GATESHEAD.- BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead announces a major solo exhibition by Brian Griffiths. Griffiths creates installations and sculptures that employ exaggerated scales, artifice and theatricality.

In Bill Murray: a story of distance, size and sincerity, the artist presents an ambitious new commission that takes in BALTIC’s vast Level 4 gallery with a contrastingly small-scale production. A series of nine different style buildings, including a lavish LA beach house, a historic Scottish mansion and an ocean adventure dome, imagine Hollywood actor Bill Murray’s activities and pastimes. A complex assemblage of these architectural models, light, everyday objects and a documented performance of Bill Murray creates a metaphysical adventure story and a fantasy caricature complete with whisky minibar, grand piano and helicopter.

Bill Murray: a story of distance, size and sincerity is an exhibition that enjoys and considers the effects of small, miniature, big, gigantic, the scaled up and scaled down, detail and overview. It is an exhibition that questions how one experiences and measures things. It encourages comparisons and differences, instabilities and slipperiness and attempts to use exaggeration as a means of revelation. This exhibition strives for both intimacy and grandeur, to present production and consumption and hopes for imaginative flight from humble objects.

Griffiths has also reproduced an image of Bill Murray at Cannes Film Festival as a 20 metre-long banner, which appears on BALTIC’s north facade for the duration of the exhibition, playing once more with degrees of scale.

Images of Murray, from the aforementioned promotional shoot at Cannes, have become key material in both object and surface for the installation. Murray is dressed head-to-toe in clashing, checked clothes using a tiny camera. Here the visual imagery is magnified and ramped up, size and scale gags accumulate as viewpoints and roles are acknowledged. Bill manages to be over- and underdressed, boyishly innocent with a heightened awareness that he is producing a quality image. Surprisingly, he holds together a wry detachment and a pronounced pleasure of the moment, like a contemporary ‘Mad Hatter’ seen through the digital ‘looking-glass’. Bill becomes a warped and absurd reflection of the media audience as he simultaneously and dutifully flattens into and out from them. Images appropriated from this series are pasted individually on to each house seemingly creating architectural heads. The model and miniature performs as a metaphor for an interior life where Bill’s stories, the documented and the imagined, are used to furnish and dress the houses, creating set pieces and imperfect descriptions.