Here then, was I / Here now, am I

About

The exhibition brings together a group of artists whose works reflect one's relationship with the outside world through a personal quest into one's self. Inner thoughts and shared aspirations, ubiquitous screens and physical surroundings are presented intertwined. Each artist, guided by their self-awareness, navigates the murky sea of the tangible and the digital world. 

The show's title is inspired by Virginia Woolf’s extended essay A Room of One's Own (1929) and the docufiction film by Portuguese director Pedro Costa In Vanda's Room (2000). Whereas Woolf critiques the conditions required for the success of female writers, Costa cuts a space for emigrant junkies and the socially excluded. Both resort to fictions within reality in order to carve out a literal and figurative space from where to voice what remains unheard. To have one’s own room is a fundamental desire difficult for millennials to achieve in London, both literally and metaphorically. A desire to reclaim space and time for the individual. Focusing on issues of personal and social identity, the exhibition hopes to highlight the importance of creative work in questioning the ‘self’ and in understanding one's role within society. 

About the artists:
Annette Fernando draws from mediated images, sourced primarily from television and film. She selects the part of the story that resonates with her, whilst bringing to light clichéd depictions of masculinity and femininity embedded within cultures. Annette's work reappropriates images of femininity away from the patriarchal gaze, and by re-exposing these images she calls into question the extent cultural conditioning effects our desires, relationships and the way we behave. annettefernando.carbonmade.com 

Alistair Leys
The contradictory space.
The self its place in society and its endlessly multiplying image.
The drug fueled selfish hedonism and the selfless activism.
The political and the personal.
The space of dreams and of concrete.
Poetry and pain.
Reality and spectacle.
The inner and outer.
The slow and the fast.
The street and the gallery.

Alistair's work brings to surface the paradoxes that coexist in our schizoid century and addresses how to represent its feeling and its look. He considers how political issues figure in relation to intimate sexual politics and moments of hallucination. alistairleys.com 

Sarah 'Kenikie' Palmer's paintings examine the hypnotism of entertainment television. Her work reduces illusionistic scenes from the screen to mesmeric impressions, attempting to expose the TV as a mirror that reflects the isolation and ennui of the habitual watcher. kenikie.com 

Based at Thames-Side Studios, Ema Pina's paintings oscillate between analytical observations and idle reveries in order to reconcile what something is with what it could be. Wishful-thinking, longing and daydreaming are materialised into objects, bodies and nature. Pina's recent works, like psychological landscapes, evolve from associations made between surfaces, textures and skin, and their relationship to colour, tone and mark. She is interested in the moment when the picture is charged with a ruminative thinking presence. emapina.com 

Inspired by everyday spaces and how we spend our time, Helen Wilson uses performance, film, drawing and installation to highlight the idiosyncrasies in our society. Her current work explores how people’s relationship to time changes depending on the space they occupy from the fast pace and forward focus of the commuters over London Bridge to mothers in Peckham meandering through the shops. Through performances and daily experiments she explores the essence of time - how to make it, lose it, save it, slow it down and speed it up. helenhelen.co.uk 

Featuring: Annette Fernando, Alistair Leys, Sarah 'Kenikie' Palmer, Ema Pina and Helen Wilson