12th Interim Exhibition: Be Real

  • Artists: Antonella Ferrari, Ellie Geary, Showna Kim, Geoff Litherland and Bobby Sayers
  • HANMI GALLERY | LONDON
  • 30 October - 10 November 2012

For its 13th Interim Exhibition, HANMI GALLERY is pleased to present works by British-based emerging contemporary artists Ellie Geary, Antonella Ferrari, Showna Kim, Geoff Diego Litherland and Bobby Sayers in Be Real. The title is a recognised phrase with a relationship to modern culture – an English colloquialism that refers to truth of self.

 

The artist’s ability is that of subverting and shifting our perceptions of what constitutes reality to offer new, thought-provoking alternatives to how we experience day-to-day life. “Be Real”, as a statement, as a wish, or posed as a question relates to one’s position and connection to the present.

 

Through varying practises, the artists explore the universal issue of “reality” as a subjective experience, encouraging the viewer to contemplate truth and transcendence through a common imaginative process.

 

Ellie Geary uses collage to communicate ideas of temporality and chance by transforming imagery and colliding elements from different decades and genres. Her artwork is about the process of searching, contemplation and the role of the spectator. In Sun Shower (2012) three women are gazing into mutoscopes, ignoring the sunset shore ahead of them whilst being showered with plastic gems that fall in perfect alignment.

 

Often deriving from childhood recollections, Antonella Ferrari’s photographs relate to notions of memory and trauma. These evocative, almost fairy-tale images, appear to be fragments of a bigger narrative, of which we can only grasp a sense of solitude and guilt. The diversity of her works, build continuity in the recurrent use of visually compelling and evocative images, which subtly guide the viewer through a journey of uncanny and intimate experiences.

 

Through an immersive experience, Showna Kim’s work combines luminous painting and ultraviolet light to create multi-dimensional installations in a darkened space. The title of Kim’s new work 1710, 2000, 2013 (2012) marks the completion dates of three major London buildings and institutions – the coexistence of past and contemporary culture has shaped the future. Her work is an investigation into the architectural planning and design that reflects functional, social, environmental and aesthetic considerations. 1710, 2000, 2013 references the ambience of these spaces; it is a drawn and painted installation work, both simple in form and complex in its unusual pairing of surface and optical illusion.

 

Geoff Diego Litherland creates work that explores the tension between the natural world and its grasping appropriation by human influence. It draws from traditional genres of painting together with the rusty surrealism of science fiction and the fantasia of abstraction to create a parallel world that seeks to not only question our perception of and relationship to nature, but paintings’ historical and current role in it.

 

Bobby Sayers takes direct reference from objects, signs and architecture: abstracting and transforming them into sculptural works that force the viewer to reconsider the connotations of the shapes and colours. The works begin to echo the area around the gallery. Operating to shift the viewers’ perspective, to that of already existing beauty.