Aetheric

1 Dec 2023-22 Feb 2024

PV 30 Nov 2023, 6-9pm

Byzantia Harlow, The Vessel, 2023, digital photography. Credit: Byzantia Harlow

Overview

Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix is pleased to announce 'Aetheric', a solo exhibition by Byzantia Harlow.  The second solo show of the emerging UK artist evolves around her constant interest in Spirituality and Alternative Healing practices.  

Harlow explores ideas around faith, belief and constructed experience, as well as the potential of art in facilitating a transitional space, shared encounter and allowing personal and collective transformation.  

The upper space of the gallery will show 85 original drawings / paintings for a new tarot deck newly created, titled the 'Aetheric Tarot'. The deck features the traditional 78 cards of the Major and Minor Arcana plus 7 extra 'Aetheric' cards. The drawings for the deck are a re-imagining of traditional tarot imagery and the characters are inspired by real people - friends, lovers, soul family and strangers.

Alongside the original drawings, the new Tarot Deck will be presented and sold as a limited edition of 100, each signed by the artist. 

The lower space of the gallery features a new sculptural installation, a Phoenix on a bed of burnt wood and ash.

The lower gallery also features a sound work Take What Resonates first shown in 2021 within a solo exhibition at Harlesdon High Street's project space in London.

Spirituality has had a huge resurgence as it offers an alternative to culturally normative systems that no longer seem to be working – Harlow believes that we have retained an inbuilt magical thinking within increasing secularism, causing a gap that was once filled by the spiritual or sublime. Humans, needing hope and faith, look for patterns to create meaning from meaningless of unknowable or un-integrateable, often sources of fear.  Alongside Spirituality, art has had a similarly important role in making sense or a narrative of difficult events. Artworks can turn society's psychological 'dirt' into something that can be enlightening and healing. Like broken bones that knit stronger, or an intrusion which accrues a healing nacre, forming a pearl within an oyster. 

Aether, the fifth element or quintessence in Alchemy, remains unchanged unlike the other four elements (fire, water, air, and earth) which are perpetual variable. It holds the other four elements together, and is linked to the nurturing Anima Mundi.  A spiritual constant, which adds spiritual quality to the physical world.

Byzantia Harlow (b. 1986, lives and works in London)

Harlow’s practice encompasses a diverse range of references and media, drawing on her interest in faith, belief, trust, ritual, replication and the gap between real experience and artificial effect/affect as it is perceived and performed by the artist, the work, and, ultimately, by the viewer. The works are ephemeral, beguiling, and oddly forbidding – images and forms hover, half recognised and half remembered from other places and other narratives. (Meg Boulton) Solo exhibitions include Take What Resonates, presented by AM-POP & Harlesden High Street, 108 Fleet Street (2021), From the same source I have not taken,  Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix, London and The Enterprise Centre, University of East Anglia (2018), Duplicate (No one will drink the water of your well if you yourself do not drink it), Chalton Gallery, London (2017), Polyester Breeze, The Telfer Gallery, Glasgow (2017), Spirit Line,  The Luminary, St Louis, Missouri (2016).  Recent group shows include Kill or Cure, Wolfson College, Cambridge University(2022), House §1, Collective Ending HQ, London; Ancient Deities, curated by Rhiannon Salisbury, Arusha Gallery, Edinburgh; Moving Oracles, two-person moving exhibition featuring Byzantia Harlow & Gertruda Gilyte, curated by Johanna Janssen, various Berlin locations; Earth Eaters, organised by Cole Projects, Hoxton 253, London; Shaking the Habitual, Galeria Duarte Sequeira, Braga, Portugal (2020), Bloomberg New Contemporaries, ICA, London (2016).  Harlow did radio projects The Silver Stream on Soho Radio (2018 – 2021) exploring her theoretical concerns in collaboration with invited guests, and wrote a fictional Novella called Ebbed Tide (2023) which investigates synchronistic events and spiritual connections.

Artists