Personal Allegories and other caprices

Neale Stratford

Exhibition dates: August 5- 27, 2011

Neale Stratford casts himself in the role of writer, producer, director and lead actor in Personal Allegories and Other
Caprices. Using action figures, Stratford expresses aspects of his life through images that are at once epic, intimate
and compelling. He introduces us to characters and leads us through scenes that are innately familiar, having been
drawn in large part from popular cinema and art history, but their psychological import seems to extend further and
deeper than these cultural references would imply. This is in part due to examining his own identity after a diagnosis
of Asperger’s Syndrome, which has led him to explore the internal psyche, and in turn, tap into the wider collective
unconscious. As a result his work exudes something of the greater human condition, while at once speaking very
precisely of the artist’s own life story.