Liliya Art Gallery is opening the last exhibition of 2023 this Thursday, Abstracting Rhythms, a group show of five multidisciplinary artists whose work explores sound and movement in visual art.
The exhibition takes inspiration from Walter Pater’s concept of Ander-Streben (‘other-striving’), the thought that each art has its own specific limitations, but that this can be circumvented by different fields ‘reciprocally lending each other new forces’. One borrowed force in Abstracting Rhythms is music, with selected artists achieving the expression of rhythm in the realm of visual art.
Abstraction enables exhibiting artists to render the vastness of corporeal experience, resisting neat categorisation. They investigate: what would it look like if we could see through architecture as we move through it? How does one represent the sculptural landscape of sound through paint? How can mark-making be choreographed and charted, in parallel with musical improvisation? How do we envision the texture of an infinite worldscape where the physical overflows?
Exhibiting Artists: Laurence Jansen, Cai Arfon Bellis, Emma Lake, bill daggs, Fran Hayes
ABSTRACTING RHYTHMS, 14th December 2023-30th January 2024, Liliya Art Gallery
Exhibition Opening on Thursday the 14th December, 6.00-8.30pm
About the artists
B. 1981, Cheltenham, England. Laurence Jansen’s painting practice explores the gestural and symbolic potential of mark-making. Rendering fluidity and movement through abstraction, he incorporates collected images to create compositions that play with biomechanical principles, in relation to architectural landscape and the figurative form. Traversing drawing, photographic field studies, media sources and collage techniques, Jansen’s process develops an emerging narrative composed of deconstructed elements that incorporate posthuman identities within a biomimetic landscape.
Cai Arfon Bellis is a south London based artist whose practice is concerned with communal experiences and forms of celebration. His work starts as on-site observational drawings exploring his experience of London’s rave culture. The drawings capture the relationship between MC, DJ & crowd, mostly at Jungle and Grime events, two subcultures he’s grown-up and participated in from a young age. Bellis’s work is a translation of those experiences, playing with the personal and impersonal, studying interactions with strangers and the forms that emerge from masses occupying crowded environments, while aesthetically drawing a line between figuration and abstraction.
Emma Lake is an artist exploring the experience of synesthesia and predominantly working with the mediums of paint, sound and performance. Lake studied Fine Art and History of Art at the University of Edinburgh, graduating in July 2022. Her work has been previously featured in the Telegraph and her Fine Art MA Hons portfolio was shortlisted for the International 2022 Global Design Graduate award, collaborating with Gucci. She has also sold three of her works at the auction house, Christie’s in London.
Lake’s work is guided by her synesthesia, correlating sound to colour and form. She aims to replicate this landscape of sculptural sound in her paintings. Previously Lake has formalised this experience as illustrative companions, but recently has been exploring colour and enjoying abstraction.
bill daggs b. 1981, London, is an artist, archivist, & musiker, working across disciplines from his London studio. His ongoing rhythmic investigations into time travel, sampling, looping and sonic architecture involve, though are not limited to, painting, sculpture, installation, performance, moving image, text and sonic composition. Bill also runs and facilitates Sound Structures once a month.
Fran Hayes is a multimedia artist whose practice interrogates the digital and the physical and the relationships that form in the spaces in between. Influenced by science-fiction, real world issues such as ecological breakdown and the consequences of capitalism, and everyday occurrences from conversations to music, we see these references seep into Fran’s practice which ranges from 3D modelling and animating to ceramics and writing.
Concerned more with process and play than with outcome, Fran uses the space of Blender, a free and open-source 3D modelling program as the main platform for her making. Blender offers the experimentation and freedom for the artist to produce in an intuitive way, allowing unique and amorphous forms to be birthed.
