Birthday
Dennis Buck, Chiara Camoni, Yulia Iosilzon, Billy Metcalfe, Jakob Rowlinson
5 September - 3 October 2020
Birth is not a momentary event, but a permanent process.
Our aim in life is to become completely born... living means being born every minute.
- Erich Fromm
Birthday presents work by five artists, exploring ideas about the creative spirit, the seemingly arbitrary designation of creative progress and what it means to work as an artist today. The exhibition hints at the contingency and miraculous nature of creation, whilst also musing on the persona of the artist and the collaborative, communal aspect of making.
Advertisement-like works by Dennis Buck offer out the artist’s personal data for free, generating questions about where the public vs private divide may exist for artists working today.
Chiara Camoni explores the creative spirit through sculpture and video, combining an awareness of sacrifice with the joys of communal ritual.
Yulia Iosilzon’s paintings are cinematic, celebratory, playful and excessive in colour, composition and material. Having moved to painting from sculpture during her MA, she frequently incorporates latex, silicone and faux fur into her canvases. Iosilzon draws on the quotidian but whips up the subject matter creating tangible and vivid works that speak to the pleasure of making.
Billy Metcalfe uses biblical references to Eden as a metaphor for the pursuit of creative enlightenment. His canvases are a wilderness of colour and thickly applied paint that, like Iosilzon, imply a physical and spiritual fulfilment in painting.
Jakob Rowlinson’s works take traditional creation myths that he subverts via the motif of various molluscs. Rowlinson challenges a teleological paradigm, engaging with ideas around how something concrete can come from an inchoate and chaotic primordial ooze but also, the ease with which it may revert back again.
images: Rob Harris