and still I may

About

This exhibition explores realms of temporal dissonance, investigating unconventional attitudes to time through various lenses such as queer temporality, the historical return, the contemporary surreal and the fragmentation of memory and narrative. and still I may shares its title with a painting by Robin Megannity. A fragment in time is left hovering and untethered, creating a feeling of tension, peculiarity and disorientation.

Prima di andare via, by Italian artist Norberto Spina depicts a large and ornate gate. Tightly cropped, the painting is built up of layers of small intentional marks, the closed gate - a threshold to the anxieties of life and beyond, through the Pearly Gates toward heaven or the heavy rusting wrought-iron Gates of Hell.

James Cabaniuk’s large and thickly painted abstract paintings delve into charged memories of encounters. Painted with speed, and in a performative mode, they explore ideas of a queer temporality and how experience, histories and identities can shift and dissolve outside of a conventional linear developmental progression. The abstraction and constant state of change leans into the opacity of queerness, traversing bodily and emotional autonomy.

Jennifer Carvalho mines work from Antiquity to the Renaissance to connect historical narratives to the present. Framing the anthropocene as a shift from earlier modes of telling and inhabiting history, her paintings work to trouble an anthropocentrically linear time, defined by humanity’s tendency to erase, rewrite and misremember entire histories.

Robin Megannity's classically layered oil paintings emerge from shadowy dialogues between the tactile and the virtual. Scenes exist outside of time in a hallucinatory reality populated by provisional sculptures, found objects and props that merge the prosaic with the hypothetical. In these domains the border between physical and digital spaces becomes porous and elusive, a super-reality wherein the rationality of our advancing technological progress is ruptured by dystopian hallucinations and fragments of the dark and delirious.

Through her paintings, Teresa Murta journeys into the realms of the fantastical, bringing together abstracted elements of form with gesture to imply movement and metamorphosis. Intuitively, the artist fuses together elements from both the artificial and natural worlds, offering viewers a gateway into alternate, sometimes absurd, realities. Murta’s dynamic use of colour and shape creates a sense of continual movement and implies the constant flux of time.

Pei Wang’s new painting Mute 66 depicts an extreme close-up of a face. Deeply saturated with colour the eyeball looks left, wide-eyed and reddened. Filled with palpable tension, Wang uses surrealist strategies, referencing Buñuel and Dali’s Un Chien Andalou and through his use of casein tempera - a paint derived from milk, he hints back to an essential strangeness at the core of our experience. Wang’s eyeball is held in stasis at maximum openness, perpetually at a moment about to blink.

Alistair Woods explores social and human existence through subcultures. Drawing imagery from everyday life, including aspects of religious iconography, popular figures and mundane objects, he combines both low and high cultural reference points, giving them equal importance and cultural value. Finding equivalence with the historical and the contemporary, Woods elevates the quotidian to establish a new position and system of value.

In Tianyue Zhong’s paintings, human presence has been obliterated and reworked with linear marks. Beginning her paintings with an image taken at a place and time different from where she is at the time of making, her muted gestural abstractions connect back to a sense of intimacy, introspection and place. Through her work Zhong is interested in reconnecting with past experiences of feeling restrained within a structure, locked within a frozen moment remembering how to begin to escape.