FISSURED REALMS

20th September – 1st October

Andrew Szczech | Christina Dobbs | Jennifer Nieuwland | Sarah Hills

Curated by:

Caitlin Fleming

D Contemporary is pleased to announce ‘Fissured Realms’, a group exhibition curated by Caitlin Fleming featuring the work of four artists, recent graduates form City and Guilds, exploring thematics of loss, memory, and pain.

Collectively they are traversing the materiality of paint by pushing the medium through processes of addition and reduction, exposing and obscuring various layers of their work and its context. There is a slipperiness to all, once promised utopias, nostalgia, navigating one's body, and the corporality of the paint itself. It all seems to exist within a state of strangeness, a realm much like our own, but the lens is cracked. It is through these fissures that these artists begin to expand on these states of erosion.'

Andrew Szczech takes us through notions of impermanence, exploring fallen utopias creating links with the current societal structures. Through cracked and mottled surfaces, he communicates broader issues such as the flawed western democracies, failing capitalism and the climate catastrophe. In the same direction but with a more allegorical approach Jennifer Nieuwland implements a visual language to evoke traumatic and intense experiences through bodily metaphors and symbols. Vivid and whimsical paintings create a humorous allegory that offsets the potentially disturbing elements within. Using her camera as a visual diary, Christina Dobbs captures moments in time and juxtaposes domestic settings creating figures that occupy a dreamlike liminal space, building up to a memento that bolster feelings of nostalgia. These themes are further analysed in the works of Sarah Hills. Through the materiality of the paint and the imagery of voids and empty spaces, she explores the fallibility and mutability of memory the repeated hauntological inevitability of life.