Carroll / Fletcher is pleased to present a group exhibition that brings together the distinct but interconnected practices of three young artists: Jim Woodall, Alexander Page and Luke Burton.
The show includes sculptural installation, photography, videos and drawings that investigate our relationship with landscape and architecture. For the artists, the natural and built environments are both a source of haptic pleasures and a playground for exploration and critical dissent in which landscape and architecture function as a stagelike objects or ciphers for memory, social and political networks and Romantic artistic positions.
All the artists share similar productive tensions within their practices: direct or hinted at autobiographical references synthesise with a distant, controlled aesthetic and emotional restraint; the obsolescence of the image is contrasted with the image as a source of hope, and even personal salvation; the apparent stability and naturalness of landscape is set against the urban environment and modern architectural practice and its accelerated entropy.
Whilst the work probes our desire for haptic pleasures within both the material and immaterial, there is also a drive to understand the political and economic systems in which the work is produced: the cycles of urban accumulation and decay, the maintenance and sustainability of urban architecture, and the new and old technologies that serve to map and constrain our representations of space and time.
Jim Woodall (b.1978, Oxford) lives and works in London. Woodall works across diverse media: sculpture, photography, video, installation and performance. His work stems from a personal and socio-political encounter with the built environment and reflects upon land ownership, human-led accelerated entropy and how technology affects our relationship with and memory of landscape.
Recent exhibitions include Tomorrow People, Elevator Gallery, London, 2013; React, Dilston Grove, 2013 and Olympic State, See Studios, London, 2011.
Woodall was a founding member of CutUp collective, an interventionist art group, from 2004-9.
Alexander Page (b. 1983, London) lives and works in London. Page’s work engages with memory and landscape. Landscape is used as a foil or a cipher to unlock direct relationships with the self, memory, nostalgia, loss and love. His work speaks of wandering, nostalgic journeys, of days spent lost in reverie but also of art and image making as a form of release from melancholia.
Recent exhibitions include A Dense Glitter of Alternatives, Vitrine Gallery, London and Like a Monkey Puzzle Tree, Copeland Park Gallery, London (as part of the Art Licks festival), both 2013.
Luke Burton (b.1983, London) lives and works in London. Burton’s work crosses sculpture, installation, photography, video and drawing to explore the irreducible complexity of aesthetic reception and pleasure, and probe the convoluted relationship between architecture, class and taste. Humour and play infiltrate a restrained and serious language of the decorative within his work and enable a critical dissidence from formal and sociopolitical constraints.
Recent exhibitions include Love / Architecture, Turner Contemporary, Margate; A Dense Glitter of Alternatives, Vitrine Gallery, London and Beat, MK Gallery, Milton Keynes (all 2013).