Sarah King

SPECULAR :
Jo Bannon* / Samuel Cook / Peter Davis / Sarah King / Charlotte Knox –Williams / Hester Reeve / Gabrielle Llewellin / Peter Matthews / Barbara Nicholls / Minou Norouzi / Monica Valcarcel Saez / Wiebke Maria Wachmann
Curated by:
Karen Roulstone & Andy Klunder
Specular brings together the recent work of a diverse and exciting group of international artists who explore and challenge our understanding of the visual and phenomenal world. The exhibition’s title, Specular is an ambiguous term simultaneously suggesting the power of enhanced vision, far-reaching observation, reflection and insight, and the very opposite of those faculties, a lack of clarity, obscurity and deflection; a world of illusion and shadows, tricks of the light. This ambiguity of meaning presents the possibility that a view of the world, which celebrates and accepts uncertainty and obscurity as the natural order might paradoxically present a clearer and truer image of reality than one which seeks an objective certainty.
The works in the exhibition offer a series of rich encounters with moments of uncertainty, the obscure and mysterious residing in the everyday. A subtle revealing of otherwise hidden and overlooked aspects of the negotiation of self, other and the material world is presented, a process which, at times, elicits a perceptual double take. Points of slippage are illuminated through conceptual and physical mappings, reflecting back on us the complexities of looking and, at times, of being seen.