PRESS
A STATE OF SEPARATION
07-24 OCTOBER 2010
Thurs-Sunday 10am-5pm

Emma Filipsson Marcus Jonsson-Filipsson Holly Gilbert
Rachel Jones David Kendall Lanis Levy Rebecca Locke
Daryl Waller

Part of Photomonth:
www.photomonth.org

Photographers and artists explore concepts of 'solitude'
as a state of mind that creates or regains spatial
perspectives or social conditions, which in turn offers
constructive engagements with contemporary urban environments.

Scratched Surfaces is a collaboration between Emma
Filipsson and Marcus Jonsson-Filipsson exploring
their relationship with family memories. Their
practice is concerned predominantly with urban
and social landscapes often linking to poetry
and literature as well as stories emanating from
personal encounters with people, objects and
architecture. These themes  often run parallel
with shared personal experiences; They identify
patterns of human activity, the subjects of their
work becoming isolated examples of these sociological formations.

Cinema space is a public place where the mind can privately wander.
The eight-second portraits that form Holly Gilbert’s Back Row explore
the mental spaces  occupied by the subjects as well as their physical relationship with the space of urban cinema. This work is part of her continuing preoccupation with the complexities of photographic
portraiture.

Rachel Jones Narrative and Understanding focuses on the boundary between private and public within the urban realm. The images depict figures
captured in public spaces with their heads in their hands, a gesture that
is often an attempt to shield oneself from the public gaze, creating a
pause from the relentless pace and the constant scrutiny of the city.
The role of the 'imaginary’ upon perception is also a focus within this
work, with the close cropping and distortion of the images encouraging
the viewer to impose an imagined narrative upon the scenes depicted.

David Kendall’s practice explores how spatial, economic and design initiatives and participatory practices combine to encourage social
and spatial interconnection or conflict in cities. Always Let the Road
Decide considers how Dubai’s complex road networks are utilised by migrant workers as spaces to meet and disappear from harsh working environments
in this city. The project engages with the concept of ‘controlled mobility’ and continues to investigate how active yet silent social-spatial imprints left by these workers, within the landscape of road networks could influence over time the large scale development and spatial design of the city.

Lanis Levy’s brighton beach/ coney island 2010 (1972) was originally conceived and shown as a slide projection piece in 1972, brighton
beach/coney island is a series documenting the social life of an aging community played out on the pavement and along the boardwalk in
Brooklyn. Returning to these images after many years, they read as
both singular moments and a cohesive narrative; a joyous memorial to
what went before (but equally may still be there).

The themes of image and identity, the power of fashion, the myth of ‘self’ and of ‘place’ and one’s relationship to it, thread through the work of Rebecca Locke. Brooklyn // Bognor captures the experience of New York City
in contrast to the artist’s roots by the English seaside. A return to Bognor signifies a very different life, and an acute awareness of both unwritten
social rules and the promise of the city. In Brooklyn, alongside everyday life, the artist performed as a singer in Sufjan Stevens’ band (Michigan Militia), a girl drummer in a Puerto Rican country music band, an electroclash ‘scenester’ and an inhabitant of Williamsburg. The artist features in the images, wearing her Brooklyn clothes—her uniform of freedom—in Bognor. The images depict the charm and beauty of the English seaside, but hint at the uncanny, something of Brooklyn echoed in Bognor.

Wearing these clothes and making these images in Bognor became a performance, an intervention, an experience in overcoming an emotional resistance against standing out in the small town and a need to conform. Through the rich colours of these constructed scenes, the artist creates a fiction, or ‘narrative of place’. A move to the city traditionally allows for the
creation of a new narrative, a new self. Is it equally possible to reverse this, to create a new narrative of place? In these images, the photograph
is an argument-Bognor is redefined, and the myth of place is challenged.

Daryl Waller serves up his victims some rhetorical uncertainties. Interests and themes are scattered and dyslexic as he wonders nomad-like from on
piece of work to another. His work offers us a full range of contradictions, an honest account of humanity, extreme on both ends of the spectrum – from masculine to feminine, violent to loving, naive to knowledgeable, expressing nihilism mixed with joy and wonderment.

 

ILEXWORKS
Project Space
No.5: Top Floor(Left)
10 Northwold Rd
London
NI6 7HR

info@ilexworks.org
www.ilexworks.org