Wyer Gallery is delighted to announce a solo exhibition of new work by Royal College of Art Sculpture School graduate Alistair McClymont, whose work sets out to investigate the romanticism with which contemporary cultural products have been invested. McClymont works across disciplines using well-known commodities, brands and logos as recurring themes. As such, his work defies categorization and the sheer diversity of his style is reflected in an extensive creation of drawings, videos, photographic work and installations.

For this exhibition McClymont has produced a series of work based around products ranging from chocolate and mineral water to the film industry and looks at the romantic sensibility employed in their merchandising. In a projection piece, Paramount Pictures, he has deconstructed the Paramount Pictures intro animation of a snow-capped mountain encircled by stars into eighty 35mm slides projected in sequence onto a white gallery wall. McClymont selects only a section of the mountainside where the sun hits the snow so that the projection moves through a series of decreasingly abstract images until it reaches its final iconic form. The piece confronts us with the romantic and aspirational connotations exploited in the shape of the mountain.

The front of the gallery is dominated by Invest in the chocolate waters of Hollywood, a massive wall installation depicting the Evian, Invesco Perpetual, Toblerone and Paramount mountains in one fictionalised mountain range. Engraved into layers of Perspex as one romantic tableau the allusion to the German Romantics is unmistakable but, with the original motives in mind, the artist has used the same production methods as advertising signage. Mirrored on the opposing wall, another tableau, A-Z, documents 300 odd real trade names used to market household air fresheners etched into a sheet of stainless steel [After the Rain, Pure Innocence and Cool Morning Air etc]. McClymont seems an avid collector of ostensibly banal information but, in companion with Logo Mountainscape, this is an extraordinary compilation of data that seems to express something specific about our very existence and a deep-seated need for a connection with something real and universal: the antithesis of urban life.

In 15, 450 Milligrams of the Evian Mountain, an etched drinking tumbler containing mineral residue, McClymont continues to explore our attachment to a world outside of the city as a small part of the Mont Blanc Massif itself is transported to the gallery by a laborious boiling away of 50 litres of Evian mineral water [Evian water, having spent 15 years filtering through the rocks, dissolves small amounts of the mountain on its way through]. Here, McClymont teasingly suggests we might actually ingest Evian’s abstract assurances of innocence and purity as tangible matter when we drink its bottled water.

And finally, Art for Art’s Sake is a video installation consisting of eight large screens each featuring a different MGM lion [the title derives its title from the Latin motto of the MGM studios, Ars Gratia Artis]. McClymont creates a virtual pride of big cats as a staggered sequence of different MGM intro animations is played from screen to screen. At one time the piece seems to celebrate the infamous sequence’s mythic quality and jettison it – upending its romantic pomp and ceremony, transporting us straight into the Big Top and the lion tamer’s cage.