GROUP EXHIBITION

Typically, liminal spaces are characterised by transition, presented in the physical forms of corridors, stairways or elevators, serving as waiting rooms between one place and another. They are often empty and abandoned, devoid of human presence. Yet, despite their disquieting indistinctness, these spaces remain strangely familiar, inducing an oddly combined feeling of eeriness and nostalgia. However, the works presented in Rites of Passage frequently include a recognisable cast of characters, inhabiting these liminal spaces and contending with their own periods of change. In this sense, by combining representations of the architectural and the bodily, Rites of Passages, implies how liminality can affect our mental existence when we are left in a limbo between one stage in life and the next.

The very form and materiality of the artworks themselves reflect these notions of the intermediate. These works often blend hyper-realism with a surrealist visual language, leaving us questioning the familiar yet beguiling worlds they create. Recognisable symbols are often slightly distorted or eerily perfected, building up to construct a seemingly alternate reality characterised by ambiguity. Simultaneously detailed and dreamlike, these works only ever verge on the abstract, hovering between the mimetic and the non-representational.

Exhibiting artists: Alison Blickle, Chason Matthams, Chloe West, Clinton King, Daisy Dodd-Noble, Haeji Min, Henry Hudson, Jeremy Olson, Jinyong Park, Marty Schnapf, Millie Kelly, Muzae Sesay, Oliver Clegg, Rex Southwick, Sasha Ferré, Sholto Blissett, Simphiwe Mbunyuza, Suchitra Mattai, Tahnee Lonsdale