Exhibition

Hang Up

6 Sep 2012 – 5 Oct 2012

Regular hours

Thursday
11:00 – 18:00
Friday
11:00 – 18:00
Saturday
11:00 – 18:00
Tuesday
11:00 – 18:00
Wednesday
11:00 – 18:00

Cost of entry

Free

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Josh Lilley Gallery

London, United Kingdom

Address

Travel Information

  • Oxford Circus / Tottenham Court Road
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Anissa Mack, Anna Betbeze, Ellen Lesperance, Liam Everett, Ruairiadh O'Connell

About

Josh Lilley is delighted to announce the opening of Hang Up - a group exhibition featuring Anissa Mack, Anna Betbeze, Ellen Lesperance, Liam Everett, and Ruairiadh O'Connell.

Hang Up brings together five artists whose works discuss the transformative potential of materiality. The exhibition will touch upon the possibilities, intentions, or atypical associations such materials have - where the use of fabric, pattern, and traditional designs allow for an exploration into each artist's cultural, political, economic, or conceptual process. The show's title comes from a seminal work in the early career of Eva Hesse - where through the seemingly simple addition of a long metal rod to a canvas, she transformed a painting into a sculpture. The energy exuded in her work, and the possibilities afforded by such a post minimalist statement , go some way to articulating the interest in form, scale, colour, exposure, material reproduction, and identity - that are apparent in the works on display in this show.

Anissa Mack's work investigates memory or nostalgia as a succession of visions recalled with increasing distortion. She is often drawn to objects or motifs from the American vernacular, such as quilts, masks, or needlepoint cross-stitch patterns, elements that in themselves exist as multiples in the world. Her quilt works are based on traditional American craft patterns in which the perspective has been distorted, causing the forms to push and pull from the wall in a slight optical illusion. Her second work in the show is a sculptural cast of a quilt in Aquaresin, standing rigid and upright leaning against the wall. Such a material shift is crucial to her, as the casting becomes a direct, physical impression - where the object is 'full of itself', and thus takes on the unstable identity of a surrogate form.

Anna Betbeze thinks of her works as material transgressions, drawing on a specific cultural history due to the fact they are enacted on top of used Flokati rugs. Concerned with materiality, scale and colour, she transforms the standard-sized mass produced carpets through unnatural and artificial processes. Staining, bleaching, tearing, burning with ash, and dying the rugs - create highly saturated and worked upon surfaces, whose very physicality moves her painterly interventions onto an expanded field.

Ellen Lesperance's works depict certain motifs used to highlight power struggles and women's rights at political movements such as Greenham Common. Her tapestries, drawings, and knitted sweaters, become odes and tributes to those who used fabric and design as a means of self expression and liberation. Investigating the visual symbols and vernaculars employed by female direct action campaigns in order to elicit change, Lesperance discovered a communal motivation in the form of hand knit sweaters. As an extension of shared ideologies, they became an opportunity for those challenging the status quo to literally embody their common cause. One such knitted work will be exhibited in the exhibition, as well as two meticulous gouache paintings that depict sweater patterns - functioning as death shrouds or memorials to individuals committed to fighting for causes greater than themselves..

Liam Everett incorporates non traditional processes onto his work, using salt, alcohol, lemon, and sunlight, in order to affect forced exposure onto his material surfaces. His recent works continue his exploration into the perceptual experience - focusing specifically on the motion of light that asserts itself within a spacial constraint. His fabric paintings are soaked, stained and dried, where methods of support then vary from poplar beams leaning onto the wall, to more traditional masonite panels or stretcher bars. Erasure, layering and exposure are continual themes within his process.

For the works in Hang Up, Ruairiadh O'Connell took images of carpet designs from 7 of the biggest casinos in Las Vegas, and laid them as silkscreen images onto wax filled steel panels. Fascinated with the coercive potential of such pattern design - whose affect while in the casino is to keep you awake, stimulate you, and make you spend more money - he succeeds in transforming and trapping such intentions within the confines of his constructions. Almost as a tease, and to create an imperfection in the ice-like surface, he kneads and presses the wax in certain places before it sets. Such an intervention may also point to the replication of masseur techniques used at the casino's to also keep its clients supple and active.

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