Maia Conran

About

The final installment of the Show One of Each season of exhibitions presents new work from artist Maia Conran. The works for this show deal with spaces that are disquietingly empty of inhabitants. The libraries and classrooms are bare, the books unread, the seats unoccupied. These darkly minimal absences are leavened throughout by touches of humour. The empty library becomes home to animated footstools; the empty classrooms are recorded as pamphlets of remembered lessons - accurate accounts of room geography that map changes in modes of learning; a vacated room is glimpsed through a fire door that appears to be held open by a golf ball on the ground. Usually polarised dualities are presented as indistinct - inside/ outside, public/ private, alive/ dead, presence/ absence. Conran's work centres around everyday objects and is developed from observation of daily situations. Her use of the everyday is influenced by popular cinema and fiction. The resultant pieces have an uncanny familiarity that, with her use of institutional systems and aesthetics, gently subverts established social practice. She demonstrates a darkly humorous concern with boredom as a paradoxical state in which the present can be questioned. Through the depiction of still moments, use of repetition and changes of pace she refocuses our attention on the ordinary.