Hang - A Group Exhibition

HANG – A GROUP EXHIBITION

16^th 21^st March 2012

HANG comprises a group of London based artists, at different stages in their careers showing together for the first time.  Although the media used throughout the show including painting, photography, sculpture and even paintings that are indeed sculptures, may be diverse the theme is made cohesive through the simple device ‘HANG’.

Since her successful first solo show ‘Blue / Grey’ at The Outside World earlier this year Laura Fishman has made further explorations into the sculptural aspects of the material that is paint. Fishman pours, drips and teases out the plastic potential of the paint itself. The skins hung out to dry like the carcass of some visceral being. Their very form wrenched from the bones of the canvas and stretcher.  

Mathew Tudor’s paintings tell of other dark secrets, of thoughts half remembered. Certain shadows, glimpsed from the corner of a sleepy eye.  Tudor’s paintings are built up by transparent layers whose counterpoint is the deeply ingrained brushwork.  Bringing forth memories evoking past emotions of events that may have been.

The inspiration for Christina Pittarides work is the found, whether an object or a ritual. These are then transposed from the mundane and discarded to icons of commercial culture.  For HANG, Pittardes has chosen imagery symbolic of New York gang culture. In these paintings we see the shoes of drug dealers and drug users dead or alive singing their song as sweetly as a bird on a wire.

Madeline Fishman draws, in many different forms, using a blend of photography, line and sewn sculptured forms.  The loose threads HANG from the canvas leading the viewer to contemplate at certain times the random forms created when each piece is hung.

Imagine ripping the pages out of your childhood encyclopedia and remaking each body part for your own museum of found things that never were.  That is Julia Maddison with her paper heart throbbing as it is pierced by a multitude of screws and nails all trussed up, enclosed in a corset of wire, hung up for all to see.

Bernice Wilson starts with her face, herself and thus the greater sense of self-recognition.  For HANG she explores the notion of Prosopagnosia, or face blindness.  Through a series of twelve paintings all identical in size she deconstructs her own face and re-presents it to the viewer as a confused map of essential parts that form her own identity.

C.A.Halpin 2012

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