Her work complements that of Matt Ager, who like Zhang draws upon the ‘found’, not through multi-cultural experience however but through found objects. His sculptures centre around the concept of reinvention and challenge the viewer to consider what a sculpture really is, thus deconstructing ideas of taste and identity. He removes his materials from the context in which they are traditionally found and uses them to create bold hybrid forms and replicas. Thus, both artists draw upon the idea of the fusion of identity yet executed in very different ways.
The exhibition also features figurative art. Exemplary of this is France-Lise McGurn’s chromatic ink paintings that recall the delicacy of Françoise Gilot’s portraits. McGurn, however, favours the fluid over the angular, which gives her paintings an exquisite yet effortless aura. Her figures are inspired by imagery that she collects from film, art, advertising, and television. These sources perhaps endow her work with a sense that the figures are in flux, and this transience creates an ambiguous narrative that, as a viewer, is very stimulating.
Equally, photographer Gina Soden draws upon ideas of the transient in her haunting images. Abandoned locations as her point of departure, ranging from derelict asylums, closed schools, collapsed palaces, to city power stations. By capturing these forsaken places, she delves into ideas about decay, beauty, nostalgia and neglect. The photographic mode allows Soden to capture these forgotten places forever in an image, holding still their deterioration, remembering a place once forgotten. Thus there is a strong sense of narrative in Soden’s work too, despite being photographic and non-figurative. The selling exhibition thus shows, as Kate Bryan stated, “a diverse range of mediums and approaches. But one thing that unites these artists is that they are all undeniably bold and exciting new talent.”
