New Songs for Old Rituals (Gallery)

21 Aug-5 Sep 2021

PV 20 Aug 2021, 6-9pm

Credit: photo Colin Mills

Overview

Group show featuring works by Adam McGowan, Alexandra Searle, Luke Tomlinson, Mary Herbert, Merlin James, Neill Kidgell, Paloma Proudfoot and Tommy Ramsay. Curated by Tommy Ramsay.

The artists in New Songs for Old Rituals stretch the intersections between their disciplines, pushing the points where painting becomes sculpture, where sculpture meets architecture, where silk screen printing meets painting and where drawing and painting meet. Boundaries are tested and examined. The works in New Songs for Old Rituals sit between the recognisable and the unknown and aim to challenge what we think we know. Structures and learnt visual hierarchies are examined and broken down. Traditional methods of display are probed.

The artists in New Songs for Old Rituals work with dream imagery, fragility and embodiment, questioning the authenticity of the gestural and the hand-made, challenging the nature of the cliché, investigating the tipping points between seduction and repulsion, anchors and slippage, whilst blurring the lines between the art object and the space.

This exhibition proposes that we re-envisage learnt languages and signs to find new landscapes and cultivate the conditions for renewal and change.