Revealing Alice’s darker side

A Tribute to Alice: White Rabbit Cocktail Club's first exhibition

There’s a platinum blonde girl in thigh-high PVC boots dragging a dead pink flamingo through the snow. She’s following the Queen of Hearts, who has a white face and deeply shadowed eyes, stalking into the dark woods in a ripped black bodice and sweeping skirt. It’s not your average scene from Alice in Wonderland, but then this isn’t your average show.

Hackney’s quirkiest new art space is raising the curtains on its first exhibition, A Tribute to Alice, a joint show from five artists exploring the darker nuances of Lewis Carroll’s classic children’s book. It marks the first in a series of monthly art shows hosted by Stoke Newington’s White Rabbit Cocktail Club as part of a drive to boost the local cultural community.

“We’re trying to exhibit work from new artists each month – always based on a single theme,” says Pierre Ulysse Gouverneu, the venue’s new manager. “We picked Alice because, after all, we’re the White Rabbit, so that was an easy first one. It’s going to evolve from one theme to the next. The next one will be called Whimsical Creatures.”

A Tribute features works from Michael Furlonger, the artist behind Alice in the PVC boots, as well as Maxime Imbert, Venus Raven, Ego Rodriguez and James Andrew Telford across print, photo, water colour and mixed collage media.

Their subjects include lesser-known characters, as in Ego’s ink on water colour, The Knight, as well as more familiar faces like the Cheshire Cat in various shapes and guises. Casting Alice herself in a darker and more sexualised light than we may be used to, we see her emerging tousle-haired onto a country path, submerged in foamy bubbles wearing dark red lipstick with her eyes sealed and staring pale-faced from the canvas, swaddled in furs.

Hung among the mirrors and candles on the dark walls of the White Rabbit’s interior, these spooky interpretations of Alice could not look more at home.

“Walt Disney went for nice and sweet imagery, but the piece itself is pretty dark so people did work that was naturally quite dark,” says Gouverneu. Far from the light-hearted children’s story with talking flowers and riddles, many of the images look more like nightmares than bedtime reading.

“We’ve been trying to develop the creative dimension of the venue, promoting young artists and companies,” says Gouverneu. “We wanted to raise the profile of people that don’t necessarily have the chance of having their art exposed because gallery space is expensive.”

He says the venue is eventually hoping to launch a dedicated arts night once a month pulling in cabaret, stand-up and music.

“We try to gather people from different mediums and different worlds.”

A Tribute to Alice
White Rabbit Cocktail Club
125 Stoke Newington Church Street
Hackney
N16 0UH