Opening on the 14th March 2019, this exhibition at Charlie Smith gallery, curated by Zavier Ellis, brings together three artists whose practice is rooted in photography. However, they are multi-disciplinary, processed-based practitioners who mostly employ photography as a founding principle, which enables them to develop unique and complex methodologies.
“Gina Soden has established a process of hand printing dilapidated interiors onto found mirrors that have been treated and corroded with industrial tools and materials. Informed by the idea of the Grand Tour, she travels to abandoned territories and buildings throughout Europe. Soden seeks out disused public buildings including palaces, churches and asylums, often having to access them illegally. Her objective is to transport the viewer to the location that she discovers, and to demonstrate the beauty of decay and the poetry of ruins. In this latter sense, Soden references John Ruskin’s ‘Seven Lamps of Architecture’, a text that became influential in summarizing thought around the 19th century Gothic revival. Ruins were of course a primary Gothic trope, and Soden locates ideals of beauty, life, memory and truth in both decay and abandonment. Her work makes for complex viewing where symmetry, corrosion, reflection and image combine in a beguiling singular object. “