Spectral Matters

1 May-18 May 2025

Overview

Spectral Matters examines the materiality of video, photography and print. Creating multimedia installations, the artists look to deconstruct the photographic image to challenge what ‘matter’ is.

Exhibiting Artists: Victoria Aherns, João Villas

Spectral Matters is an exhibition by Joao Villas and Victoria Ahrens whose work references the ephemeral materiality of sound, video, photography and print. Creating installation pieces, they look to deconstruct the photographic image through material interventions, to challenge what ‘matter’ is. Where the ghost of a tugboat wonders round on an imagined trajectory on the river Thames, the floating vegetation of an industrial park is collaged through video projections. These create vibrant matter, as Jane Bennett termed it, imbued with a spectral quality. The hauntology of sound waves, translucent images on the wall, and video projections inhabit the gallery space and create connections through language, text and images on translucent screens. Victoria’s sculptures and videos look at the human and mineral residues of spaces that have slowly disappeared from sight. The traces of their chemical, and material residue survive as ruins and recordings or ‘stone tapes’- memory matters that reside in the material itself.  They haunt the gallery with poetic images that hover and overlap with otherworldly colours.  Joao’s work uses text, video and image, as well as sound recordings to explore the hidden and more ephemeral interventions of matter on the landscape, as sound waves and airwaves, creating different frequencies across the landscapes of our senses. They look to ephemeral and machine communication, visuality and invisibility.  The work overlaps and crosses over, both artists responding to the other’s practice. The images create matter, as spectral matter gives agency to the materiality of its own making, while haunting the space with its frequency- it vibrates. The exhibition explores memory, technology and the Anthropocene- and how the disappearing materiality of the world is captured through ephemeral means. The selection of the remaining nine painters was driven by their deep engagement with the physicality of paint, colour and the visceral impact of gesture, rhythm, and haptic sensation. By foregrounding the embodied experience of perception, each painter is engaged in an examination of how the surface of a painting can be explored, not as a settled notion of picture making but as a process that is being constantly renegotiated.

For Stephen Buckeridge, Catherine Long and Steven Walker the gestural application of paint conveys the rawness and sensuality of a bodily experience, whether the physical movement through a landscape or as in the case for Catherine Long the use of gesture as experience is synonymous with physical movement and dance. EC engages with the painted material as a gesture, and in which remnants within the painting are often deconstructed to become the fabric of the painting. Tony Antrobus, Karl Bielik, Dido Hallett, and Sabine Tress make visceral process driven oil paintings where the surface evolves out of the encounters between gesture and colour, paintings are often layered exposing their history and evidence of doubt. For Patrick Jones and Lindsay Mapes colour is an important the focus for the work, Patrick Jones who likes to work on large unprimed canvas, improvising a varied technique, like a giant watercolour. The pigment is intense, so working flat on the floor allows the thin washes to overlay and dry. Playfulness and materiality a focal point of Lindsay’s work as is the understanding of how these combinations melt together or scream in separation.

The aim of the exhibition is to present an exhibition which explores gesture both through is historical and contemporary practices and including generational and gender responses where the process is intuitive and incorporates the body as a tool both through its gestures and actions. The exhibition presents both larger scale work and more modest and even tiny works, where the juxtaposition between large and small would engage with each other creating different dialogues in response to the exhibition title.

Accompanying essay by Dan Howard-Birt