So, far
June 18-28, 2003
Roberto Antillon, Karin A. Baez, Kate Clarke, Tobias DeSilva, Laurence Elliott, Paul Freeman, Kate Hamilton, Cinnamon Heathcote-Drury, Susan Hill, Stuart Leeser,Tessa Oksanen, Zoë Panting, Senayt Samuel, Melinda Rose Silva, Gautam Vagal, Steryios Valiouli, Sonja Wilson, Po Yan Yee
| photographs | space 1,3 | Note: Private View is on Thursday, not the usual Wednesday

Taking on issues as diverse as identity, urbanity, religion, and aesthetics, the artists’ work ranges from black-and-white photography to digitalal media to video. The exhibition includes photographers from various backgrounds, including professional studio and architectural photography, journalism, academic humanities, to name a few. While many have participated in exhibitions across the globe and have works in public and private collections, some students are just beginning to explore photography after having careers as painters, academics, and computer programmers. As the title of the exhibition hints, the work conveys both a sense of completion as well as an invitation to continue to investigate and explore key issues in contemporary life.

Renowned for its critical and historical study of photographic arts, culture and sciences, the University of Westminster is one of the oldest and most respected photography programmes in the UK. Students not only engage in the practical production of work, but also must complete a rigorous theoretical and critical curriculum.

Roberto Antillon was born in El Salvador and grew up in Guadalajara, Mexico. He studied mass media and worked as a photojournalist. Antillon has had a number of exhibitions in Mexico and this will be his first London showing. In his current work, Antillon investigates his feelings of displacement as a stranger in London.

He seeks to examine how being an outsider can occur not only for the newcomer, but also for each city dweller as s/he experiences the rituals of daily living. For example, how does the space in the street, which is simultaneously an open public space and one full of barriers and frontiers, create and maintain feelings of (in)difference?

Karin A. Baez, born in Germany and living in London, has created a series entitled City Marks: Notions of Identity and Displacement in the City. The photographs map the physical space of the city in an effort to open up urban environments to an alternative history full of memory and possibilities.

The saturation of ever-changing sites combined with the frenetic pace and continued emphasis on new technology and advertising is almost urging us to pause and create a map of the in-between spaces forgotten in the flux of the city’s consumer-oriented lifestyle desensitised to everyday imagery.

Kate Clarke was born in Nairobi, Kenya, and grew up in Malmesbury, Wiltshire. She completed a BA Honours in fine art and design at Bath Spa University. Inspired by her previous studies, Clarke began to utilise photography to make work that moves between fantasy and reality, desire and boredom. Incorporating her personal childhood experiences, her work mixes fairytale with horror and confuses childhood with adulthood.

Clarke’s preoccupation with pictorial space introduces qualities of painting to the image that disrupts the photograph as well as enhances it. Enigmatic and playful, her photographs explore notions of space and fantasy through the language of self-portraiture.

Tobias DeSilva has worked in and around the field of photography on and off for 12 years in the UK and abroad.

In his current work, he challenges the ways that ordinary objects, people, and places are perceived through a series of witty and provocative self portraits.

Laurence Elliott originally studied fine art at the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland in the early 1990s. He produced both individual and collaborative installation and slide works in Manchester, Belfast, and London. Elliott has worked with digital imaging/media since 1997, including work presented at Milia Multimedia Festival in Cannes, France.

His recent work, tentatively called interjacence, uses street-based photography to explore states in which inner and external spaces/awareness are equally balanced. The project examines the withdrawal from and engagement with interpersonal contact that takes place as a defence mechanism against the overload of senses in urban environments.

Paul Freeman is an architectural photographer working in London. Before turning to architectural photography Freeman was a software consultant. In his current series I remember the future — recent London architecture, Freeman attempts to use architectural forms as the basis of fictional distortions to recapture some nostalgic notions of the future.

Instead of using traditional “literal” images of buildings and urban landscapes, Freeman slices and anamorphoses these sites in order to provoke the memories of future fantasies that existed before dystopic forecasts and corporate cartoons obscured certain kinds of imaginative potential. As memories are themselves fictions, and regressions are processes of magnified distortion, the process itself is open to question.

Website: http://photo.paulfreeman.net

Kate Hamilton has a background in fine art.

Her current work is based around the discovery of things that lurk beneath, mining the unconscious of dark and light and looking with new and perhaps disturbed eyes at the ordinary.

