Justin Hodges

Work from Summit.

“Summit is an amalgamation of Romantic landscape paintings, miniature golf courses, and Google image searches. In Summit, sculptural interventions work to create an immersive experience addressing the nature and function of photography in contemporary visual culture.

To activate Summit its viewer must become a participant on the stage where summiting occurs. In this way, Summit takes its name, at least partially, in referencing the process of summiting anything with a vista, which is a popular experience for recording. A cursory Google search for “Summit Selfie,” yields approximately one hundred seventy million results, and in a manner of speaking, Summit is a product of all of them. It is their proxy. In this gesture, Summit questions the modes and frequency in which images function in our digitally rich landscape by becoming the physical manifestation of one.” – Justin Hodges

Katleen Vinck

Work from her oeuvre.

In her work, Katleen Vinck often makes use of scale models in which she relates the characteristics of sculpture, architecture and theatre scenography to one another. Her education in architecture, art and scenography makes such an overarching approach obvious yet challenging at the same time. Vinck focuses on phenomena that occur spontaneously in nature. However, once man has assimilated them, it becomes a matter of ‘staging the natural’‚ which results in new meanings. In terms of content as well as form, the artist ìnvestìgates archetypal structures from nature that can be rediscovered in culture like an echo.

Her interest in the landscape gravitates to forms such as caves‚ cliffs‚ hills, trees… She inquires about their possible function, symbolism and the way in which they are processed by humankind. For instance‚ she interprets the bunker as a sublimated form of shelter that can be typologically reduced to the cave: an archetypal form.

Similar to the contrast (or relationship) between cave and bunker, Vinck develops systems of oppositions and models through which she perceives reality and which form the basis of her artworks. Strict ordering and classifications are usually made difficult by exceptions and intermediate positions. Consequently, Vinck’s attention is drawn to the notion of ‘realia’, a term from library science for things that do not fall within a normal classification system. They hover somewhere between or fit into several categories, leading to a status of indefinability.

Stef Van Bellingen, 2013

Sarah Sze

Work from her ongoing exhibition at Victoria Miro.

“Sarah Sze’s exhibition at Victoria Miro spans all three spaces. This is the artist’s third solo show with the gallery and her first presentation in Europe since representing the United States at the 2013 Venice Biennale.

In the Wharf Road galleries the exhibition comprises three installations – one on each floor – that the artist has conceived as a series of different experiments that explore the construction and measurement of space, mass, time, and volume through the use of materials. Each one turns the viewer’s sense of scale, gravity, and information on its head. Common objects like rocks, newspapers, and furniture mutate from something known, to something foreign, fragile, newly composed, and entirely transformed.

A new series of silkscreen prints also mark a singular moment in time – 1 January 2014 – and are based on newspapers gathered from around the world on that date, with all images replaced by depictions of the midnight sky. Several works from the series are installed at both the Mayfair and Wharf Road galleries in a sequence that follows the rotation of the earth as one year turned into the next.” – Victoria Miro Gallery

Kari Altmann

Work from XOMIA

How Do You Remain Elegant About Survival?
Reduce It Down To Skeletal Movements
Make It More Ergonomic
Customize, Decorate To Fit
Stretch, Flex, And Xtend
Use Every Part
Show Up Fresh, Stay Fluid
It Works In Liquid Impressions
XEVIA AND AQUAHYDRATE COMBINE TO FORM AQUEVIA XHYDRATIA
Head Toward The Horizon Together
Grip The Ground With TalonFlux
The Best Of Soft-Shell And Hard-Shell
Orca Killer Compression Core
Second-Skin Stimulastine
The Ability To Detach And Reattach
Your Friend Ssaleikha Just Posted A New Photo On Zorpia!
In A Closed But Very Powerful Ecosystem
Not Just A Network, It’s An Attitude
Also Comes In Clay, Clear, Blue, White, Iridescent
Until Everything Is A Mandala
Everything Is A Compass
Everything Is A Virus
Everything Is A Sun
It’s A Big World, Go Run It

Brooks Dierdorff

Work from Midnight Sun.

