Shape_Shifters

About

Shape_Shifters is an exhibition of site-specific work resulting from a residency at Arthouse1 by six artists who all transform shape, space, environment and experience through their multi-disciplinary approaches. Through various multi-disciplinary the six artists investigate Modes of display, illusionary experience, architecture and reconstruction of space are some of the themes that connect the works

All of the artists acknowledge in their practices the central importance of generative dialogue and exchange alongside experimentation, risk taking and research to their process of artmaking. In this respect they work collaboratively (though not as a collective); whether through the creation and development of their work in conversation with others, curatorial projects, residencies and exhibition making.

Sasha Bowles’ work deals with illusion, interventions, metamorphosis, taxonomies and provisional structures. Starting from Old Masters works Bowles’ process is an evolving loop. Through intervention on book pages and postcards, she re-presents and subverts classical narratives, cloaking the figures to open up new possibilities. This process also references classical sculptures which are reproduced as ephemeral sculptures, photographed and extended through painted and digital mediation, culminating in new interpretations.

Rosalind Davis’ paradoxical works imagine a multifaceted set of possibilities for visualizing and creating spaces which are complex, disorienting and subjective. Beginning with the rationalised objective geometries of architecture, multiple spaces are constructed and reconfigured across multiple disciplines, connecting and disconnecting physical and psychological boundaries in 2 and 3d.

The borders between the real and the illusory are blurred in Justin Hibbs installations which disorientate and subvert our perceptual experience of space. Combining analogue and digital modes of representation, production and display these environments negotiate the changing terms of our engagement with the reality of the modern world around us.  “Hibbs’s works are worldly, imperfect at the outset.” Martin Herbert.

Engaging with the everyday as well as possible and impossible futures Evy Jokhova often responds to environments and the works of others as a form of extended collaborative process surveys the disparity between plan and reality. Exploring social narratives and remembered ‘truths’, Jokhova questions her own subjective role in and relationship to society, history, landscape, architecture and public ‘signifiers’ such as monuments. The complex relationships between the perceived, the imagined and the accepted norm are driving factors in Jokhova’s multi-faceted practice. The work selected for Shape_Shifters will transform and adapts itself to the space and the other artists' work.

Gibson / Martelli create illusory worlds of virtual reality, where artworks are activated through the visual codes of Dazzle Camouflage. Unlike traditional camouflage which operates on the principle of concealment, dazzle camouflage uses complex arrangements of high-contrast, interrupted geometric patterns that confuse the calculation of a ship’s range, speed and bearing in an enemy’s optical gunnery rangefinder.