Cinnamon Heathcote-Drury began studying photography a decade ago in the United States, and later pursued a degree in drama and theatre arts at Exeter University followed by a post-graduate diploma at the VGIK Film School, Moscow. Her travels led to a career in press, fashion, and most significantly fine art portrait photography (she has nine photographs in the National Portrait Gallery’s permanent collection).

Recently, Heathcote-Drury's work has focused on the dream state and subconscious, with studies investigating personal trauma and loss. Her figurative work continues to ridicule gender stereotyping, especially the inequalities and prescribed notions and signifiers exploited by the mass media.

Susan Hill studied glass and photography at Canberra School of Art in her native Australia. Since relocating to England in 1997, she has been an Artist-in-Residence and lecturer at the University of Sunderland, director at the Vardy Gallery, and education specialist at the National Gallery, London.

Her current work explores the often controversial, and today rarely openly discussed or debated, subject of abortion. Through the use of video and sound, Hill personalises the issue through interviews in an effort to explore the grey areas of real experience as opposed to the often black-and-white polemics of the media and politicians.

Stuart Leeser’s interest in photography stems from a preoccupation with the social function and potential of the photographic image to open up a dialogue about contemporary global concerns. His experience in photography is limited: having studied for an advanced certificate before embarking on the current degree. The rest of his background is varied and consistently includes studying philosophy amongst other things. Leeser has exhibited for a couple of years with a group of artists in Brighton as part of the city’s annual festival.

His current work tries to draw attention to stereotypes and the assumptions made, based on appearances.

Tessa Oksanen is a London-based freelance photographer who has done everything from fine art to documentary, editorial pieces to corporate promotions. Oksanen uses both conventional and digital techniques, creating images from advertising material to exhibition pieces for clients ranging from international opera companies to newspapers and magazines. Since 1995, she has had numerous solo exhibitions in the UK and her native Finland.

In her current project she explores different layers of personal identity by combining various media, such as digital media, photo-microscopy and image transfer, to create portraits. These images are augmented by the subject’s personal effects, such as paintings, drawings, manuscripts or a part of a model’s own DNA, such as a piece of hair or nail.

Website: www.topphotography.co.uk

Zoë Panting, a native Londoner, studied English literature at University College, Oxford. She worked as an editor and wandered aimlessly between office jobs before beginning the current masters programme last autumn.

In her current work, she plays with issues such as looking and being looked at, woman as object, and subjective points of view. Panting’s atmospheric photographs use bold colours and lighting to create rich mise-en-scenes in which she places herself as object, artist, and woman.

Senayt Samuel began her photography career as an intern photojournalist for the New Haven Register. Prior to relocating to London, she worked as a freelance photographer in Connecticut and New York for clients such as The Daily News, The Source Magazine, Savoy Magazine, AmeriCares, and Yale University Art Gallery. Samuel has exhibited widely throughout the United States and has undertaken a number of portrait projects in Africa and Latin America.

The exhibition will feature a series of self-portraits staged in front of mirrors. These poignant images examine the issues that arise at the junction of self and self-image, perception and understanding.

Melinda Rose Silva, originally from San Jose, California, came to London after working as an editor at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to pursue an MA in Art History at University College London. After completing a dissertation on Baroque aesthetics and the sense of touch, she began the photography programme with little more than a few lessons and a keen interest to make art instead of describing it (though she continues to do freelance art criticism).

The exhibition will feature a few works from her text and image-based series Still Lives. Working with issues of memory and decay, Silva combines large-format colour photographs of graves at Highgate cemetery (where she is a tour guide) with texts to create a new form of eulogy.

Sonja Wilson is a versatile photographer working predominantly in documentary and portraiture. As a keen communicator, she seeks to produce images that are not only beautiful, but that also challenge preconceptions.

Her contribution to this exhibition includes pieces from her series More Than Hoes.

Po Yan Yee comes from pre-SARS Hong Kong and has been working in the press for about 6 years as a reporter, photojournalist for news and features editor for education and cultural pages.

Her current work investigates the Jewish and Muslim population that coexists in and around Stoke Newington, London. Destiny or history has brought these two groups of exiled people into close proximity and Yee’s work explores the relationships that have developed.

For further information contact:
Melinda Rose Silva
m: 07966 201 311, e: melintron@yahoo.com
High and low resolution images available upon request.