A collaborative exhibition of edging, painting and mixed media featuring:
Amy shin hye jung, Angela Edwards, Leah Newman, Meiko Kikuta, Oliver McConnie, Ryuta Suzuki & Sujin Shin

Private View: Friday 28th of August 2009 - 6 pm to 11 pm

Exhibition runs from: Friday 28th of August to Thursday 3rd of September 2009
Gallery Opening Hours: Fri, Sat, Mon, Tues, Wed, Thurs: 2.30 pm - 6.30 pm
Last day of Exhibition: Thurs 3rd of September: 11.00am to 5.00pm

This is an exhibition that seeks to preserve and express the voices of society’s outsiders. The artists in this exhibition come from different social and ethnic backgrounds. Although physically they live within society’s walls, they stand apart. They are or have chosen to be themselves outsiders; and they perceive and face society through the outsider’s eyes.

It is from this conflict that the seeds of this exhibition derive. Based on their experiences, the artists have put together this exhibition, seeking to question and challenge society’s presumptions of outsiders and hoping that the collection will enhance our understanding and inquiry of society’s ‘others’.

Amy shin hye jung: Amy observes the distribution of minority and majority groups within society. She states that people don’t want to be put into minority groups because the concept of minority is perceived to be the weak and at odds. Amy’s interest in minority groups comes from her personal background and experience within society. Moreover she tries to read what minority means with her outsider’s view.

Angela Edwards: Edwards’ strong sense of humour is never far from the surface of her work however, lending balance to the darker elements of the paintings, she is unafraid to reveal her feminist principles and her ambivalent feelings towards sexual identity, violence and passion, Edwards purges personal experiences and eyewitness encounters from her psyche by expressing herself with the uncensored honesty of a child. She brings a raw energy to her work, which is both shocking and mesmerising.

Leah Newman: Newman draws in order to explore and give material presence to space and place. Through her commitment to certain materials, mark making and surface detail; drawing is the way in which she acts out a desire to understand the self in place. She is interested in geography, both cultural and physical. Exploring the self through real and imagined places, she uses drawing to define boundaries and then again to move beyond them. Pencil, thread, charcoal and paper are her tools of navigation and exploration.

Meiko Kikuta: Born in Japan, and a double major in Psychology and Fine Art, Meiko is currently taking a course at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. She draws inspiration from the spiritual experiences in everyday life, yet perception of fear, isolation and anxiety in current-day cities hold a particular fascinating for her. The delicate emotion that transpires her work is thus surrealistic and has distinct, yet otherworldly beauty.

Oliver McConnie: Oliver McConnie’s etchings explore the ambivalent nature of the grotesque, they are constructed from intuitive drawings, into carefully considered pictorial compositions with multiple narratives.

Ryuta Suzuki : Memory, dreams, uncertainty, innocence and metaphysics are key words and reference points featuring in Suzuki current work. Printmaking and in particular ‘watercolour-based photo-woodcut’ are his main vehicle to express his wealth of ideas. The latter technique combines Japanese traditional printmaking and photography through silkscreen printing. By using this technique, Suzuki can produce a form of ‘photographical’ imagery, which is not a photograph in itself. Suzuki’s prints express the uncertainty of communication of subject and technique, leaving the viewer with a sense of “soft – focused vagueness”.

Sujin Shin: Sujin Shin’s work seeks to express the Homeless’ creation of their own space as a juxtaposition to the hard reality of living on the streets and their hidden desires to build that space into a ‘home’. Just as Sujin Shin has given new meaning to materials discarded; the artist work is filled with the hope of giving new meaning to their lives. Welcome to the “Homeless’ Home”!