GROUP EXHIBITION

While the dark, frosty days of January can be an eerie harbinger of the extremes to come, they are also a moment for reflection and new beginnings. Borne from conversations amongst the exhibition’s artists about the current state of affairs, Let The Sunshine In brings together propositions by a group of contemporary artists that reconsider the uncertainties, and the possibilities, of our future.

Released in the pivotal year of 1969, the 5th Dimension’s song Let the Sunshine In from the musical Hair was an anthem to a burgeoning sociopolitical movement that for many signalled the dawn of a new consciousness. That sun has set in the decades since, with the counterculture’s many promises having gone unrealised. We now find ourselves at dusk, with global conflict and social inequities proliferating, the spectre of nuclear warfare looming, ‘culture wars’ raging, the recent repeal of Roe v. Wade undoing hard-won bodily autonomy, and abuses of the natural environment threatening the viability of our ecosystems.

The future appears shrouded by an inevitable gloom. Commonly understood as a marker of impending doom, such darkness can instead be used as the basis – a materia prima – for the emergence of a renewed world. While the sunrise may represent a time for creation, the sunset is an ‘overture’, a spectacular window of time before ‘the night’s insurrection’ for the world’s ‘architecture’ to be dismantled and reconstructed (Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, 1955). Art and the imagination can be sources of abundance from which to envision new kinds of connections to nature, spirituality and the universe.

Presenting a selection of new and recent paintings, photography, sculpture and works on paper, the artists in this show offer us portals through which we might reimagine the evolutions of the natural and built world, politics and society. The reminder to let the sun shine into our lives is not a sign of defeat, nor does it deny the fraught times we live in; rather it is a memento vivere to continue to strive for a better, more luminous future.