Category: Artist Show

12th November – 5th December 2014

Ilona Szalay paintings will be shown in ‘It’s just a short walk to the future from here’, a group show at the Arusha Gallery in Edinburgh. Ilona’s pictures are permeated with a lonely sense of yearning and a poignant straining towards something infinite. There is an intensely visceral quality to her recent paintings, a sense of abundance and illumination. Ilona also creates video art in which she uses stop motion animation to create free-wheeling narratives of oil paint on glass. These ‘moving paintings’ exist only in recorded form as each drawing is extinguished to allow room for the next. As such the work is ephemeral and spontaneous, the images dissolving into each other and sliding across the surface of the glass. The pictures tell of metamorphosis, desire, dreams and death.

Find out more about Ilona Szalay’s work in our previous Q&A.

1st of September – 14th of September

Dulcy Lott’s new collection of photographs, titled ‘Everyone, everyone knows it’s me’, touch on the darker side of fairy tales and focus on the surreal, unsettling moments that life throws at us. It also investigates the physicality and relationships within the photographers frame.

Dulcy used local Oxford dance artists Callum Anderson, Helen Wadge and Emma Jane Grieg, as well as models from a non dance background to create the work. The nimble dancers were put into dramatic and challenging dance positions, often within quite harsh surroundings such as rusty old fences, coarse stone walls and large,abandoned shipping containers. This combination, creates a tension and unease within the viewer as well as a chance to study the elegance of the human form in such demanding poses, for that split second, before they’ve been lost.

‘Everyone, everyone knows it’s me’ is on show at Blackwell’s Coffee Shop, Oxford.

28 June – 9 August 2014

Successful portraits resist description in a way that other types of picture do not. A portrait is something other than just an image. Simple images aspire to tautology; “I am what I depict” they insist. Portraits make the precise inverse of this claim. Portraits suffer from the ravages of their sitters’ old age and dissolute characters.

See these two black and white images of a man’s head, face-on and in profile. The expression is inscrutable; is it fear, anger, defiance, resignation? That his name, aliases, the nature of his crime and the date of his arrest are listed on the reverse is of no help.

The mugshot and the passport photo are the most straightforward, the most concise and accurate of portraits. They are intended only for the purposes of identification. They describe their subjects fully and simply, yet they cannot be fully and simply described themselves. The only way to make a portrait comprehensible is to dissect it, dismember it, reduce it to a collection of appendages and features; here are the eyes, here is an elbow… Sally Kindberg goes further; she has obliterated the face altogether. With cheese. Continue reading “Artist Show
Mugshots: Sally Kindberg + Philadelphia PD”