This-Here-Now
Juan Bolivar
Adam Gillam
Hiroe Komai
Trisant (Julian Hughes-Watts)
Curated by
Trisant
noformat gallery presents This-Here-Now. A group show of four London-based artists
whose work explores the nature of objecthood and modes of representation.
Bolivar's paintings investigate language and cognition,
and hover between abstraction and representation. His paintings reconfigure the
stylistic appearance of abstraction turning this genre into tragi-comical
visions. The paintings in this
exhibition were produced between 2002 - 2006, and contextualised this research
through the idea of faciality, a term coined to describe the recognition of the
face - fragmented and re-assembled as faceted abstractions. The paintings
examine hierarchies at play in reading these works, with influences ranging
from South Park to the legacies of hard-edge abstraction.
Adam Gillam’s delicate structures have an impromptu
quality, akin to a makeshift moment given form. His work is balanced and
nuanced; scraps of material, like scraps of time, are assembled in an
inventive, bricolage fashion. Gillam improvises with different materials, and
the quality of those materials and the act of working with them determines the
end result in a particularly lucid way. The process of making is both a method
and an interpretive tool. Works emerge from a day-to-day engagement with
utilitarian materials and what Gillam calls his ‘scatty pragmatics’ approach.
Cast in bronze in a variety of finishes, from polished
to patinated, Hiroe Komai transforms objects from utilitarian, objective
mementos to objects of luxury and desire. Komai places the crafted objects on
perspex sheets and display methods reminiscent of high street stores, exploring
notions of ‘taste’ and indicating the connection between high and low
aesthetics and the reducibility of ideas not only to concepts but to ‘looks and
style’.
Reflective surfaces in Trisant’s digital works create
interrelations between objects in a hermetically sealed computer-generated
environment. The scenes adopt presentation and display strategies commonly used
in commercial advertising, but these are used to foreground the nature of
representation, modern patterns of consumption and the projection of
desirability onto consumer goods. Tight loops of repetition are used in these
digital animations to exaggerate advertising techniques that place products
firmly in consumer’s consciousness. The repetition invokes flux, but rapidly
returns to point zero.
Exhibition dates:
• Private
View: Saturday 23rd November, 5-8pm
• Exhibition:
Tuesday 23rd November - Sunday 15th December 2013. Open Thurs-Sun, 12-6pm
no format is a
permanent interdisciplinary visual arts gallery space curated and programmed by
Second Floor Studios & Arts (SFSA), based at their Harrington Way site in
South East London.
www.noformat.co.uk
no format - Second Floor Studios & Arts,
Harrington Way (off Warspite Road), Woolwich, London, SE18 5NR.
no format is located immediately off the A206 dual
carriageway near Charlton and Woolwich. Charlton and Woolwich Dockyard Main
Line stations and The Docklands Light Railway are in close proximity. Jubilee
Line North Greenwich (O2) then 161 or 472 from bus stop A to Warspite Road.
Regular bus routes (180, 177, 161, and 472) serve the
local area.
Enquiries: jhwatts@btinternet.com