Parental Guidance Suggested
  Green Cardamom, London, 24th January 2008 to 23rd February 2008
  Tuesday to Friday 11am to 5pm. Saturday 11am to 2pm

  In her first UK solo exhibition, artist Faiza Butt displays a new departure, merging portraits of her maturing children with mushroom clouds, explosions and the debris of everyday life, to explore the growing backdrop of violence in life today as proffered by the media and global events.
In Parental Guidance Suggested Butt will exhibit both small and large scale works. Including an image of ex-New York mayor and US Republican presidential nominee, Rudolph Giuliani with mushroom clouds for eyes, two bearded men locked in a passionate kiss, and a man pointing a revolver at his own head, the three small paintings refer collectively to the psychological landscape of the so-called ‘war-on-terror’. The large-scale works mark significant developments in Butt’s thought, the most dramatic being the identity of their main protagonists: her own children depicted against a faux toile de jouy decorative pattern.
Commonly associated with curtains and upholstery, toile patterns typically depict pastoral and nostalgic scenes of picnicking couples. Those of Faiza Butt show scenes of random violence: scenes are of cruelty beautifully rendered. Faiza Butt is known for her fusing of Asian and European cultures, merging celebrity photographs, violent stories from Western media and figures from her daily life in her work. Such cultural interweaving is also visible in the artist’s technique. Using colourful felt-tip pens, Butt builds up her images using tiny dots on architect’s film or paper. Her technique resembles modern photographic effects as if replicating the grain of a newspaper or digital image. She then splatters enamel paint on the surface of the film, as if mocking the abstract painting cliché.