Efi Michalarou at dreamideamachine has profiled Zero Zero, the lates exhibition at Annka Kultys Gallery.
ART CITIES:London -ZERO ZERO
By Efi Michalarou
Exploring reality and virtual space, the group exhibition “ZERO ZERO”, presents works by artists who employ both traditional materials and/or digital media to create new, imaginary landscapes. Through a selection of works that includes videos, photography, sculptures, prints, and paintings, that seek to uncover the relationship between reality and virtual space.
Arvida Byström creates images in a contemporary ‘girly’ aesthetic, often using pastel colours and glitter in her meticulously staged work both for fashion and Instagram. While aiming to subvert accepted feminine gender norms by fostering an open culture wherein people feel free to deviate from pre-existing ideals, her pictures are devoid of either irony or sarcasm. The sculptor Ivana Basic creates forms whose surfaces resemble human skin, connoting raw slabs of meat twisting into themselves into awkward, alien-like figures. Her work examines human physicality, its limitations, matter and imagery. In her practice, she tests the boundaries of “human minimality” in terms of the fragility and ephemerality of our bodies and employs the experience of the uncanny as the catalyst for conversation, creating complex virtual identities. Cao Fei work spans photography, video, performance, installation, and Internet art. She investigates contemporary Chinese identity, exploring the border between dreams and reality through a combination of staging, costumes and digital compositions. The work of Lucy Hardcastle explores tactility, sensuousness and illusory aesthetics through sculpture and digital pieces. In converting 2D imagery into physical objects, she creates trompe-l’oeil sculptures, fluid in shape that lure the viewer into expecting malleable forms, when they are in fact comprised of resistant, hard-surface materials, such as blown glass. As the surfaces of her sculptures are similar to those of her digital renderings, she examines the tension between the physical and the virtual, aiming to create deeply immersive pieces that explore nature of these sensory experiences. Jennifer Mehigan, uses traditional and digital methods of drawing, painting and sculpture to create ‘cybersensual’ works: material pieces that combine vivid arrays of colour and abstract forms with a pronounced digital character. Her work, via its blending of media and distinct use of forms, suggests that the classical oppositions of virtual and real, traditional and digital and desire and disgust might not exist in as the stark binaries they are commonly assumed to be. Participating artists: Ivana Basic, Arvida Byström, Maisie Cousins, Ivan Liovik Ebel, Oliver Haidutschek, Lucy Hardcastle, Eric Mack, Jennifer Mehigan, Vince Mckelvie, Signe Pierce, Molly Soda and Konrad Wyrebek.
Info: Curators: Molly Soda, Arvida Byström and Ada Rajkovic, Annka Kultys Gallery, 472 Hackney Road, Unit 3, 1st Floor, London, Duration: 30/6-30/7/16, Days & Hours: Wed-Sat 12:00-18:00, www.annkakultys.com
