2018 Residency Program Group Show

About

The Muse Gallery proudly presents

Our  2018 Residency Program Group Show 

Josephine Cottrell

Mahaut Harley Leca

Mark Tamer

Our private view is on the 11th January from 6-9pm
The show then continues from 12th until the 28th January
Open from 12-6pm, Thursday - Sunday weekly 

We welcome our new residents from some of the best Art schools and Universities in the UK. From January to June, recent graduate artists: Josephine Cottrell, Mahaut Harley Leca and Mark Tamer are working on site at ‘The Muse Gallery & Studios, as part of the 2018 residency program. For further information on our residency and other programs, please use links below.

Residency: http://www.themuseat269.com/about-us/residency2018
Shows: http://themuseat269.com/whats-on/detail/123/air-winter-group-show
Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/1758885144418642/

Josephine Cottrell
Her current work explores perception, the limitations of art and the artist’s control over a viewer’s response. With an eclectic set of inspirations, the work combines elements of modern abstraction, with the romanticism of the early to mid-19th century.
The works experiment with how much information needs to exist in a piece, for it to be perceived and accepted as art and questions why a viewer instinctively objectifies and tries to ‘makes sense’ of abstraction - composing naturalistic images from unintended shapes and forms.
 
Working with traditional print techniques in an experimental and non-traditional way, She produces a large quantity of prints which then go through a selection process, which she considers as instrumental to my practice as the printing itself.  Using traditional Japanese Aesthetics as a guiding principle, subtlety and detail are critical - the smallest of details can mark an image as either too literal, or as an image lacking in content.

Mahaut Harley Leca

With her distinctive attention to being a female artist, Mahaut Harley Leca feels the need to translate both individual and multiple concerns about women’s role in society. Her endless investigation of the ‘body’ led her to examine the superficial interpretation of the female body in fashion advertising. Through the female gaze, the ‘body’ is depicted as the origin of language, the result of inner emotions and a biographical revelation of her psychic state. By creating out of focus, deconstructed works she is recreating the  original, and giving a new meaning to the ready-made. What happened in the past is not gone but transformed into the modern. 
 This endless process of reassembling and reconstructing the damaged reflects the ancient Japanese philosophy of embracing the damaged, Wabi Sabi, that resolves in breaking traditional ideals of imperfection where the pristine is less beautiful than the imperfect. The appropriation of ready-made imagery and found elements  is translated into faceless compositions of twisted legs and arms resulting in a multiplied landscape of dismembered  limbs. With this in mind and the use of grisaille and absence of colour she is familiarizing the uncomfortable into her ideal of aesthetic to later give  birth to unique artworks which of whom one can appreciate the singular new beauty.
Mark Tamer
If I seem a little jittery I can't restrain myself I'm falling into fancy fragments - can't contain myself I'm gonna breakdown Buzzcocks, Breakdown
Mark Tamer explores the materiality of both analogue and digital mediums and the structures that underpin these; the analogue chemicals, the digital networks and the apparatus of photography that filter our reality. He utilises mistakes, glitches and errors to reveal the processes involved as this can often tell us more than something perfectly executed.
The colour work Mark is presenting here is from Breakdown, a series of camera-less Polaroids that have undergone an array of violent physical interruptions. He sees this work as a form of energy that finds expression not unlike a guitarist using feedback or smashing their guitar into an amplifier.