The works featured in this exhibition straddle the figurative and surreal, exploiting the vibrancy of colour and mystery of shadow, mirroring the pendulous swing of the psyche. In traversing such a rift, the artists together express the restless dialogue at the centre of our understanding of ourselves, as individuals caught up in internal contemplation of the self, and as a society fraught with the endlessness of redefinition.
Questions are posed on the subjects of identity and communality, encouraging a discursive analysis on human interactions on a corporeal level. Insights into the mind’s inner workings are expressed in gestures and postures, filtered through the artist’s subjective lens into landscapes evocative of fantasies and dreams. In environments of contrasting energies tensions give way to release, strains fall away to expose joy. The restrictions of our physical selves are bent into advanced configurations that allow for impossible physical interaction, a reflection on the reaches of our social capacities.
Rewarding the intrepid interloper, the artists offer an intimate experience of sensuality, and invite an examination of our roles as gendered (or non-gendered) beings and how we shape the lived experience for others. Symbolism and meaning is stretched and refracted, the cerebral and animal intertwined.
The human environment is tempered with conflicting intentions, moments of vibrancy and of harmony. In capturing this, the artists emerge in their work as characters, suspended within the tangibly abstract worlds of their creation. Engaging with this presentation, the viewer is encouraged to step into these worlds, to interact, to open the senses to suggestion in many ways, through ‘the lives of others’.