ART CITIES:London-Parallax Scrolling
Incorporating a number of different moving image techniques, the short films in the “Parallax scrolling” screening programme at Breese|Little Gallery in London, explored the treatment of perspective, depth and perception in two and three dimensions, draw attention to the ways in which space and movement can be suggested on screen, creating both a precursor and a parallel to the experience of moving through the exhibition of works that follows the screenings.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Breese|Little Gallery Archive
The exhibition “Parallax scrolling” presents a selection of new and existing work by: Nicholas Hatfull, Lauren Keeley and Jackson Sprague. Jackson Sprague’s works play with concepts such as domesticity, function, value, staging and the conflict between interior and exterior. In his work artworks are proposed as live in entities, close to their owners and insinuating themselves into the lives and surroundings of real or imagined residents. He appropriates the vocabulary of decorative objects, such as vases, room dividers, even pictures hanging on the wall to make art-objects that camouflage their ‘artness’ in pseudo-interior settings. His work draws on design motifs from the last century, which act as codes for design and domesticity. However Jackson often employs neglected materials, such as cardboard, to create his work and thereby undermines these apparently tasteful objects in order to raise questions about the domesticity of art, it’s value as a commodity, how art accumulates value, what it is to be a piece of art and what it could be. Lauren Keeley’s practice encompasses many processes of image-making including painting, photography, printmaking, digital design and rendering software, her works are the product of collage both in design and in execution. Keeley’s work blends digital methods of production with hand crafted material sensibility to explore representation and image-making both historically and in the digital age. As the artist says “My approach to painting is pragmatic and structural: there is a focus on the processes, constructions and deconstructions that are used during the painting process, rather than a centring towards the final outcome”. Nicholas Hatfull’s work revolves around metaphors of contemporary consumption, offering the viewer pre-digested nuggets of art history and modern life in an approximation of the dynamics of fast-food culture. Hatfull is interested in what, how and when we eat, connecting contemporary foods to painting. Foreign shores and stimulation recur in a series of paintings made in 2009 and 2010, where beaches mingle with motifs of ovens and pizzas. This cultural scavenging coalesces into a harmony that is as much to do with rhythmic composition as narrative association. Hatfull’s distinctive style of abstraction unanchors the debris of company branding that drifts into his art from its banal existence. Everyday vernacular is transformed with rakish simplicity into symbols of an underlying reality.
Info: Curator: Rebecca Lewin, Breese|Little Gallery, Unit 1, 249 – 253 Cambridge Heath Road, London, Duration: 27/1-18/3/17, Days & Hours: Wed-Sat 12:00-18:00, www.breeselittle.com
