‘The Signs for Somewhere and Elsewhere and Here and Now’

“The loner who both observes and creates worlds necessarily speaks with many tongues. It is with these tongues that she explores the contours of the centre and the margins, the signs for somewhere and elsewhere and here and now.” ― Deborah Levy, Swallowing Geography[1]

Taking its name from an early novel by Deborah Levy, the group exhibition features new and recent works by the 12 artists represented by the gallery. Their contributions revolve around lived or imagined experiences of inhabiting space and around shape-shifting spaces, both external and internal. From being ‘here and now’, to remembering the ‘somewhere’ of past experiences and envisioning an ‘elsewhere’ of a time yet to come, the exhibition looks at space as a collector of past, present and future, a container of memories and thoughts and desires. To see the show is to wander through an associative landscape, where fragments of recollections or daydreaming merge, where the body pushes for a new way of imagining the physical structure of space itself, and where places with many layers and presences with many selves coexist.

The exhibition is framed by our recent relocation to a space that is radically different from the previous address. In the months prior to it, when we reconfigured and redesigned the site by visualising ourselves in it, and in the weeks following the move, when we began inhabiting the space, some questions proved inevitable: What are the consequences of carrying our past from room to room? How do we live in the present moment without being distracted by what we used to have and what we wish to have? How will imagination fill the new home with spirit and meaning? 

Working across mediums ― drawing, painting, photography, collage, video, performance, object ― and often merging them into a tapestry of their imagination, the 12 artists represented by the gallery offer a range of enquiries into physical, social and psychological spaces that are in a flux of remaking or, at least, in constant movement. These encompass intimate spaces such as a house and spaces of wide expansion such as vistas and landscapes; the body and its precarious relationship with the built environment and the outer world; seemingly ordinary places that act as a prism through which one glimpses at the history of the past hundred years; and geometrical spaces that become sites of unexpected graphic effects through simple gestures and a rigorous methodology. Taken together, they remind us that a space is not a static arrangement of surfaces of given physical dimensions. It is a site of contingent relations, a dynamic document of life, within and upon which multiple layers of activity and subjectivity operate at once.

[1] Random House UK, 1993 © Deborah Levy