FROM MUD TO MORTAR

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SHERIDAN FLYNN ADRIAN HAYS ZIGGY GRUDZINSKAS ALEX WELENSKY EXHIBITION: 12th March- 3rd April 2010 PRIVATE VIEW: THURSDAY 11.03.2010 6:30-9:00PM DJ SET BY ADRIAN HAYS 9:00PM From Mud To Mortar presents four artists attempting to capture individual viewpoints of the London landscape. From mud in East End canals to vast panoramas of the Thames, each of the artists has a unique perspective of the city they occupy. Taken with a 1950's camera, Ziggy Grudzinskas' stunningly soft and ghostly landscapes are technical experiments, exploring the uses and the place of the more traditional manual camera in the context of modern digital photography. The photographs were created using a multiple exposure technique, as well as being scanned and composed later, which adds a depth and a history of sorts to rival the more 'polished' results gained from current digital techniques. Adrian Hays' highly manipulated works have an almost CGI quality. These 'video game versions' of London posses a dark and abstract quality, contrasting an almost text-book, corporate glossy perfection with an underlying cinematic eeriness. Alex Welensky's deliciously gritty images are somehow simultaneously very pure and very simple. Focusing on the texture of the landscape around the East End, Welensky's work often concentrates on dirt, rust, mud and decay — metaphors perhaps for the all that clots the dark heart of this great, yet at times loveless city. Composition, colour and attention to detail are key. It is not surprising to find that as a photographer whose practice has its roots in reportage, Sheridan Flynn's photographs are the only ones with human bodies amongst the bricks. Despite, or maybe because of this, there is a distinct lack of personal engagement in most of the images. No eye contact and often no faces at all. He negotiates these bodies as though they were pieces of street furniture, just more obstacles to walk around, and leaves the questions they silently pose unanswered. At times blending with the architecture, they are subtly lost in the advertising of the shops surrounding them. What is so arresting about these collections of works is that they are hardly inhabited at all. Beautifully capturing the wasteland of the 'transitional space' between beginning and end, the fall of industrial London and the rise of the new — there is a nothingness, a lack, in these works which existentially stands forward to be counted, and like Pierre in Sartre's café, is important precisely because of what is not there.