Lacey Contemporary is proud to present ‘Relational Extravaganza : Arbitrary Dreams’ a dynamic multi-media group exhibition encompassing a collection of painting, photography, print and sculpture, created by eight carefully selected, emerging artists and curated by Christina Mitrentse Projects. The exhibition reveals the artists diverse working processes, styles, medium and scale. The seductively deceptive artworks offer a case study of the aesthetical interaction between nature, seduction, & commodification. While the selected artists produce an assortment of highly stimulating visual data there is a common thread holding the works together –in search of Aesthetic Forms and Their Opposites they echoing abstraction.

Oslo based British artist Alex Bunn, creates supersensory large scale images that explore fresh realms of combined sculpture and photography, reconciling disparate perspectives on the world around us. Bunn’s work can be seen as an attempt to reconcile the various models, modes and statuses we employ to navigate and engage with the cosmos without compromising it’s natural disorder. Alex Bunn’s work has been exhibited at the Frieze Art Fair, The Royal Institution, in solo shows at Aubin Gallery, Another Roadside Attraction Gallery Unit24 in London as well as in New York, Tokyo and Stockholm.

Jonas Ranson is an established British screen printer and graduate of the Royal College of Art. His images engage with the aesthetic experience that emerges from perceiving boundless landscape. Through obtrusive fractures, darkness, obscurity, privation and vastness, the images encompass subjects relating to the apocalyptic, biblical and the sublime. The Landscapes become a metaphysical realm for the purging of emotional trauma. Jonas Ranson work is a part of significant national public collections including Pallant House Gallery.

Born in London Katrina Kotcheff is a multidisciplinary artist working in photography, film, installation and drawing. She studied architecture and a BA in Fine Art at the Sir John Cass Department of Art, Media and Design and has since worked in UK film and television. She has exhibited widely in group art shows and galleries in East London & Venice Biennale as part of Personal Structures: ‘Culture/ Mind/ Becoming’ exhibition.

In this show she presents photographic works from her personal archive, or in this case Anti-archive; as through a random event, a collection of photographs were damaged by water, separating out the colour chemical processes, they are transformed into new evocative images. This destruction is the very thing that brings them new life, connecting water and memory. Photographs Grass Cloud I and II were originally taken (1987) on a sea wall in The Wash in Norfolk where the land has been reclaimed over time from the sea. In Rainbow Head, a portrait of the artist (1990 ), the hair has turned into a myriad of colours, framing the face creating an other worldly landscape.

Nana & Felix is a Korean-Finnish artist duo who work on photography-based project and are based in Finland. For this exhibition they present new work from their popular ‘Ways of Seeing’ series. They re-document and re-assemble what they see in those desire-oriented found, public, and superficial images, present in their everyday environment, both online and offline, in order to question their ways of seeing. Through a photographic play, Felix reproduces and distorts the image with the aim of questioning which one is the referent and which the representation. Nana cuts and freely assembles these photographs, in order to reconstruct and to translate the same repetitive nature of the image while questions the ontological state of Nybergh´s photographs. Nana & Felix have won many awards and their work is in collection at City of Turku, Finland.

Sumer Erek is a multi-disciplinary conceptual creator with extensive experience in public art installation, creating large-scale works and participatory projects in the UK and abroad. He studied an MA in Theory and Practice of Transnational Art at Camberwell – UAL. In his site specific sculptural installation The Sound of Cicadas on five finger mountains, Mountains and cicadas becomes the metaphor for politicise nature of our created existence. This installation is made from tiles of scaled down image of the mountains, like the war game console. Empty cicadas shells, collected from Cyprus and filled with dye, gather the reminiscent of cataleptic existence, and further investigates the conflict between the nature and man, individual and society.

Gareth Lloyd is a painter who studied technical and industrial drawing at Berkshire College of Art and completed a post-graduated fine art degree at St Martins School of Art. His doctoral research in philosophy at the University of London, examined ‘Image’ in the light of Derrida’s notion of ‘Return Inquiry’. Drawing inspiration from the cinema,

Lloyd plays with iconography, but the icons at its heart are not those of classical painting, they stem instead from the kind of imagery that has become iconic merely because of the role it has played in all our everyday histories.

Japanese artist Yutaka Inagawa graduated with an MA from Chelsea College of Art & Design in 2004. He has been widely exhibited in-group and solo exhibitions in France, U.S, Japan, Seoul, Shanghai and London. Yutaka’s diverse body of work stems from his fascination with the notion of deceptiveness and integrity in digital photo manipulation and painting. This gradual shift in reality and perception manifest itself as a form of enigmatic complexity in the artist’s detailed oil paintings. A twisted fusion of the West and Japan blurs the seriousness of identity and race.

Naoya Inose is a Japanese painter who graduated from Tokyo University of the Arts with a BA in Oil Painting and is now currently based in London. His works are included in Takahasi Collection Fondazione Benetton. Inose's work explores the tension between the natural world and its grasping appropriation by human influence. It draws from traditional genre of painting Inose uses oil paint techniques to create both meticulously realistic landscapes and abstract oil paintings on canvas which question our perception of and relationship to nature, and the paintings’ historical and current role.

The show is curated by Christina Mitrentse: http://christinamitrentse.com/.