Darkness Spoken - A Group Show

About

A group show seeking to render the invisible, exploring darkness as a forceful and vital presence in the practices of four emerging artists. Curated by AFTER.

Revealing histories of shadows, of the seen unseen, exploring reflection and motion, presence and void, the concrete and the liquid, these artists challenge the idea of darkness as a lack - suggesting instead that it speaks and speaks back, discloses by concealing.

Fascinated by the idea that an object deep beneath the surface of the earth, in a place where no light could ever reach it, has the potential to retain light and release it over time, Jonas Brinker works with phosphorescent rocks. Clearest in darkness, these rocks are, for Brinker, a type of recorder, a charged device that causes an image of its inner self. Thus rock is a collaborator, responsive, a camera and a source of interior light.

As well as operating below ground, Brinker also interrupts the distant glow of a much larger rock, the moon, in earthy fashion.

Hannah Devereux's photographs and series of drawings all derive from her ideas surrounding abstraction within landscape.

Nick Scammell maintains a practice where photography and literature collude. Working where the image meets the word, where the material meets the digital and where the ancient meets the modern, Nick uses scanners to explore the transformation of surface into rumour.

Falling Volume follows Edmond Jabès' obsession with the place of the book and the space of the page. Testing for resistance, it seeks the beyond of the book. The late Egyptian-Jewish poet believed that “making a book could mean exchanging the void of writing for writing the void.”

Combining eye and hand, page and screen, flyleaves from Jabès' The Book of Shares have been manipulated during scanning, in order to explore that which supports and enables the word.

Julie Bentley presents work from her ongoing series Umbra. An image on the verge of destruction, emptied of context, forces the unmoored viewer to turn back to their own experiences of such space. Thus the emptying space, ironically, emphasises the self, leaves us helpless.

Bentley’s corresponding video work reminds us that the space beyond the edge of the frame has a life of its own, that it is the place where the world of the film can collide with ours, suggesting that we ourselves are objects moving across a screen, out from and into the black.

Jonas Brinker is a German artist and a 2015 BA Fine Art graduate from the Slade School of Art who has exhibited across Europe and whose work often addresses time and light.

A 2014 MA Photography graduate from LCC, Julie Bentley works in photography and video, drawing on Hollywood tropes and an attraction to ‘terrible beauty’.

Hannah Devereux is a British artist and a 2011 BA Fine Art graduate from Byam Shaw School of Art, Central Saint Martins. Devereux's work is based on ideas surrounding abstraction within landscape. This year saw her first major exhibition, at Showing Space, Lincoln.

Having curated and exhibited with the Goldsmiths-affiliated collective Crossing Lines, Nick Scammell completed his MA Photography at LCC in 2014, exhibited in This New Feeling at Central Saint Martins in 2015 and has been selected for the Pingyao International Photography Festival. He lives and works in London.

About AFTER

AFTER is an artist-led curatorial project that seeks to showcase and support recently-graduated artists still shaping and establishing their practices. AFTER was founded in January 2015 by Julie Bentley and Nick Scammell, following their graduation from the London College Of Communication's MA Photography.

http://www.afterprojects.com/