PRESENT TENSE

Beginning in the Bourgeois Gallery, the exhibition opens with a collection of work that addresses shifting realms of contemporary experience. Spotlighting artists Lydia Blakeley, Sholto Blissett, Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings, Shaqúelle Whyte and Gray Wielebinski, who each adopt and extend beyond traditional mediums and modes of display. 

Sholto Blissett conjures uninhabited vistas to investigate how societies conceive and mythicize their place in the natural world. His landscape paintings are comprised of mountain ranges, vast bodies of water and neoclassical architecture assembled into dreamlike combinations reminiscent of Renaissance capriccios. Inspired by the view that humans cannot escape nature and that we never exist beyond its bounds, Blissett paints uncanny worlds where humans are neither free in a state of Arcadian bliss nor exist in opposition to nature, but are simply and undeniably connected to it.

Leading into the next gallery, Victoria Cantons’ practice is shaped by her multinational, cultural and religious background, addressing issues of freedom, how beliefs are shaped and the notion of who the individual can be. Cantons incorporates ideas of femininity and gender in her work, drawing on her own autobiographical experiences as a gay and transgender woman.

The Rhoades Gallery is dedicated to large-scale painting, including Emanuel de Carvalho, Vanessa Garwood, Ania Hobson, Christina Kimeze, Daisy Parris, George Rouy, Ella Walker and Joseph Yaeger, celebrating the breadth of the medium, its place within the history of art and its enduring ability to evolve and transport the viewer.

The Pigsty Gallery features a collaborative presentation of work by Christopher Page and Clementine Keith-Roach. Page combines hard-edged geometric compositions with illusionistic painting techniques to highlight contemporary theories of vision, balancing the interplay between our imagination and symbolic registers. His motifs confuse the boundaries between real and virtual space: shadows cast across the surface of the paintings call into question where the work begins and ends; blank mirrors confront us with our own absence; glowing skies distort architectural space. Whilst drawing from Baroque illusion, the works hover on the edge of abstraction, making reference to the flattened world of digital screens.

Reminiscent of archaeological artefacts, Keith-Roach creates casts, often taken from her body, and melds them with antique terracotta vessels painted to create a continuous surface that blurs the boundary between body and object, skin and clay. Her work is inspired by clay’s inherent tactility and sensuality, as well as the immediate physical affinity one feels with antique ceramic containers and their readiness to be anthropomorphized. The resulting works simultaneously celebrate the female form and breathe life into the storied histories of domestic objects.

The exhibition closes with a pairing of work by Shawanda Corbett and Sang Woo Kim. Having spent their early years in Mississippi, US and Seoul, South Korea respectively, the London-based artists address themes of fractured identity and cultural duality that take on new connotations in a modern, digitalized world.

Corbett’s performative objects, part of a new ceramic series entitled ‘The Haint Blue Period,’ traverse a feeling or memory of a person. Historically, African Americans would paint the ceiling of front porches and exterior window shutters to prevent haints, malevolent spirits and a more personified energy from entering their home. The series looks at the darkest and lightest part of an individual’s humanity, as well as the gradient in-between. Sang Woo Kim was raised in London, UK by traditional Korean parents and always felt ‘other’ to the people around him. Working from painting to installation, Kim builds up and breaks down material boundaries to create a visual ‘skin’ composed of nostalgia and recollections, looking inwardly at his experience of being a first-generation immigrant. Identity takes on new associations in the social media realm, where one’s persona is a multi-layered construct and can be created out of thin air. Kim’s work questions what constitutes identity and how much of it is real.