‘Figments of Figures’ is an exhibition featuring the work of four emerging artists concerned with figuration in painting; or perhaps with ‘re-figuration’, as Dana Schutz recently put it. Unlike Schutz’s approach however, the works in this exhibition do not start somewhere in the public imagination, but rather in the quiet and personal recesses of memory, fantasy, and self-vivisection.
For Adam Southgate, dramatically lit smart-phone selfies are a means through which to explore self image, and narrative flow in the cinematic freeze-frame. Simultaneously, Southgate revels in the material properties of oil paint, and the mysterious magic of making a thing appear on a page. Sallie Page retrieves and re-animates timeworn family photographs, rendering them in the process both more familiar and more strange. Bonnie Qin documents studio re-enactments of childhood memories; inhabiting imagined characters, coveting the traces they leave. Diane Green explores fantasies of monstrous and metamorphosing bodies through her paintings, as well as the unruly clunkiness of amateur stop motion animation and video. These are figments as much as figures, stories as much as studies.
