Sexy Sexy

Nolias Gallery
8th March to 14th March 2007

Sam Adams/ Nicola Carvell/ Sonia Almeida/ Jim Howard/ Hannah Birkett

Sexy Sexy is an opportunity to bring together artists whose practices call into question the phenomenology of surface. The viscera of surface appeal, and its connotations of superficiality need not be typified by seductive simulacra, sardonic cynicism and jesting nihilism. Rather, as this show endeavours to highlight, by returning to the surface of things, it can allow for a different kind of understanding and depth. There can be more to immediacy than impact.

The exhibition will include works by Sam Adams, a site-specific installation developed through the exploration and re-initiation of spatial awareness, his work is informed by an awareness of architecture fused with the psychogeography within everyday life. Nicola Carvell’s expanded paintings employ a concentration of colour and form in her dynamic mutation of fashion culture and rock music – youth culture rendered plastic. Work by Jim Howard subverts the precepts that prey upon people’s weaknesses in his ‘grab-n-run’ political art – intellectual piracy as social commentary. Hannah Birkett’s practice highlights the issue of value and meaning by exploring the gaps between expectation and inadequacy, language and reality, and mass reproduction and the aura of original artworks. Sonia Almeida re-painted, re-constructed paintings are symptomatic of the difficulty to make a strong statement about anything, given the complexities of everyday life, and make for an ambiguous yet reflective attitude.