I am very excited to be exhibiting shortly as one of six invited artists in collaboration with the Rooftop Collective. The curator, Anna McNay, has written about the upcoming show and the premise behind it.
***PRESS RELEASE***
VIEWPOINTS: A series of artistic conversations 17th - 22nd April // Espacio Gallery, London
About works on display and viewpoints in paired artists:
A number of the pairs come together in their approach to the natural landscape. Jeremy Johns’ photographs and Susan Clare’s watercolour and acrylic paintings, share a reflective and muted palette, which brings depth to open skies and wide vistas, bathing viewers in a fragile light. Tom Owens’ photographs breathe a certain kind of familiarity, returning to the same location at different times of year, noticing nuances and transient – often manmade – objects, many of which could be the raw materials for Consuelo Simpson’s sculptures, combining found objects, yarn and wire, to reflect on the collision of rural, agrarian and urban society.
Both drawn to the geometric shapes, patterns and lines in their everyday surroundings, Paul Clifford and Michael Wallner employ their photographic and digital media to celebrate beauty in the mundane and the abstract in everyday life. A concrete wall is seen as a canvas of colours, all decaying paint and rusty pipes; paving stones turn into confusing collages of colour and texture.
Chris King’s photographs, capturing southern American landscapes, devoid of human figures, suggest deserted film sets and invite the viewer to imagine the unravelling narrative script. Judith Burrows, a photographer and filmmaker by trade, similarly uses locations from her work as the starting point for her mixed media canvases, incorporating fragments of music and maps, alongside isolated figures, creating a sense of dislocation and uneasiness. For this exhibition, she will create a new ‘narrative of location’, responding directly to one of King’s Arkansas liquor store images.
The conversation between Toby Deveson’s black-and-white photographs and Annamarie Dzendrowskyj’s similarly monochromatic, small-scale oil paintings is one of mutual exploration and running headlong into the unknown; that ambiguous, grey area that hovers between presence and absence, between what is seen and what is not. While Deveson’s tools and history keep him firmly rooted in the world of the ‘real’, Dzendrowskyj completes that foray into the magical surreal.
And finally, turning from the external landscape to the interior, photographer Graham Matthews and mixed-media artist and sculptor Lesley James examine psychological ideas of hidden truths – what lies beneath the surface or behind the face presented to the world. With ghostly prints, totems and rubbings of walls – physical markers of the boundaries that keep us apart – their collaboration seeks to merge approaches and methodologies to produce a new language of perception; a collaborative viewpoint.
Key information:
Exhibition dates: 17th – 22nd April 2018
Hours: Tues-Sat 11am-7pm, Sun 11am – 5pm
Address: 159 Bethnal Green Road, London E2 7DG
Tube / Train: Shoreditch High Street, Bethnal Green Road
www.therooftopcollective.com/
For more information about the show / collective and to request print-ready images, please contact: Sue King, The Rooftop Collective Coordinator. hello@therooftopcollective.com // +44 7597 364 099 // Social media: @rooftop_group #viewpointsshow