Site and Scene

Artists: Bella Easton I John Greenwood I Chris Hawtin I Joseph Stokes I Filippos Tsitsopoulos 

curated by Chris Hawtin

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17 November - 15 December 2018

Wed-Fri 10-3pm

Sat 10-6pm

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This exhibition presents the work of five artists who are working in a new aesthetic of a mutated or metamorphosed figurative subject. As the Surrealists of the early 20th century were informed by the nascent media of cinema and photography these artists are informed by digital iterations, pixilation, video games and visual effects. The forms and spaces presented are alien, perhaps alienating, yet remain recognisable – not something imaginably esoteric but something one step removed from the homely, familiar sites of both figuration and abstraction. They exist in a strange state between the known and the unknown. The location, the site of the works in this exhibition, is indeterminate in their situation relative to the established territories of abstraction or figuration.

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These are surreal forms or spaces for sure, but not surrealist as we understand it from the movement of the last century. Working beyond the depiction of the transformed exochronicimagined spaces of Dali or De Chirico the artists presented integrate the processes of making into a rational architecture, informed either by the logic of a narrative space as of that in film or video games or that of the other major development of 20thcentury art - abstraction, they are not contrived, and yet they remain dispossessed from either true figuration or pure abstraction. They are processes creating mutated, figurative metamorphs; alien forms, distorted organic or technological structures, spacecraft, skulls, animals, landscapes which are heading for, but never quite reach the purity of abstraction. They remain deterritorialised in an interzone of disquiet and unease, caught in a state of permanent transformation.

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Image credit: 'The Reaches' by Chris Hawtin, Oil on canvas, 50x60cm

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