About
RIGHT HERE
10/7 27/7 2008
Wed Sun, 12 6pm, or by appointment
Private view: Thursday 10/7 2008, 6 9pm
Lorem Ipsum Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition Right Here, featuring work by Sofia Dahlgren, John Higgins, Thomas Harrison, Birthe Jorgensen and Emma Wieslander.
Right Here brings together work by artists who have gently manipulated common perceptions / misconceptions within artistic experience and as a result unleashed new or underlying structures.
Swedish artist Sofia Dahlgren's video works directly reference a tradition of 19th and early 20th century Scandinavian landscape painting. Dahlgren's soft focus âtableaux', presented as continuous loops within which movement is minimal, draw on the idea of Landscape as a psychological space, a space for reflection and projection. In the piece Forest Clearing Nature is ultimately about Man's relation to Nature and her use of after-effects manipulation, confirms Dahlgren is not concerned with documenting the landscape per-se, instead, she shows us a landscape that exists somewhere in between the real and the imaginary and always in relation to Man.
Artist John Higgins applies a range of methods in order to extend or exaggerate physical properties of the materials that he uses, often to uproot static traits of his subject matter and tease out alternative suggestions. For his piece Still Life, four floral oil paintings found in a second hand store have been masked in gold leaf. The addition of the golden layer creates a tension between the monochromatic surface and the impasto brush strokes that form the anonymous painter's attempt at Dutch Still Life. Higgins' piece playfully raises questions about originality and value.
For British artist Thomas Harrison walking through urban and rural landscapes is the starting point and his work reveals influences such as a Darwinian 19th century fascination for exploring, collecting and classifying and John Cage's ability to hear music in everything. The resulting arrangements are layered yet often economic in means. For the piece Great Untitled he has visited an architect's workshop and used leftovers found scattered on the floor in conjunction with works created in response to a spring walk in the Berkshire Downs.
Danish artist Birthe Jorgensen's photographic landscape series serve as a means to confront paradoxical statements made within minimalist painting and to undo a personal touch deemed too subjective to retain. These images favour an abstract painterly sensibility above the laws of gravity, yet remain tied down in the abnormal objectivity and unreal stasis of photographic representation. In the piece Untitled, Great Out-washed Planes of Southern Iceland the drift towards, what with hindsight might be described as the emotional totality, that artists such as Mark Rothko, especially near the time of his death, expressed in his iconic paintings, is disrupted by a sharp realism.
Swedish artist Emma Wieslander uses her training as photographer as a basis for her research into the perception, depiction and description of Nature. Fascinated by techniques old and new, her work is inspired as much by historical interests as it is by novel concerns related to the instability of digital imagery and experimentations with 3-D printing. For her piece How You Describe It (360º Sunset) Wieslander has turned a photograph of what is commonly known as an omega sunset into a miniature 3-D object. Furthermore the commonly used and misleading description of the sun setting into the sea, pointing towards the possibility of moving around the sunset, is here made apparent.
