Century Gallery
ACAVA, 1-15 Cremer Street, Shoreditch, London E2 8HD
Contemporary fine art in an artist-run gallery
flowlock
Sept 4-14, 2002
Yasuhiro Fujiwara, Angela Hiss, Sumiko Seki, Guy Shoham, Maria Wolfram
| paintings, 2D, video | space 1,2

flowlock involves five recent graduates from the MA course at Chelsea College of Art and Design.

The work of these five artists captures fluid movements and continuity only to be found in nature. The work captures a space or moment out of its natural environment, allowing a transformation to take place through the working process. Paintings, objects, and installations are losing their connection to their origin and becoming something else by gaining their own integrity and presence, making space for the mind to travel.

  
Yasuhiro Fujiwara's 3-dimensional quasi-landscape and architectonic small wall and floor objects are more often than not divorced from their original geographic locations, re-configured into an 'imaginary' dream-like space. These architectonic and landscape 'artefacts' retain no distinct cultural, social or geographical marks. Universal in their appeal, these dislocated spaces always seem to remind the viewer of a familiar yet unspecific place.

Angela Hiss's staged sketch-like videos explore notions of disruption and displacement. Baroque Waltzes are enjoyed in narrow corridors while unorthodox Tango dancing — characterised by jagged movements — is performed in the privacy of her own home. Hiss's videos present the viewer with a plethora of emotions, ranging from hysteria to angst through to psychosis, compulsive behaviour and solitude.

Sumiko Seki's paintings present beautiful wilting and rotting flowers floating against an empty yet richly coloured background. Seki's dying flowers are dislocated from their normative surroundings, no longer presented in full bloom in fields of gold.

Seki documents the 'afterlife' of these natural mortal objects, disrupting the dominant meta-narrative whilst exploring an alternative space.

In his paintings, Guy Shoham re-presents kitsch 19th century porcelain figurines against artificial and theatrical backdrops, blurring the boundaries between the 'imagined' and the 'real'. These garish figurines are re-contextualised into a fantasy world of stage sets and otherness, no longer the mainstay of antique displays cabinets these shiny figurines creates their own realm of existence.

Maria Wolfram's cartographic abstract panels and landscape paintings map the passage of time. The notion that memory captures and faithfully records fragmented images, suspending them in a time-bubble is disrupted by Wolfram, as she presents her personal and intimate recollections continuously changing over time. These malleable and fluid memories are far removed from their original context, creating a multitude of new and symbolic spaces.