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THE
CLEARING NETTIE HORN is proud to present The Clearing, a group show consisting of works by Joe Biel, Rebecca Stevenson, Alex Ball and Stephanie Quayle. The exhibition is concerned with the artists’ use of the limitations between internal worlds and outward expressions. Exploring a sophisticated visual language, the works in the exhibition are scattered with art historical and literary references, merging classical elements with contemporary content echoing a strain of elusive narratives that run throughout the entire exhibition.
Heavily influenced by the short writings and diaries of Franz Kafka, Alex Ball’s intricate paintings evolve from a mixture of his own sketches, prose writings and grafted images from a personal archive of second hand books and manuals. Suggestive of parables and allegories, Ball’s paintings result in a disjointed and lingering amalgamation of repetitive images and characters that oppose their original context. Whilst maintaining a reference to the historical tradition of vanitas and panel painting, Ball encourages unrest through his haunting symbolic content and enduring image associations which are formed between objects and bodies but which are too unstable to be bound by definite readings. The physical and conceptual space occupied by his subjects and his literary preoccupations call the onlooker to read the paintings as they would a book. Stephanie
Quayle introduces the wild outdoors to contrived domesticity and
civility in her crude and primeval sculptures. The focus is her fascination
with primal animal instinct; she highlights the tensions and boundaries
of our inner ‘animal-ness’
with the brutality and potency of the materials she employs. The
immediacy and raw energy of clay and how Quayle employs drawing as a
technique to create three-dimensional forms emphasize its abrasive appearance
against the clean craftsmanship of the furniture. Directly confronting
the irony of our ‘human-ness’, Quayle draws out the inner
force, intrinsic to nature and ourselves and evokes a strong sense
of history, which in this case is diffused with a note of wry and cynical
humour.
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