Summer Graduate Show
A showcase of London’s most exciting emerging talents
5 – 20 August 2022
Anise Gallery’s Summer Graduate Show returns in 2022, embracing its ethos to connect spatial investigation with art, and pushing the dialogue between architecture, technology and the built environment further through contemporary art practices.
Shi Jiao, Dreams
Exploring the merging of digital technologies with the physical world, the technologies transforming how we inhabit our cities, and our developing urban landscape, the exhibition considers the current condition of our built environment. We are excited to present graduate artists from London College of Communication, the Royal College of Art, Slade School of Fine Art, and Camberwell College of Arts, who – through their varied works – speculate on alternate futures for our planet.
Shi Jiao (SHI) | AI Mountain, Dreams
MA Photography | Royal College of Art
SHI is an interdisciplinary artist working in photography, installation and interactive arts, exploring the possibilities brought by new media to art and space.
AI Mountain investigates the role of the artist in creating unique work when generating forms and imagery through AI. By experimenting with the generating process, SHI highlights how the world that one interprets, and experiences could be largely collaged, both in form and materials.
Within Dreams, SHI explores China’s national dream using live installation and lighting performance to create multiple meanings beyond its original context. By photographing the projection, the word and the landscape are recombined and transformed into an image of a dreamland as a metaphor about the ambiguous meaning of ‘Dream.’
Wen Pey | LDN 51.5072N 0.1276W
MA Animation | Royal College of Art
Wen Pey is an animator from Malaysia, with an interest in architecture, history and humanities.
LDN 51.5072N 0.1276W explores the impact of the Industrial Revolution through the traces of old London buildings, reflecting on how technology has changed the traditional understanding of work, community and identity.
Since the first generation of industrialisation in 18th century Britain, we are now entering the fourth generation of industrialisation. From controlling machines to interacting with them, technology has encompassed the physical, biological, and digital domains. Technology has changed our socio-economic structures, our communities and our identities. We are constantly questioning who we are and how we see the world. Further reflecting on technological developments, the better we can understand ourselves and the social patterns that technology embodies and enables, with the possibility to make our lives better.
Mo Nan | The Self of the Edge of the Self
MA Fashion / Royal College of Art
A London-based digital artist, fashion designer, and concept designer, Mo Nan focuses on post-humanism and identity politics, reflecting thinking in an era when the Internet and reality are overly intertwined.
Exploring an imagined future human identity, Nan speculates how humans will break away from the definition of ‘human’ to become continuously fluid, boundless beings. The mask is at the core of his work, referring to the unknown abyss of identity, presented to the viewer in digital form.
Eleanor Turnbull | Paper Puddles
MFA Fine Art Media | Slade School of Fine Art
Living and working between London and Cornwall, Eleanor Turnbull creates sculptural installations involving sound, moving image and storytelling. Acting as healing containers, where grief and joy are held in the same space allowing healing to take place, and mould-making as a tool of communication and refuge, emotions, secrets and landscapes too big for the body to contain are collapsed into tangible objects that playfully patch thoughts together.
Here, Paper Puddles are the physical manifestations of Lonely Puddles, an archive of water-bodies and their journeys to the sea, beginning by directing puddles how to get to the nearest sea, and since becoming an international collection of water-bodies, equipped with intentions to meet.
Isabella Scott | Tracing London
BA (Hons) Photography | London College of Communication
Tracing London consists of a series of thirteen photographs that explore concepts of materiality and embodiment, time and place. By focusing on the overlooked and the unnoticed, the disregarded background of modern contemporary life comes into prominence. Interacting with the world via a viewfinder enables an awareness of our existence in it, while also facilitating the process of capturing visible traces of personal encounters.
Susan Sontag wrote that a photograph is ‘not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stencilled off the real, like a footprint.’ (“Image-World” 154). Through the photographic examination of the marks and textures on surfaces, Scott reads London’s urban landscape through the traces of past activities, enabling her to develop a sensitivity and familiarity with the places inhabited every day – a reminder of the enduing pleasure of just looking.
Elsa Money | Saccharine
BA (Hons) Fine Art Drawing | Camberwell College of Arts
With quiet forms and fragments of detail, Elsa Money creates environments with the intention of evoking feelings to create a collective, whole moment for an audience to bask in.
The rose-tinted romanticisation of the images allude to the impossibility of viewing the contemporary landscape without considering the deteriorating environment, with formal components introduced to impede the sentimentalised imagery, suggesting our species’ presence, and evoking the slight feeling of uncertainty that is felt in places that were once familiar.
