Leslie Bunch LG and Roland Hicks at Blythe Gallery, Imperial College, 18 Sep – 31 Oct.
Talking Things
Blyth Gallery, Level 5, Sherfield Building, Imperial College University of London, Exhibition Road, SW7 2AZ
18 Sep – 31 Oct, Mon – Fri 10-5pm
PV 6-8pm 8 Oct
Bunch and Hicks ask questions, voicing subtlety and doubt.
Is it real? What cast the shadow?
Theirs is a meticulous and slow, seemingly time-warped, approach to what might be called still life.
Bunch paints shadows of borrowed invested objects, which seem to exist outside of time, simultaneously futuristic and primordial, like sealed time-capsules of buried memories.
Hicks’ work is a slowed down depiction of a fast creative act, an elastic time-travel of sorts through art history.
These are things which evoke the mutant or hybrid, don’t explain the manner of their making, or offer up a clear reason for their existence.
Both artists question our propensity to label, categorise and objectify, and our perception and construction of reality, the slippery place where interpretation, truth and authenticity lies.
Their approach is one of rigorous ambiguity, the work sitting silently somewhere between the real and illusory, the figurative and abstract, the sophisticated and primitive, volume and flatness, presence and absence.
The show’s title, ‘Talking Things’, is derived from a Japanese koan, a riddle from Zen practice which is posited to transcend limitations of dualistic thinking, logical reasoning and language.
It is a very strange affair,
To realise how things are talking;
Discovering the ordinary ear,
Which can listen but never hear.
Tung Shan
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