, are Adam Cullen, Dale Frank, Daniel Malone, Paul Quinn, Scott Redford and David Rosetzky.
Chapman, in the accompanying catalogue essay, suggests the presence of a male identity is encoded, often covertly, into modern art and contemporary culture. Although Chapman hedges a bit, his conception of masculinity is best described as variously subcultural, youthful and gay. Needless to say, it is far from SNAGish. He helpfully provides a lengthy list of artists, artworks and pop-culture touchstones that have supplied a context for his thinking on the subject. This list ranges across 'classic' works, like Jasper Johns's Painting with two balls and Andy Warhol 's piss paintings, to the works of Felix Gonzales Torres, and it extends to include things like graffiti tagging, video arcades, saunas, beats and forest clearings.
Following this vein, the works in the show draw heavily on subculture - to the extent that some of the artists simply import unmediated chunks of it into their work. Scott Redford's Perpetual Abstraction (7066 A.D.) consists of a custom-made surfboard propped in a corner of the gallery. The date, 7066 A.D., appears on the surface of the board, perhaps intimating a fantasy of transcendence. In Strongly Agree, Agree, Neutral, Disagree, Strongly Disagree, Adam Cullen montages himself into repeated comic book images, creating grimly absurd miniature mise en scènes. Music features very prominently as an index of subcultural masculinity in the works of Daniel Malone, David Rosetzky and Dale Frank. Frank's work, PARENTAL GUIDANCE to CHILL OUT