SAMPLE SUITE
Featuring works by Evie Torkington
Dates to be confirmed (9th-15th November)
Evie's practice centres on a post-pandemic, post-influencer society, with social media archives as the locus of the research. My objective for this show is to dissect the visual language of the workplace, comprised of stock images and now AI, the most median aesthetic it can muster. Penetrating its inoffensive yet eventually bleak essence, and displaying that as a moment of significance, akin to a memorial or a seminal image, stressing their inevitable melancholia.
‘SAMPLE SUITE’ (working title) comprises 8 30cm x 45cm x 6cm illuminated, screen-printed lanterns, functioning as spatial windows or interfaces that adapt and revise the immaterial spaces they contain. They suspend an arbitrary, ephemeral moment in time, memorialising vapid corporate surfaces transposed with melancholic imagery and memorabilia I have collected. The physicality of the work yearns to be significant, to be beautiful. The soft glow captivates the audience, and as they look for the immaterial world contained within each lantern, they find only an eroded sense of liveliness, flattened and diminished by the visual cues that corporate culture uses to fracture and erode any incidental beauty or chaos it may encounter.
Employing the photomechanical praxis of silkscreen print in the wake of post-conceptual painting, the work reproduces physical and digital collage, activating an ambiguous distance from authorship and authenticity, challenging our propensity to ascribe objectivity to photographic aesthetics. The images are indexical to something that perhaps was or would have been.
I use predominantly analogue processes, yet conceal the work's mechanisms internally so it presents as a simple object, while simultaneously signifying its own impenetrability and fragility through delicate materials and hidden mechanisms of illumination and robustness. The light-based works are exhibited in dimly lit spaces, expanding the spatial boundaries of the work beyond its own physicality, antithetical to the scrupulously contained corporate aesthetic.
