The Deleted World

About

Following an open call to UK art school graduates, After presents The Deleted World, a curated selection of twelve emerging artists who look beyond the limits of boundary or edge.

Reaching toward a negative transcendence, where excision trumps construction and where doubt beats certainty, the centre is vacant, the void beckoned, and zeroes and gaps are chief collaborators.

The selected artists divide and recombine images, drain and charge objects, delete and invert ideas. Creating time machines, fossils, doubles and grids invested with possibility and play they ask: what is nothing made of? What is anything made of?

Caroline Abbotts experiments with photographic paper. In her series Faders iron- toned silver gelatin prints are exposed to moonlight. the use of iron in silver gelatin processing replaces the silver with iron blue, sensitizing the surface to UV light and ensuring they will gradually fade to black.

Gala Bell explores the iconoclastic act - defacing and devaluing ‘sacred’ objects. Using the banknote as a medium, new images are created by dissecting fragments of a note and examining the blank space. For Bell, the edge of the cut note is the frontier between the physical presence of money and the vacant space that denotes freedom.

Jonas Brinker places a roll of 16mm film in direct contact with phosphorescent rocks, yielding an ongoing image where the medium is the frame of the moment.

Max Colson uses photography and digital manipulation to deconstruct the aesthetics of privatized public environments, nominally public but secretly securitised and highly managed. His series Images of Enjoyment and Spectacle, appropriates ‘digital composite’ images of hypothetical landscapes used to market privatised public spaces and luxury housing developments. All CGI elements removed, the empty background is filled with a digitally created pastel hue. Only the stock images of people and skies remain.

May Heek places different image sources together to question the point at which an image begins and how colour renders space.

Kyounghee Lee considers the landscape of technology and future nostalgias, with objects divorced from purpose no longer desirable but mysterious - an alternate archaeology.

Megan Needham translates the visual structures of objects within urban and industrial environments into a series of hand rendered lines, using concepts of repetition and order found within the everyday. Her Test Pieces series explores the ubiquitous nature of the grid through drawing on primed boards.

Dan Newton frames the space and the activity that unravels within it, drawing attention to parameters and limitations, exposing interstices within the arena of encounter. Understanding art as a state of mind or a mode of being, he aims to initiate moments of immateriality in which art may or may not unfold.

Liz Orton’s series of handmade collages, Deltiologies, is an inquiry into the end of landscape as a stable visual field. Views have been categorised, cut and re- assembled. Here, perspective is undone and space reconfigured into new topographies. The once stable centre is void. The horizon a fiction driven by a dissonance between mind and world.

Himali Singh Soin’s art is informed by travelling to the source of ancient stories and contemporary literature alike, exploring the experience of love. Time Machine reflects on the lateral nature of time - of past, present and future as simultaneous rather than linear.

Dario Srbic is an artist and researcher whose works question where photography can be found, preferring the location or territory of photography to the search for its essence. For Srbic the eye penetrates via repetition, and this repetition turns his work n-1 into a desiring machine without centre or periphery, merely a vibration.

Luca Vanello's The Object Is Just An Object takes words on white boards in a trauma treatment centre, words that describe the timeline of a traumatic event, erases them and mixes the pigments in water, presented together with a submerged blank sheet of paper.