The Transition Gallery Chelsea Prize is awarded to a graduating BA Fine Art student (or students) from Chelsea College of Art. The award is for a show at Transition and accompanying support and advice from the gallery staff. This year’s recipients are Molly Beth White and Lewis Dalton Gilbert. Vestige is a showcase for the two selected artists.
Molly Beth White’s films and performances are rooted in the classic Freudian universe of the uncanny with her elaborate sequences using abandoned costumes, props and glimpses of fractured movement. Drawing upon motifs and devices found in fairytales and folklore her darkly Hitchcockian encounters hint at narratives, which just escape comprehension. Interested in what she describes as ‘the shattered self, one person constituted of many separate entities and characters’, her films are layered with symbolic elements of the grotesque and the macabre.
Lewis Gilbert works with collections of found objects and sensory elements in his installations. He is interested in the evocations and traces of a life suggested by his carefully selected and placed ephemera. Inviting a voyeuristic approach, Gilbert side steps the notions of time and place inherent in these objects deliberately staging invented narratives and autobiographies. Recently he has become concerned with ‘the idea of hoarding and other obsession compulsive disorders’ and is collecting items that contain his name.
Last year’s Transition Chelsea Prize winner was Paul Kindersley. Since his solo show She wanted his soul, but he could only give her his blood at Transition in September 2009 he has gone on to exhibit widely. Most recently he curated and featured in Hand Joy and Stay Lucky at the Centre for Recent Drawing, London. Other exhibitions include Sensucht for JTG Project 09 at James Taylor Gallery and Show and Tell at Marlborough Project Space, London.