“Midnight Sun responds to the ill-fated true story of the Andree Polar Expedition of 1897, in which three explorers set out to be the first to reach the North Pole using a hot air balloon. After crashing on the arctic ice halfway through the journey, the three explorers survived the next few months in the arctic, continuing to photograph and record their observations of the landscape. These materials and the bones of the men were found on a remote arctic island thirty years later. In the face of death, what was it that urged these three explorers to continue to make photographs? Through reinterpreting this historical event, Midnight Sun investigates the mirror effect between the landscape and the photograph, and how each informs our understanding of the natural world and ourselves. Using photographs sourced from stock imagery, beach towels, Google image searches, and original imagery, I explore how photographs mediate nature in the contemporary context. Exploring cultural, scientific, and personal themes within the story of these three explorers, I question my own perceptions of nature and the ways in which photography becomes an expression of the precarious desire to understand and to communicate.” – Brooks Dierdorff

Hannah Whitaker

Work from Peer to Peer.

“For an artist to toy with the material qualities of photography is a common device, even at a time when that materiality is becoming increasing anachronistic. The great majority of photographs have been abstracted out of existence, transformed into reams of code. The original, material forms of photography, like film, are now almost solely the domain of artists and photographers with a point to make.

Hannah Whitaker’s Peer to Peer published by Morel Books uses a combination of collage, in camera masking and other forms of manipulation to shatter the surface of her analogue imagery, in the process disintegrating them into many parts. This might seem like a well-worn path, were it not for the way these bits are organised to form distinctive patterns appearing to the viewer like a lost visual code. Indeed even the pictures in their arrangement across the pages seem to hint at some form of cypher, with empty areas occupied with an almost imperceptible varnish which echoes the shape of absent photographs.

The subjects of Whitaker’s photographs (a mixture of portraits, still lives, landscapes and nudes) seem in many cases much less important than the patterns, which dominate and overwhelm the images below. The shapes and forms used create a powerful over-riding mood, with mosaics of dots and squares forming a calm, stable pattern reminiscent of Morse code, while the more anarchic triangular breakdowns prove enticingly aggressive. Vertical lines create the effect of a bar code or zoetrope, and the image beneath takes on a strangely powerful sense of motion.

The result of these experiments then is more than a nostalgic exercise in collage and old-fashioned photography. Instead Peer to Peer is a book seemingly with one foot in the material past, and with the other in the ever more dematerialised present. It is a book that plays with the codes and conventions of photography and abstract art, and does it fittingly enough, with the very material of photographs themselves.” — Lewis Bush

Carmen Winant

Work from My Life as a Man.

“My Life as a Man depicts a single collage deconstructing and rearranging its composition. Resolution is sought but never “found.” The book features original text contributions from Matthew Brannon, Moyra Davey, Courtney Fiske, Jim Fletcher, Kenneth Goldsmith, Jonathan Griffin, Geoffrey Hilsabeck, Michael Ned Holte, Sarah McMenimen, Anna Livia, Alexander Provan, Ross Simonini and John Yau. Each book comes with a unique cover image collaged on as well as a folded newsprint poster featuring eighty finished crossword puzzles from the NYTimes by the artist’s mother.” – Printed Matter

Casey James Wilson

Work from Physical Fitness @ Neon Heater.

“Via installation and photographic works, Physical Fitness addresses concerns of image consumption and prosumer commerce within the global marketplace, effectively re-contextualizing appropriated photographs and ready-made exercise equipment intended for self-improvement in order to present a foil for trends in the lifestyle commodity of personal fitness. Mining material from today’s lowest common denominators of immediacy and consumption (ie. google and amazon), products and product photographs are reimagined to new ends which absurdly subvert their original functions in an effort to challenge concepts regarding fitness and physical health lifestyles. Individual works address discreet concerns towards time, commitment, restraint, resistance, injury, anthropomorphic augmentation, and supplement addiction while opening a space for an overarching dialogue of how contemporary images and products provide consumers with identities for purchase.” – Casey James Wilson

Debora Delmar

Work from Upward Mobility.

“Working with sculpture, video and installation, Debora Delmar Corp. explores the way in which globalised consumer culture influences our lives and routines. Debora Delmar Corp. creates intricate assemblages that appropriate and reconfigure familiar branded goods and imagery in an attempt to deconstruct the visual language of corporate advertising.

Upward Mobility includes a group of dramatic banners emblazoned with aspirational imagery found on the social media page of a bank in Mexico. These are fenced in by a series of kitchen countertops and garden hedges, creating a maze-like effect which the visitor will need to navigate around to encounter a series of household appliances and objects from the artist’s native Mexico City.

Through this unique and immersive environment, Debora Delmar Corp. invites visitors to consider the implicit messaging within the advertising imagery that surrounds us each day. ” – Modern Art Oxford