DIRTY HOUSE presents works by Jack Gwyer, Osian Jenaer, and Mo Adams. This new body of work inspects the organs of commercialised craft, observing the visual languages forged from its steady spiral into fallacy and the collision of its extremes.
Central to the work is the idea of the artists’ own agency within the commercial landscape. The exhibition’s title, “Dirty House” takes its name from the studio the artists share in South London. Surrounded by industry and mechanised production, the artists respond to the dichotomy between destruction and fabrication in their enclosing landscape.
Through contemporary painting, digital fabrication and construction using found objects, the creators look to exploit the contradictions inherent to commerciality the worthlessness of the by-products of so-called high value, the repetition that builds the unique, the sterile conditions of manufactured eroticism and find potency in the conception and production of their own work.
The specific amalgamation of the works on show at Fitzrovia Gallery stems from the artists’ embrace of a Frankenstein approach. Fascinated by the potential outside of direct personal representation, the artists have produced works presented as scenes, each with motifs amputated, transplanted, arranged and rearranged by one another, contributing to the cloudy yet boundless voice that is born from multiple tongues-speaking as one.
DIRTY HOUSE – at Fitzrovia Gallery – 6th March 2022 Private view 4th March
About the artists…
Osian Jenaer is a multimedia artist based in London, working in both physical and digital media. His practice encompasses 3D design, image manipulation and video editing as well as painting and sculpture. Alongside his personal practice he has collaborated with various brands and artists to produce animated and static graphics, and has shown works in galleries across the UK and abroad.
Jack Gwyer is a visual artist based in London. Working primarily with enamel and wax on canvas, his practice reinterprets the visual motifs of commercial objects, technology, and data archives through manipulation of texture and iterative displacement of form. He has shown work across the UK since graduating in 2018.
Gwyer’s work frequently draws upon the transitive and unstable elements of modernity. In his most recent series, repeated transfer techniques characterise a protracted process that emulates the ebb and flow of advanced commercial systems, where frameworks shift in constant avoidance of obsoletion and language grows to emphasise the profitable while obscuring the unsustainable.
These paintings set out to slowly reconfigure the aesthetic palette of the industrial space away from its prosaic associations and towards new possibilities. In the formation of the final surface, landscapes and text may appear and fade, with each added layer amplifying the oscillation between the familiar and the foreign, and each new hue muddying the water between commerce’s memories and dreams.
Mo Adams is a multimedia artist, she graduated with a degree in illustration from London College of Fashion. Whilst working as a set designer in London and Paris, Mo has collaborated with numerous brands and publications including Pop Mag, AnOther Mag, Burberry, Miu Miu and more.
