Cacotopia 04 | Week 1

About

Annka Kultys Gallery is pleased to present CACOTOPIA 04, the fourth edition of its annual survey of leading emerging artists within the contemporary art space.  This year’s exhibition features the work of Nicole Coson, Bex Ilsley, Richie Culver and Garrett Pruter and follows its now traditional format of allocating each artist a solo exhibition of one week’s gallery time during the month long show.  

Nicole Coson | Week 1
16 January – 18 January 2020

Bex Ilsley | Week 2
23 January – 25 January 2020

Garrett Pruter | Week 3
30 January – 1 February 2020

Richie Culver | Week 4
6 February – 15 February 2020

The works of the four artists in the show highlight the blurring and perhaps increasingly symbiotic relationships between the once separate disciplines of painting, photography and more recently digital art; an unambiguous counterpoint to the earlier art historical notion of medium specificity developed by Modernist critics, most notably Clement Greenberg and Michael Friedman.  Greenberg in his Modern Painting essay of 1960, for example, explained “medium specificity holds that ‘the unique and proper area of competence’ for a form of art corresponds with the ability of an artist to manipulate those features that are ‘unique to the nature’ of a particular medium.”  Hence if there is a unifying theme that links the respective works in CACOTOPIA 04 it may very loosely and imperfectly be described as one of medium unspecificity; an anti-specificity or even medium ambiguity.

For the opening reception and week one of CACOTOPIA 04, the work of London-based Filipino artist Nicole Coson (b. 1992, Manila, Philippines; BA Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, London, 2014 and MA Painting at Royal College of Art, London, 2020; lives and works in London) will be on show.  Coson’s work examines the economies of visibility and disappearance in the case of overlooked bodies and includes explorations of invisibility in warfare as tactical counter measures (for example, camouflage) and cultural visibility in art.  For CACOTOPIA 04, Coson will be presenting eight large prints on paper, attached by magnets to metal sheets.  Each work is derived from a single image, a photo of a tree-lined pond that the artist fell into as a young girl and had to be rescued from, being physically dragged from it by her father.  Coson creates each work by building up layers of collage from the pond image (the same image but treated differently in each work) and then etching is used to create a camouflage effect across the work.  The different treatments of the pond image reference how memory can alter over time and in iteration such that the effect of remembering is never identical, never homogenous, ever slippery and unreliable (and not unlike Heraclitus’s dictum that you cannot step in the same river twice).  The variations between works therefore embody the temporal distances between memories and the camouflage the capacity for memory to distort and mutate.  Such distortion is reminiscent of Freud’s concept of screen memory, the psychological theory of a childhood trauma being replaced by a vivid but bland memory, whereby recall of the traumatic event is blocked or screened by memory of some harmless but associated and inessential aspect of the experience.  The camouflage in Coson’s prints may be viewed as a Freudian screening of the traumatic image of the fateful pond the artist fell into.

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