Fresh Cuts, 2020.
Sid Motion Gallery is pleased to present ‘Fresh Cuts’, a group show of four artists who work with photography and digital collage: Ibrahim Azab, Jessy Boon Cowler, Hayleigh Longman and Stanislava Vaseva.
Influenced by the concerns thrown up by the current global health emergency and the detrimental impact that that is having on artists, especially those at the beginning of their careers, Sid Motion Gallery is keen to hold true to their core values of supporting emerging talent, and is delighted to exhibit these artists for their first time in a commercial gallery.
Drawing on ideas of construction and manipulation through photography, these four artists are linked by their shared interests in sculpture and performance and explore the dialogue between the manually constructed and the digitally stitched together.
Through the tensions between digital image making and analogue play, each artist considers the photograph as an object. Ibrahim Azab makes framed digital collages which hang alongside a painted wall text in the exhibition, the paint marks weave between the printed collage and the spray-painted wall. Further breaking the boundaries of the conventional photograph, a digitally printed fabric hangs from the architecture of the space. Jessy Boon Cowler leaves traces of her hand cut collaging within her digital prints that are left unframed to reveal the materiality of the paper. Hayleigh Longman’s ideas around collage are explored in the installations themselves: prints overlapping Perspex, floor-based photographs and framed laser cut materials intended to be seen from all sides. Stanislava Vaseva’s digital prints are produced life size so the physicality of the depicted hands become present in the space challenging the seemingly 2D nature of the medium.