Cura – Waking Silence

Pfister Gallery Projects present: Cura – Waking Silence
19th – 27th June 2012

Special Event, Saturday 23rd June, 3.30 pm -6 pm
To include: artists talk by Rozanne Hawksley & Live Painting by Guglielmo Alfarone.

Pfister Gallery Projects is a non-profit educational organisation in which mature students interested in curation develop an exhibition. The group is committed to furthering the careers of emerging and established artists. The current exhibition Cura: Waking Silence is curated and organised by Elena Cardinelli, Lucy Kane and Jingning Xie under the guidance of Renée Pfister.

Project blog here: rollingplinth.com

Cura: Waking Silence

Cura: Waking Silence is an exhibition exploring the shared meaning of mortality as a necessary part of an endless cycle of birth, life and death. In our advanced society, the ignorance surrounding ‘death’ and of what one can not speak are underpinned by fear. The journey through life is also a journey towards death.

Works of memento mori are contrasted by poetic expressions of light, colour and creation, suggesting a new beginning. Viewers are invited to engage with emotions of loss and pain and notions of transition, passage and afterworld. We might note the strong significance of these terms. The selected works by Guglielmo Alfarone, Esmé Ducker, Rozanne Hawksley, Željka Mićanović and Jeff Robb bring together moments in time to narrate a particular connotation of a universal experience. Each artist has a very distinct artistic practice and works in a different medium and scale. They have developed their own unique visual language reflecting their personality and fascination with this subject.

Guglielmo Alfarone

Guglielmo Alfarone is exploring people’s aura’s and captures the moments when the most unexpected and unnatural expressions appear. He begins working on a bare white canvas, spraying colour, ink, and water onto the surface and engages in an extensive and repetitive process. In time fragmented and white-washed figures and faces emerge slowly from the pale void as visible personages. His embodiments remind one of the medieval saints, haunted ghostly figures and fictional characters in a transitional state. Alfarone calls this process the exhausting session of pose, a process of ritual revisited and rediscovered each time.

Esmé Ducker

The abstract paintings of Esmé Ducker draw on elements of nature; its rhythmic ebb and flow, its ever-changing state that is reflective of the human mind. As a painter, she observes shifting elements of light and form, expressing this with spontaneous, sweeping marks that create paintings of energy and vigour and yet exude a meditative, peaceful quiet. The split canvases create visual voids, shards of light and dark and raise questions about creation and destruction. Each element of her sculptural stretchers is placed to form a collective narrative and the sense of her paintings shifts and changes with a different perspective, offering new possibilities.

Rozanne Hawksley

Rozanne Hawksley has been creating works that are ample in allegorical references, implicit in sorrow wounds and haunting memories. Imbued with her early life experience, her works convey love and loss, intimacy and isolation, desperation and hope.

The displayed pieces involve the contradictory unity of hands, giving and receiving. Get Thee to a Nunnery is quoted from Hamlet. A white glove, with ribbons and feathers, represents the purity of the virgin and is pierced by a thrusting bone, conveying separation and betrayal brought by death, cruel and absolute.

Pale Rider, quoted from the Book of Revelation, chapter 6, presents one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Death is untouched by his own evil when the world is bent on destruction. At first glance, both works are cradled in silence and darkness but appear pure and sacred.

Željka Mićanović

Željka’s installations can be seen as pages from a book laid out, examining, analysing, documenting, cross-referencing the layers and elements of life. For her ink, germinates into being, from sheets of literary masterpieces, emerging in a new dimension. Fascinated and obsessed by the process of transformation, Željka explores the beauty and the horrid. The ‘Bubarijum’ series (the Serbian word for insectarium) takes its inspiration from a metamorphosis by Kafka, a book that the artist has studied in depth. Words, figures, signs and gestures are used to illustrate and to re-discover Kafka’s historical character Gregor Samsa, his sensation and experience of life, to communicate the conundrums of our existence.

Jeff Robb

From jet black darkness, Robb’s nudes emerge like marble sculptures, communicating the implacable hardness of stone. One notices familiar particularities of the human body, taut skin over bone juxtaposed against folds of flesh and a smooth membrane against the texture of hair.

Robb’s representations explore the uncertain world of intimacy and separation. The posing figures appear pre-occupied, longing for closeness at the same time drifting apart into a devouring abyss. His immaculate floating models convey a metaphorical notion, their journeying in a passage of time, towards the shifting relations between here and there.

We would like to thank:
Campbell Works
Pete Goodrich, Art Works
Stuart Hillcock, Footprint Design Ltd
Mauger Modern Art
Renée Pfister, Art & Gallery Consultancy

Date: 19 Jun 2012 – 12:00am – 27 Jun 2012 – 6:00pm
Venue: Campbell Works, Belfast Road, Stoke Newington, London N16