Patrick Heide Contemporary Art is pleased to present The empty way earth gets to its feet, an exhibition featuring Alex Hamilton’s latest works on paper alongside an installation by Erika Winstone.
In Alex Hamilton’s drawings space is fragmented, ambivalent and irrevocably changed, yet to some extent familiar. As if looking at the reflection of a broken mirror, our perception of space is altered and the boundaries between memory and imagination are blurred.
One of Hamilton’s principal concerns is how to capture and represent the uncertainty of memory. His practice includes processes similar to the act of remembering and its reversal.
The artist’s photographs of landscapes and urban spaces are photocopied onto watercolour paper, some areas are then deliberately erased and manipulated with a variety of materials such as charcoal and pen, others overdrawn using a growing range of colours. The works in The empty way earth gets to its feet emphasize colour over structure: while in previous drawings the documented landscapes were clearly recognizable, shapes of cars, buildings and people have now given way to a labyrinth of colourful lines, closely aligned to form waves, only to be interrupted by scattered shard-like shapes. The resulting complex and dynamic compositions take our gaze by storm, propelling us into an intriguing space which echoes science-fiction.
Sci-fi and its projection of a post-apocalyptic future seem to also resonate with the exhibition’s suggestive title. Earth’s existence goes beyond the marks and scars we have inflicted on it, yet it does recover and renew itself through light and, as the artist suggests, colour. Hamilton’s works question our place in it, facing us with imagined memories of a new, and perhaps future reality.
Erika Winstone is a London-based artist, curator and lecturer best known for her wall installations combining drawn-paintings and video. For The empty way earth gets to its feet she will present a multi-media installation that circles around her latest film London Project 2020 - 2022.
Projected onto the wall, the film will be surrounded by an assemblage of works, ranging from glass paintings and metalpoint drawings to a recent series of brushstroke paintings, that all directly or metaphorically refer to the narrative of the film.