location/locality
Parvathi Nayar, Daniel Barclay Panizo, Yoshihiro Yamase
The Artists
Galia Armeland
In my work I take simple materials that are used daily and find in them a new visual aspect. I like to discover a new characteristic I was not aware of before or to make a visual illusion. I believe power lies within simplicity, through a simple action, a simple image or a simple statement. My work deals with the image and with the symbol it carries, and yet the objects I am making are not entirely a "Representation of" but also aspire to be "The thing itself".
For location/locality I deal with the sense of Location-less, the painted images depict scenes that take place in different rooms in a house. They create a feeling of distance and intimacy at the same time. Location-less - as an object, a scene, a narrative that has no specific location, no place. Not necessarily in the meaning of utopia but in the meaning of the inability to grasp the existence of location in relation to the certain object, scene or narrative. The same location-less feeling applies also to the sculpture and is being emphasized by the covered face of the figure that is "compelled" to use a guide dog in order to gain an awareness of location, of placement.Yasmeen Al Awadi
Signposts, flagpoles, bollards, and bike stands line, demarcate, divide and subdivide the landscape we inhabit. Is their positioning purely functional or is their abundance partly to provide a visual reassurance of our ownership of the space? These methods of territorializing, mapping and encoding our spatial environments have become an integral part of the formalistic language I implement to explore the idea of a spatial location of sentiment and identity. Questioning this kind of attachment in contemporary urban societies with increasingly transient populations has developed into part of the process of constructing my work.
I overlap, co-join and extend personal navigational maps of numerous global locations, with which I am very attached or familiar, to form plans for the placement of the elements within installations. Aesthetic and formalistic references to minimalism and modernist architecture are implemented to create a kind of display of distopian landscapes whose rudimentary elements hint at potential futures.Martin Church
The basic starting point of my abstract and also figurative oil paintings is the positioning of an object/s (things) within a location. The location for these "things" is the picture plain, the gallery setting, and/or onto the world at large, (and small). I try to create a sense of this haptic situation through the building of perspective/s in the work, giving the elements a situated, volumed and spatial quality. Added to this, through the way the forms and lines are carefully worked with each colour, is a temporal nature; with all the forms I try to give an analysable, fresh and 'open' sense.
I feel my works have both an anthropomorphic and non-anthropomorphic sense to them. I want to give a human aspect to the "things" and locations present. Looking at forms from different sources, such as microscopic images, electrical schematics, symbols and codes, from language, a geography textbook, or a drinks can, inspires this. I try to construct an image that this reaches beyond this also, to a non-human level. With both senses, I want to create atmospheres in my work such as beauty, intensity, perplexity, solidity, lightness and carefulness.
In this current work I mainly developed a new element that has gone into my painting. I have given the work a greater scene of a constructed or construction location; something that I feel can inspire and develop new work again and the ways it can be seen.Roselina Hung
My painting practice makes use of the portrait genre because of my interest in people and their faces, especially of those who are in my immediate environment, such as friends and family, and those of popular culture found in the media. I am interested in people's relationships with each other and how identity and memory are affected by these relationships, looking at the fluidity and performance of identity within the context of others and attempting to explore this theme through my paintings. Not only am I focusing on the relationships between the subjects found within the canvas, but I am also examining the relationships between the subjects in the painting with both myself and the observer.
In location/locality, I present oil paintings of myself on white backgrounds. These works relate to my on-going 'Art History' and 'Portrait' series, in which I question the validity of history and memory and the freedom taken in (re)creating histories and memories. This reinforces the idea that they cannot be taken for true facts and are always biased and questionable as ultimate truths. The paintings on exhibit represent events of the past, memories even, but in locating these memories, their recollection is questioned. The subject and viewer are both locatable yet location-less at the same time, within the painting, raising questions around identity, memory and time all in relation to physical and psychological location of the self.
Parvathi Nayar
I play in different ways with the idea of human narrative, the projects we engage in, as body-subjects inhering the world. We are at heart storytellers. My interest lies in exploring narrative in subtle ways, as experience, through human presence and absence, through traces of human activity. The process is a dialectical relationship between texts I have written, photographs I have taken, found imagery. The attempts to piece together the elements that form narrative is inevitably fragmentary, always incomplete and an ongoing process - but precisely as a result of these problematics becomes a way to deal with the fragmentary nature of our times.
For location/locality, I present a series of graphite on gesso drawings that examine issues of trace and presence and sight in establishing location; the use of mechanical devices like microscopes and telescopes and cameras to see and record the everyday but in ways that are disquietingly familiar. What are the links between the act of looking, and locating. The drawings are obsessive renderings that suggest trace and presence; unease and ambiguity. The resulting installation of isolated fragments teases out a new narrative.
Daniel Barclay Panizo
My work navigates between different subjects and disciplines in a multidisciplinary level. The concept of hybrid cultures sustained by Nestor Garcia Canclini is point of departure to my fragmented narratives, that describe a performative social landscape from a developing country like Peru. A political and social map turned around into non-linear patterns. Humour and analysis, rawness and concealed meaning become part of this structure. Overall my position as an artist is to explore forms of representation that have to do with my culture and subjects (political/ cultural/ psychological/ personal) that I feel identified or engaged with.
In the location/locality piece I use myself as a receptor to register reality through the filter of my personal subjectivity, my intimate memories, my organic response to events. The work takes the form of a series of drawings, that as small impulses, register my context, a locality that offers familiarity by describing a place, a social map, distance and singularity in the image and its representation. Scattered drawings work as a conglomerate of images, many different bits of a context that gives viewers the possibility of creating their own order of connections between them. The location in the piece confronts the understanding of space, the differences that separate individuals or puts them together. The locality of it displaces context to create a process of negotiation, a transition between representation of oneself and the other.Yoshihiro Yamase
I have been interested in specifying what happens to sensory information, and how the information will eventually affect the experience and behaviour of the perceiver. Because art has always been concerned with conscious experience, and with matters of sensation, perception, and cognition. My concern has been to create the hybrid space as the fusion of optics and kinematics (the notion of space, time and its light relative to the position of observer).
I produce paintings using different kind of paints, such as acrylic paints with medium, enamel paints and gloss household paints, in order to get the dynamic space of optical illusion. As a human, as part of nature, I am interested in the relationship between personalized perceptions and absolute reality. In other words, the limiting relationship between our own consciousness and nature.