Borderlines
11 January to 3 February 2018
To welcome in 2018, we are pleased to present ‘Borderlines’, an exhibition about how we identify with a sense of place. The exhibition brings together three contemporary artists: Koh Sang Woo, Olivia Kemp, and Stephen Walter.
Koh Sang Woo is a Korean artist who uses his models as a canvas. He paints allusions to their dreams or desires onto their skin, then photographs them and inverts the colours to suggest how our inner worlds can conflict with society. In ‘Borderlines’, Koh presents a new pair of self-portraits that explore the relationship of the self with the structures of nationhood. In one he is painted with the American flag with one of the stars as a tear (Koh has been a Korean based in the US for over twenty years); in the other, a grid of basic freedoms of expression (love / hate, speak / hear, wish / believe) are written in mandarin Chinese. These works look at how the individual comes into contact with a nation’s systems of order, and how a sense of identity can also become a net of limitation. Koh Sang Woo recently had a retrospective exhibition at Asian Art Works, 798 in Beijing. His work is held in the Korean National Museum of Contemporary Art and the Savina Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul.
Olivia Kemp’s drawings are expansive and relentless, fruit of an enthusiasm that borders on obsession. They take the idea of a romanticised or idealised place and run with it beyond any natural geography or sense of proportion. While her smaller drawings are intimate and precise, her large works seem endless and complex in the extreme, packed with a plethora of tiny details which are each given minute focus but built up into scenes without any focal point or respite. Most are of places Olivia has known but which she then turns into something ‘other’ through the processes of remembering and drawing. It is memory in action, an attachment to a physical place that is fired by imagination: specific and particular, whilst at the same time sprawling and continuous. Olivia Kemp’s work is held in The Royal Collection (including the personal collection of Prince Charles), the Victoria & Albert Museum, and The Rothschild Collection, for whom she was commisioned to create a piece based on the RIBA award-winning Flint House (2015).
Stephen Walter is a British artist well-known for highly detailed map drawings that combine geographical accuracy with personal references. In ‘Borderlines’, Stephen presents new collage works which interweave his drawings with printed maps and painting, using an almost geological process of stratification to create an abstracted rendering of place. Mechanical map reproductions blend into his personalised lines and marks. The logical precision of cartography exists side-by-side with painterly expression, so that the graphic becomes gestural in a layered object. This approach then becomes a means of creating a personalised representation of place beyond specific memories or symbols, one that ventures into the sense of emotional memory that we can attached to specific locations. Stephen Walter’s works are held in numerous collections including the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Government Art Collection, The British Library, The Houses of Parliament Museums, and The London Transport Museum.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Cookie | Type | Duration | Description |
---|---|---|---|
_wpfuuid | 1 | This cookie is used by the WPForms WordPress plugin. The cookie is used to allows the paid version of the plugin to connect entries by the same user and is used for some additional features like the Form Abandonment addon. | |
cookielawinfo-checkbox-necessary | 0 | 11 months | This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary". |
cookielawinfo-checkbox-non-necessary | 0 | 11 months | This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Non Necessary". |
viewed_cookie_policy | 0 | 11 months | The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. It does not store any personal data. |
Analytics cookies help us understand how our visitors interact with the website. It helps us understand the number of visitors, where the visitors are coming from, and the pages they navigate. The cookies collect this data and are reported anonymously.
Cookie | Type | Duration | Description |
---|---|---|---|
YSC | 1 | session | This cookies is set by Youtube and is used to track the views of embedded videos. |
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
Cookie | Type | Duration | Description |
---|---|---|---|
test_cookie | 0 | 11 months | This cookie is set by doubleclick.net. The purpose of the cookie is to determine if the users' browser supports cookies. |
Cookie | Type | Duration | Description |
---|---|---|---|
CONSENT | 0 | 16 years 10 months 14 days 16 hours 18 minutes | No description |
Advertisement cookies help us provide our visitors with relevant ads and marketing campaigns.
Cookie | Type | Duration | Description |
---|---|---|---|
IDE | 1 | 1 year 24 days | Used by Google DoubleClick and stores information about how the user uses the website and any other advertisement before visiting the website. This is used to present users with ads that are relevant to them according to the user profile. |
VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE | 1 | 5 months 27 days | This cookie is set by Youtube. Used to track the information of the embedded YouTube videos on a website. |