g_URL

About

Press Release // g_URL x Noble Studios

Public reception: June 16, 2017, 6 – 10pm 
Opening hours: June 17 & June 18, 2017, 12pm – 6pm 

Combining works across video, sound, sculpture, textiles and installation, g_URL will explore how these female artists have investigated developing technologies, virtual reality and the internet within their practice. 

Social media platforms and the development of virtual and augmented reality have provided us with a framework to construct and perform a variety of online identities. Their application blurs boundaries between online and offline space, and consequently merging our identities IRL and URL. g_URL seeks to explore how this has impacted our perception of - and relationship to -  ourselves and others, with a particular focus on the influence of these new technologies for women. How has technology shaped female identity and notions of femininity? How has the Internet interfered with our intimate relationships? Are we closer to our iPhone screens than we are to each other?

Amongst the artworks exhibited at g_URL is the premiere of ‘In The Flesh // Allegory To URL’, a new ASMR video with an accompanying sound piece by Corie Denby McGowan. She explores how the online can be used as as a powerful site of healing, a requirement in a contemporary society that has experienced increasing anxieties and an inability to relax as a direct result of the pressures that exist within capitalism. This artwork will induce and immerse the viewer into an experience of euphoria, highlighting the ability of technology to go beyond the screen by generating feelings that are multi-sensory and emotive.

Continuing the focus on lived experience, ‘Natural Beauty (Adorned)’ by Lily Evangeline juxtaposes a water tank installation with corresponding digital prints of orchids, a flower which the artist considers a source of feminine inspiration. Interrogating beauty standards across the digital/physical spaces, she focuses on the female body as a site of contested self-expression.

g_URL will also exhibit two sculptures and a sound piece titled Two Dead Lovers by Roxman Gatt, a video and installation titled The Merging of Two Bodies by Sophie Rogers and new artwork by Hannah Dinz.

g_URL was co-founded and co-curated by Olivia Yallop and Alexandra Hull and as a means of showcasing  and collaborating with emerging female-identifying artists who are working at the intersection of art and technology. Olivia is a creative producer in the fashion and beauty industry and Alexandra is studying an MA Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths.

Roxanne Gatt lives and works in London, and is also known by her pseudonym Roxman Gatt. She is a multidisciplinary artist whose research explores sexuality, identity, and women within popular culture contexts. Mundane aesthetics and the internet become both a tool and a trigger to produce work. Roxman was awarded the Chris Garnham Prize (2015) as well as the Magnum Showcase Online Photography Award (2013). Recent exhibitions include Homo Melitensis: An incomplete inventory in 19 Chapters, Malta Pavilion, Venice Biennale (2017) and Bloomberg New Contemporaries, ICA, London and Bluecoat Liverpool (2016).

Corie Denby McGowan is a moving image and installation artist whose work interrogates the performance and construction of identity online, with particular focus on the enactment of gender through the hyperfeminine and kitsch. Through this she explores how “spectatorship of the body and the representation of Woman on screen can be powerfully redefined”. She is also interested in how contemporary culture fetishes with the act of appearing on the screen and seeks to discover the new socially contrasted gaze of which exists through the internet.

Sophie Rogers is a video based artist whose practices focuses on the act of storytelling. Rogers' work explores the potential of childhood reveries through the digital and the everyday; creating fantastical surrealist fairytales. Rogers is based in London and has had work exhibited at the Barbican Centre, Tate Modern, Zabludowicz collection and most recently presented her first solo exhibition as part of Academy Costumes Residency in partnership with Platform, Southwark.

Lily Evangeline is a designer based in London, England. Her work is hugely influenced by emotion, empathy and intimacy, which is portrayed through strong colour palettes and alluring textures. She grew up in Suffolk and at 18 went onto study at Birmingham Institute of Art & Design. In 2014 she graduated with a degree in Textiles & Surface Design (BA Hons). Lily resides in London and freelances in print and set design. 

Hannah Dinz works with textiles, found images and objects to explore representations of daily routines through ornamental and craft techniques. With a particular interest in the home, Dinz engages with online DIY and self help channels that offer guidance and advice, from housekeeping to sexual health. Since graduating from University of Brighton in 2014, she has been living and working in London.

We would like to thank everyone at Noble Studios for their generosity and support of this project.

For further information and press enquiries, please contact Alexandra Hull & Olivia Yallop (info@g-url.co.uk).

Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/235818190231282/