Sam Creasey Open Studio Day

About

28th July

SW15 3EJ
12-8pm 
Artist talk: 5PM 
Drinks
Music 
Posters and prints available 
Free postcard on arrival
Free Parking in the estate.

More info about the work: 
www.samcreasey.com 
https://www.mtart.agency/artists/sam-creasey/
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Where the A3 dissects Wimbledon Common and Richmond park lies Putney Vale. A geographically and physically isolated area, the small housing estate is located in Roehampton Vale. With fewer than five hundred households, the dwellings are a mix of privately and council owned flats, maisonettes and semi- detached houses. The residents are a varied mix of European, Asian and African communities, a large percentage of Polish migrants and families, and numerous Pakistani and Somali families. After Newlands Hall and Putney Vale community centre sadly shut down a few years ago, the residents were left without a communal space for activities and meetings. 

To help keep the building alive until the new proposed council houses are to take its place, Sam has since operated his studio from the community centre through a guardianship scheme. Utilising the basketball court in the centre of the building, the space has provided ample possibility for new works and experimentation in his painting. The open studio aims to re-open the doors for a day for the locals and introduce some new faces to his practise. 
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The relationship between viewing and understand a painting as opposed to a photographic image, and in recent years a screen based image, is central to Sam’s practise. Painting is valued by the artist as a remedial activity and medium for reforming cold digital detritus into a new unique object. In a technical age where a carbon copy object can be 3D printed and photographic images over saturate our daily stimuli, reforming formless, screen based detritus within the language of painting breathes the life into Sam’s figurative paintings.

Utilising a collaging process, Sam uses the internet to mine for source material. Intriguing images from politics, the media, the environment and technology are shifted and juxtaposed in Photoshop with often disparate elements to create a new subverted narrative. The often-illusive figures in the works are placed in a semi-fictional world on the brink and at a power balance with the technology we have created.

Sam positions himself as the man in this man/machine paradigm; relying on touch, gesture and the physicality of the painted mark to imprint the meaning in the works. His images evoke to the viewer a sense of uncertainty and dystopia in the information age and to himself a sense of humanity through the painted process. A human feeling often lost in internet ocean or the robots in our pockets.