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Group Show : The Mediators Private view Thursday 2nd May 2013

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2nd May – 8th May 2013 The Wayward Gallery 47 mowlem street london E2 9HE www.thewaywardgallery.com/

Abigail Box, Clare Gosling, Alice Evans, Vasilisa Forbes and Marta Ceynowa: Curated by John Angel Rodriguez

This exhibition brings together a group of female artists who are exploring the photographic image. The themes and concepts they explore in their work vary greatly, but the connecting link between them is their interest for establishing relationships with other mediums.

Some of the artists are incorporating objects in the photographic set-up and others are constructing multi-layered scenarios. The analogue photographic process also appears in some of the work in the exhibition. These approaches are particularly prescient when we consider that we are immersed in a world where the proliferation and fascination for digital images has generated an immense number of photographs published indiscriminately on the Internet. It seems to be wise, in this context, to have a look at this emerging wave of creators that are working in the field of expanded photography and are pushing the barriers of traditional ideas about techniques and mediums.

The Mediators exhibition project aims to display a set of artworks that invite the audience to re-think the role of the photographic image as a provocative entity.

The work will be displayed in an installation-type layout, which seeks to resist the signification of the conventional white cube. Its creators play with light, shapes and surfaces alongside the gallery space.

This exhibition also explores experiments with photographic imagery on different surfaces and reveals how these experiments not only correspond to the need to find a technical solution, but are more a consequence of a conceptual echo the artists find along their way while researching and working with their photographic images.

The second objective of this exhibition is to establish a mutual contribution by both artist and curator. This exhibition will be the first in a series of projects to promote artists that are both interesting and valuable in terms of their research and formal expression.

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About The Artists
Alice Evans
The process and ideas that have led to the development of Alice Evans’ practice have been influenced by the experiments taking place in the Epic Theatre of Bertolt Brecht. Brecht’s theatre practice led him to propose that a play should not cause the spectator to identify emotionally with the characters or action before him or her, but should instead provoke rational self-reflection and a critical view of the action on the stage.

Evans is interested in the integration of photographic imagery and installation. For example, in the series exhibited she plays with the possibility of creating an expansion of the space, layering the background and the foreground in a rare continuity. This immersive situation is something that incorporates the presence of the viewer as an active participant in the completion of the photograph. The viewer constitutes another extension of the layers and planes proposed by the artist.

Within each image are contradictory realities representing the difficulty she finds in articulating her relationship with the world from the position of outsider. The psychological and physical spaces of the images are made apparent through an awkward scrambling of montage. The interior and exterior spaces of the images, like the space of the unconscious mind seem both exclusive and yet also permeable. There is confusion between what is exterior and what is imagined. The human need for meaning desires and creates comfortable classifications, but the superimposition of two or more impossible realities in Alice’s work suggests a reality that refuses and rejects this order.

Abigail Box
The recent work of Abigail Box was created with the objective of distancing her from the original image allowing her to paint in a more abstract manner. She uses still shots of explosions – both real and some computer generated blasts. The remnants of Explosions as patches of colour are an innovative intervention within the field of mediatic painting. This procedure can be understood as a mixture between analogue techniques such as the oil painting and technological mediations. The result of this is to enrich the perceptive features of the final painting.

Most recently, she has been painting explosions from video stills. In using them as vehicles for painterly experimentation and she feels that they are fantastic carriers of colour and light. Drawing parallels between painted abstraction and the idea that in reality taking on board all of the visual information of an explosion could be seen as an enigmatic and abstract experience.
For this exhibition Box has painted a piece that involves working in ways that encourage her to look differently at the photographic material that she works from. This action allows her to take a distance from representation and instead embrace mistranslation and intuition, interrupting accuracy and making paintings, which are visually more inventive.Encouraging a fascination with looking and ways of seeing constructed imagery and painting as both a surface and as an invented space.

Vasilisa Forbes
Superposition of imagery generated by a computer is a constant manifestation of our current visual culture. This is a central fascination in the practice of Vasilisa Forbes. In her photographic practice she integrates different references ranging from art to fashion photographers. Her exploration blurs the notions of commercial imagery since she plays with a painterly approach and is influenced by artists such as Viviane Sassen, an artist who has dramatically changed the face of fashion photography.

This initiative has fused two worlds, fashion and fine art, two practices that have been constantly separated by their different purposes. Fashion photography has been widely stereotyped to promote a culture of beauty and banality and the fine art photography has been considered conceptual and exclusive to an audience. Nonetheless, Vasilisa’s trans-disciplinarily practice has brought together these two contexts to collide and spiral about one another. This kind of convergence is not a new occurrence, nevertheless in terms of its contribution, it could be understood as an important step forward.

The Hours series is an ongoing series of performative photographs in which self-portraits seem to exist in a suspended state between a narrative created by the trauma of a recent event, and an exploration of its aftermath. Strange poses contrasting with strange landscapes displayed on different sizes and mounted on colourful frames and mats. This ‘set up’ aims to enable the viewer to perceive the photographic imagery as an object rather than a simple picture.

Clare Gosling
The paintings of Clare Gosling are based on memories of a time spent in Mongolia.
She recreates these images from what she recalls, therefore her pictures are akin to her residual and fragmentary memories of events at the vestiges of her mind. When she remembers these landscapes and scenery they have a powerful effect on her artwork. Gosling recreated these hazy memories through the usage of colour, photography and other materials to create the misty feeling captured in her imagery. The cut away parts in the artworks represent gaps in her memory of the Mongolian landscape and through layers of resin she have cut away part of the image. The final piece is a piece that sits between the spectrum of the mediatic painting and the experimental photography.

Clare is also currently working on some new artworks based on photographs she took with the camera that used to belong to her grandfather. She took those photographs in Kent where her grandfather used to live and where she spent some time as a child.

Marta Ceynowa
“Stop ‘taking’ pictures. Start ‘making’ them. So I made them”
The images that Marta is showing in the exhibition are a series that might be considered either as photography or painting or both. She first paints and then later constructs each uniquely abstract negative. Then develops these in the colour darkroom. What is interesting about printing in the colour darkroom is how colours change from negative to the positive. The actual print allows her to manipulate and rearrange images, as she wants. Her aim is to push the boundaries between painting and photography. A painting is considered unique at first hand, however, in this instance it is possible to make more than one copy, which in turn responds to the Benjaminian conception of ‘aura’ in painting.

In case of photography the question that arise is ‘can be this action be considered photography, just by using darkroom, without even using a camera? In the past photography was in a way taken twice – once in the camera, by pressing a shutter speed and then in the darkroom, by developing a film and making a print. Now in the era of digital images photography is taken only once by simply pressing a button. The processes of the darkroom and handmade prints have been forgotten. Marta believes that she might go against the stream and come back to the roots of this medium and use non- figurative, abstract form to allow the viewer to stimulate their own imagination and creativeness.

Marta is particularly interested in blurring the notions of those two mediums whilst finding the way to combine them together. Painting because is the oldest form of art; She has recovered the gestures of the prehistoric cave’s drawings then developed through centuries. Then when photography was invented painting went to a new genre allowing all different forms of abstract and non-figurative presentation. Nowadays photography does what painting did for centuries – record the reality. Now maybe even record the abstraction.

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