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Mamonloch im Selbst, 2019 Oil on Canvas, Bendix Harms
Exhibition
Prospect and Refuge
12 Mar 2022 – 9 Apr 2022
Regular hours
- Saturday
- 11:00 – 17:00
- Friday
- 10:00 – 16:00
Address
- 6 Camberwell Passage
- Camberwell
- London
England - SE5 0AX
- United Kingdom
Travel Information
- Nearest Bus Stop: Camberwell Green (F), bus numbers 35, 40, 42, 45 and Warner Road (J and H) bus numbers 36, 185, 436, N136
- Nearest London Stations: Oval (Northern Line), Denmark Hill (London Overground and Thameslink) or Loughborough Junction (London Overground and Thameslink)
- Denmark Hill
Sim Smith is delighted to present Prospect and Refuge, curated by David Surman, featuring the work of seven contemporary artists working in a range of different media, brought together for their respective engagement with notions of subjectivity as it relates to the concept of landscape.
About
This exhibition presents the work of seven artists, Carl Anderson (b.1990), Richard Ayodeji Ikhide (b.1991), Bendix Harms (b.1967), Ian Gouldstone (b.1979), Callum Green (b.1991), Kate Groobey (b.1979), Jonathan McCree (b.1963).
The human mind, curious and conscious, is inextricably linked to the mysteries of landscape. Like the cave of da Vinci’s recollection, the land exerts an aesthetic power over us, a power rooted in our practical nature. Such a cave offers a place to call home, but what if it is occupied—by something bestial, something supernatural? If such a cave were a place of safety, the curious human could venture from it on daily adventures and return to it. The British geographer Jay Appleton coined the terms ‘prospect’ and ‘refuge’ to better account for these experiences of opportunity and safety that punctuate landscape. We are pushed and pulled by our inquisitiveness and trepidation—our aesthetic sense is inseparable from our animal senses. The landscape is not nature, it is something inside us.
The work touches the fibre of being and the world Appleton describes with ‘prospect and refuge’. What triggers a sense of ‘specialness’ in a place? Can a mark or a movement suggest opportunity or threat in our deeper consciousness? What makes up our sense of ‘home’ beyond simple familiarity? Taken together, the works included in this exhibition point to new aesthetic categories and themes that go beyond the traditional artistic categories of landscape, abstraction, figuration. We have stepped into a cave and found ‘marvellous things’, new points of reference to landscape and revitalised conceptualisations of home, wilderness and being.
