Sunny Side Up!

In an age where we spend a significant amount of time in front of digital devices replicating form and depth, Sunny Side Up! questions the relationship between sculpture and painting and the blurring distinction between the 2-dimentional and 3-dimentional.
This exhibition brings together the work of Kate Terry, Vivien Zhang, Luey Graves, Scarlett Bowman and Paloma Proudfoot.

The repetition in Vivien Zhang’s work serves to emphasise specific objects and images of significance – examples include the mathematical shape gömböc, African furniture from her childhood home, and Swiss artist Johannes Itten’s designated shape to the colour green. The juxtaposition and layering of motifs in Zhang’s work often follow algorithms found in digital imaging tools – a process by-product of our ways of reading and engagement with visual material today. New hierarchies and distances are thus negotiated on the painting surface, as a reflection of our increasing adaptation into trans-border inhabitants.

In response Zhang’s paintings are the minimalist geometrical sculptures of Kate Terry. The colour and the form of the sculpture as well as its awkward off-centre placement recall the work of minimalist Donald Judd. Series IX illustrates Terry’s concerns of weight and presence with direct emphasis on their physicality, form and colour.
In stark contrast to these geometric abstractions of both Terry and Zhang’s practice, are the surrealist paintings of antiquities by Luey Graves. Graves’ mute palettes are an abstract background for objects that float, unanchored within a landscape of shifting images. Within each frame is the story of an object, appropriated by the context of display, alongside a feminised domesticity of production and consumption. She has imposed visceral interactions between hands preparing food and details of objects that signify the physicality of human relationships. Fertility symbols, the idealized female form, the male as warrior or holy icon, the paintings are an examination of sensuality.
Literally blurring the lines between sculpture and painting are the ‘fragment” works of Scarlett Bowman. Bowman uses ready-made materials, employing traditional craft based processes to explore the physical experience of handling these materials, such as assemblage, collage, casting, and stitch. At first glance Fragments, appear to be abstract paintings yet as the name suggested these 2 dimensional sculptures are abstract compositions made-up from fragments of everyday house - hold materials cast in plaster.

Paloma Proudfoot’s current series Flushed takes as it’s starting point ten-pin bowling balls and pins, transposing these objects into hollow clay clones using the process of slip casting. Proudfoot manipulates the once seamless hourglass and spherical physiques of the ball and pin to create mutant renditions of their originals. The resulting concave bellies and sunken cheeks emphasise the anthropomorphism of their shapes: the pins become slouching or reclining bodies, the balls punched-up ghostly faces. The perfection of the original is interrupted but not entirely broken; they are still aspiring just falling slightly short.