Library Music

About

Library music is an exhibition about time, memory and place. Seven painters explore aspects of suburban, edgeland and rural landscapes, wandering from faded modernity and future ruins to idyllic villages, from eerie landscapes and spectral houses to utopian visions, bringing together different ideas of folklore, the unknown, the weird, as well as hazily recollected cultural memories.
The landscapes depicted may be mundane, featureless or interchangeable, yet there is often an atmosphere of realised or implied unease or suspense. They can seem familiar, reassuring, yet also unsettling or eerie. The notion that the familiar, the everyday, could carry something that remains hidden or somehow becomes significant, lies at the heart of much of the work.
Alongside the external landscape paintings, on a more interior level, are works that depict sites of creativity and alchemy with views of surrounding woodland, children on listless afternoons stuck in a perpetually unsettling 1970s, and shadowy depopulated spaces inhabited only by flowers.
Although each painter uses a different visual language, their paintings share a sense of something having been discovered – images lost and found during the painting process, and a way of using paint that calls attention to the medium itself, and an understated, quiet atmosphere. The idea of simplicity is fundamentally important to the work featured, and it’s very much at the root of what makes still visual imagery so powerful.