Exhibition
Nightwonders, By Tom Banks
26 May 2022 – 5 Jun 2022
Regular hours
- Thursday
- 10:00 – 16:00
- Friday
- 10:00 – 16:00
- Saturday
- 10:00 – 16:00
Free admission
Address
- 2 Ethelbert Terrace
- Margate
England - CT9 1RX
- United Kingdom
Travel Information
- Thanet Loop
- Margate
The themes behind the exhibition are an ongoing interest in the night and our perceptions of the night, the psychological aspects of darkness and how our imagination deals with the unseen. This is combined with an interest in suburbia and the connotations of class and taste.
About
The Lido Stores are pleased to present Nightwonders, an exhibition of new paintings by St Leonards based artist, Tom Banks.
The paintings in Nightwonders meet both of Mark Fisher’s definitions of weird and eerie. ‘Weird’ being the presence of thing that should not be present and ‘eerie’ being the absence of a thing that should.
When viewing the paintings in Nightwonders, we as viewers are aware of ourselves as being in some way intrusive. Through our positioning in the painting we are nightwalkers in urban streets, we shouldn’t be here, we are weird, weirdos, outsiders, social outcasts, outlaws. We are the people to whom darkness provides cover.
What is eerie in Tom’s paintings is the defining quality of night - the absence of light. Or rather light's presence as spotlights, that emphasise its absence everywhere else. These light sources throw up skeletal trees like anthropomorphic forms or cracks in the night. Or highlight the vistas of urban houses, hard shells protecting soft, sleeping meat.
While we question our weird presence in the eerie absence of light we might come, also, to question our surroundings. Who sleeps in these houses? What secrets do they hold? Who or what else does this darkness hide? The night becomes a medium in which we encounter all forms of otherness.
Tom’s inspiration for this collection of work comes from ‘Nightwalking: a nocturnal history of London’ by Matthew Beaumont, of which he quotes:
"Nightwalkers experience urban life as a form of phantasmagoria, one that they are utterly immersed in and oddly detached from. The nightwalker thus dramatises the dialectic of alienation and desalination, oppression and emancipation, the prosaic and poetic, at the core of metropolitan modernity.”
About Tom Banks
Tom has a BA in Fine Art from Kingston University, he has had multiple solo exhibitions around the South Coast and exhibited extensively throughout the UK. He won the Beep Wales International Painting prize in 2018 and has been selected for open calls including the Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne (2018, 2015, 2014 and 2012) and 20 Painters at Phoenix Art Gallery, Brighton 2014.
Night Wonders is his first solo show in Margate. Tom currently lives and works in St Leonards on Sea.
