Takahiro Iwasaki, Penny Klepuszewska

About

To live in the wouldn't or the would?

Again and again, in the most hard-edged urban situations, we come across carefully collected and cherished intimations of Pastoral; a Magic Tree air freshener dangling in a taxi cab, the green hills screensaver, an olive grove on the margarine tub, SOL beer and Scottish Bluebell matches.

There are little worlds to be found in window boxes, or in office cubicles populated with plastic budgies, smiley sunflowers and holiday snapshots.

A particular colour of pink, from a pear on a desk, seems to float in the space, neither in the world nor out of it.

The distance created by a pane of glass only serves to expand our capacity for daydream.

Takahiro Iwasaki is a Japanese artist currently working in the UK. Iwasaki creates meticulous assemblages in which miniature mountain ranges are carved from erasers and pencil lead pylons pepper a horizon at skirting board height. These creations hold the quality of postcard scenery, that in collapsing the scale of a landscape, we might peer in and imagine ourselves in situ.

Penny Klepuszewska is a photographer working within the traditions of still life and portraiture. Her images powerfully resonate with a spare, dark ambience. The composition of an interior settles on the simple details of a naked light bulb or an old blanket which immediately evoke the mood of a particular space and time. These moments cloaked in blackness are charged with loneliness and longing.

Iwasaki and Klepuszewska lyrically transform the gloss of the commonplace, demonstrating an almost meditative attention toward the material and situation at hand. Objects become vessels of fantasy, whispering to us of another possible existence. The romance of landscape frequently collides with the artificial and everyday. Narratives are spun around the conception of space where we might briefly inhabit a Lilliputian world or lift the lid on a private interior. To live in the wouldn't or the would? The question exists over the hill, in that room heavy with memory, at the edge of the photograph's darkness.

The exhibition is co-curated for ROOM by Sandie Macrae and Tamsin Clark.