JESSICA WARBOYS

About

Jessica Warboy's solo commission is the first in Cell Project Space's CYcLORAMA series. The exhibition presents a translation of the artist's imagination into perceptible experience through a combination of moving image, performance, and painting. Warboys' practice spans across a range of media and, intentionally, she has not settled on one fixed mode of working. Her selected materials are often partnered with a natural element, such as the sea or the sun. For her ‘Sea paintings' Warboys submerges large canvases into the sea before and after applying pigment directly onto its surface. The action itself is closely linked to performance, with the traces of movements and the disparate and free elements that appear on the canvas. The work reveals an action and the strength of the environment in which the paintings were made. Hung onto the wall and often engulfing a space, Warboys chooses not to stretch the work, but to retain the freedom to respond to a gallery space and maintain a continuous and open-ended approach to its interpretation. This process, related to both performance and gestural improvisation, is akin to the way Warboys makes her video works, in which the narrative is gradually revealed to test an audience's responses. Her films often employ long takes and steady camera angles creating a contemplative atmosphere exploiting the metaphorical richness of the natural environment. VICTORY PARK TREE PAINTING will incorporate Warboys' ‘Trilogy', first exhibited at Le Crédac, Ivry-sur-Seine, Paris, earlier this year. The Trilogy presents 3 individual works filmed between the summer of 2010 and Winter 2011, beginning in La forà ªt de Fontainebleau, France and finishing in London's Victoria Park. The Fontainebleau Forest is, compared with the more formal setting of Victoria Park, a wild setting and, poignantly a famously revisited site for landscape painters of different historical periods. Warboys' second part of the trilogy Marie de France presents a subtle mix of an outdoor setting of meadows and a neutral interior. It draws the viewer directly to painting where the medium itself is worked in front of the camera to create a marbled painting of the primary colours red and blue. These colours are transferred from two female characters, which align themselves as the muse or subject for the painting, their bodies fragmented while the camera captures the movements and metaphorical conversations of their legs and arms. Finally, the film Marie de France accumulates in an abstract portrait of the medieval poet of the same name. Warboys creates mysterious, and poetic scenarios where human presence is suggested throughout the three films and where sculpture is derived from human interaction with found objects. For this exhibition Warboys will work inside the gallery space for a month prior to the exhibition and draw upon a sculpture made previously, ‘Annabel Grey'. The sculpture and works produced within this period will become an integral space to screen 'Trilogy'. Jessica Warboys simultaneously works between London and Paris and has had solo exhibitions ‘Parasol', 2009 at Galerie Gaudel De Stampa, Paris and more recently ‘No More Summer of Incompleteness', 2011 at Sutton Lane, London. Since graduating from ‘The Slade School of Art' in 2004 she has attended a residency at ‘Frac des Pays de la Loire' 2010-2011 and more recently a residency and solo exhibition 'Underlap' on Stromboli, Sicily as part of Volcano Extravaganza" a project by Fiorucci Art Trust, curated by Milovan Farronato with Rita Selvaggio. VICTORY PARK TREE PAINTING' will be her most recent commission in London after live/film event, ‘Ballad of the Green Hoop', at the South London Gallery, curated by Anne-Sophie Dinant 2010. Other solo exhibitions this year include ‘Land & Sea', Le Crédac, Paris and "A l'étage", Satellite 4, Jeu de Paume, at Maison d'art Bernard Anthonioz, Paris curated by Raimundas Malasauskas, recent group exhibtions include 'Tableaux' Le Magasin, Centre National d'Art Contemporain, Grenoble curated by Yves Aupetitallot & Vincent Honoré, and 'Madam Realism', Marres, Centre for Contemporary Culture, curated by Lisette Smits, Maastricht."