Hello Dear Network of New Media: To you all creators, researchers and thinkers.
I am delighted to invite you to the Private View of MEDIATORS an exhibition that is opening this thursday the second of may at 18:00 to 21:00. *Opening day second of May 2013* *From 18:00 to 21:00* *Exhibition will be open from: 02/05/13 to: 08/05/13* *Opening hours from 12:00 to 18:00* venue: http://www.thewaywardgallery.com/ *MEDIATORS * *Exhibition website:* *http://angelrokatz.wordpress.com/ * This exhibition brings together a group of female artists who are exploring the photographic image. The themes and concepts they explore in their work vary greatly, but the connecting link between them is their interest for establishing relationships with other mediums. Some of them are incorporating objects within the photographic set-up. Others are constructing multi-layered scenarios, for instance Alice Evans Staged series and the most adventurous explorers are adopting analogue photographicprocesses in their work. This approach is very important when taking into consideration that we are immersed in a world where the proliferation and fascination for digital images has generated an immense conglomerate of photographs published indiscriminately on the Internet. Therefore, it seems to be wise to have a look at this emerging wave of creators that are working in the field of expanded photography and pushing the barriers of traditional ideas about techniques and mediums. The Mediators exhibition project aims to display a set of artworks that invite the audience to re-think the role of the photographic image as a provocative entity while inviting them to play with light, shapes and surfaces alongside the gallery space. The work will be displayed in an installation-type layout, which seeks to be less restrictive than the conventional white cube. This exhibition also explores experiments with photographic imagery on different surfaces and reveals how these experiments not only correspond to the need to find a technical solution, but are more a consequence of a conceptual echo, one the artists find along their way while researching and working with their photographic image. The second objective of this exhibition is to establish a mutual contribution by both artist and curator. Then this exhibition will be the first in a series of projects to promote artists that are both interesting and valuable in terms of their research and formal expression. Hence, I will be inviting the network of professionals that I have built in London’s art scene to introduce them to a community that includes gallery directors and press. *Alice Evans* The creation process and the ideas that have led Alice Evans to get to the point of maturity in her practice, has been influenced by the synthesized and extended experiments of the Epic Theatre of Bertolt Brecht. He proposed that a play should not cause the spectator to identify emotionally with the characters or action before him or her, but should instead provoke rational self-reflection and a critical view of the action on the stage. Evans is interested in the integration of photographic imagery and installation. As it happens for example with the staged series, in these photo shots, she played with the possibility of creating an expansion of the space where the character was staged whilst layering the background and the foreground in an rare continuity, this immerse situation is something that incorporates the presence of the viewer as an active element for the completion of the photograph as a result the viewer constitutes another extension of the layers and planes proposed by the artist. In this way her photographic assemblages are combining landscape photography as a background and the photographic set up where the models were staged. *Abigail Box* The more recent work of Abigail Box was painted with the objective in mind (to use methods which 'distance' her from the original image allowing her to paint in a more abstract manner). She is using still shots of explosions - both real and some computer game designed blasts. The remnants of Explosions as patches is a very innovative intervention within the field of mediatic painting, this procedure can be understood as a mixture between analogue techniques such as the oil painting and technological mediations to enrich perceptively the features of the final painting. Most recently, she has been painting explosions from video stills. In using them as vehicles for painterly experimentation and she feels that they are fantastic carriers of colour and light. Drawing parallels between painted abstraction and the idea that in reality taking on board all of the visual information of an explosion could be seen as an enigmatic and abstract experience. For this exhibition Box has painted a piece that involves working in ways that encourage her to look differently at the photographic material that she works from. This action allows her to take a distance from representation and instead embrace mistranslation and intuition, interrupting accuracy and making paintings, which are visually more inventive. Encouraging a fascination with looking and ways of seeing constructed imagery and painting as both a surface and as an invented space. *Vasilisa Forbes* Superposition of imagery generated by computer is a constant manifestation of our current visual culture and this is one of the main interests that Vasilisa Forbes has been attracted to. In her photographic practice she integrates different references ranging from artistic photographers to fashion photographers whose explorations have blurred the notions of commercial imagery whilst playing with a painterly approach like the work of Viviane Sassen that has dramatically changed the face of fashion photography. This initiative has fused two worlds -fashion and fine art- which practices have been constantly separated by its different purposes, the first one has been widely stereotyped by its exacerbate cult to the beauty and banality and the latter one has strongly argued been extremely conceptual and done for an exclusively audience, nonetheless trans-disciplinarily has bring together these two contexts that seemed to collide in an spiral circle, this kind of convergence is not a new drift, nevertheless in terms of mutual contributions can be understood as an important step forward, likewise the Hours series of Vasilisa who has made an ongoing series of performative photographs in which her self-portraits seem to exist in a suspended state between a narrative created by the trauma of a recent event, and an exploration of its aftermath. Strange poses contrasting with strange landscapes displayed on different sizes and mounted on colourful frames and mats. With this set up she aims to enable the viewer to perceive the photographic imagery as an object rather than a simple picture. *Clare Gosling* The pièces of Clare Gosling are based on memories that she got from time spent in Mongolia. She recreates these images from what she remembers, therefore her pictures akin to be her residual and fragmentary memories which are the vestiges kept in her mind, when she remembers those landscapes and that scenery which have had a powerful effect on her artwork. Gosling recreated these hazy memories through the usage of colour, photography and other materials to create this misty feeling captured in her imagery. The cut away parts in the artworks represent gaps in her memory of the Mongolian landscape and through layers of resin she have cut away part of the image. The final piece is a piece that sits between the spectrum of the mediatic painting and the experimental photography. Clare is also currently working on some new artworks based on photographs she took with the camera that used to belong to her grandfather. She took those photographs in Kent where her grandfather used to live and where she spent some time as a child. *Marta Ceynowa* “Stop ‘taking’ pictures. Start ‘making’ them”. So I made them The images that Marta is showing in the exhibition are series that might be considered either as photography or painting or both. While doing this she first painted, later constructs the unique abstract negative. Then developed these in the colour darkroom. What is interesting about printing in the colour darkroom is how colours change from negative to the positive. The actual print allows her to manipulate and rearrange them, as she wants. Her aim is to push boundary between those two mediums. As painting is unique at first hand, there is only one unique piece; here it’s possible to make more than one copy. In case of photography the question that arise is ‘can be this action be considered as photography, just by using darkroom, without even using a camera? In the past photography was in a way taken twice – once in the camera, by pressing a shutter speed and then in the darkroom, by developing a film and making a print. Now in the era of digital images photography is taken only once by simply pressing a button. The processes of the darkroom and handmade prints have been forgotten. Marta believes that she might go against the stream and come back to the roots of this medium and use non- figurative, abstract form to allow the viewer to stimulate their own imagination and creativeness. Marta is particularly interested in blurring the notions of those two mediums whilst finding the way to combine them together. Painting because is the oldest form of art; She has recovered the gestures of the prehistoric cave’s drawings then developed through centuries. Then when photography was invented painting went to a new genre allowing all different forms of abstract and non-figurative presentation. Nowadays photography does what painting did for centuries - record the reality. Now maybe even record the abstraction. -- John Angel Rodriguez Independent Curator
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