Back to the Future features the work of seven emerging artists whose interests lie in investigating temporally distant aesthetics, objects and images. Unlikely imagery and forms are drawn together in complementary arrangements, creating new languages and examining old ones.
Elena Damiani and Jorge De la Garza explore unexpected conflations in their collage and assemblage work. Damiani balances existing and historical elements, drawing attention to the act of documentation that she perceives as having assumed compulsive ubiquity today, while De la Garza’s emphasises narrative, exploring representation and interpretation of his chosen imagery.
Rowena Hughes and Sam Burford test their intervention with found book pages. Hughes’ crisply overlaid geometric shapes sit with and against the dated images of the photographs beneath. Burford similarly experiments with the physical and cultural properties of his found subject matter, investigating ideas arising from folding printed images.
Apart from the re-imagined past of the collage works, Jan Kempenaers presents a failed optimism for the future. His photographs document the Spomeniks, strikingly futuristic Soviet era war memorials from the former Yugoslavia.
New scenes and possibilities emerge in the work of Viktor Timofeev, whose paintings envision a virtual reality of floating forms, recalling a surreal junkyard described through pixellated and computerised 3-D rendering. Sam Griffin’s meticulously detailed drawings assume similarly abstract, geometric elements. His outdated and mysterious-looking architecture is oddly familiar despite schematic borders and absent backgrounds.
Sam Burford was selected for Future Map 2007 and Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2009. Elena Damiani has exhibited internationally and is represented by Selma Feriani Gallery, London. Jorge de la Garza has shown in Mexico and the UK, including Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2009. Sam Griffin was selected for 100 New Artists by Francesca Gavin in August 2011 and is represented by Gallery Vela, London. Rowena Hughes’ recent work was included in Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2010 and is currently showing in a second solo exhibition since graduating at Renner Prinz, Vienna following her first at Room, London in 2011. Jan Kempenaers recently showed alongside Armen Eloyan, Sarah Lucas and Paul McCarthy at Galerie Bob van Orsouw, Zurich. Viktor Timofeev has exhibited extensively in the UK, USA and Germany and is represented by Hannah Barry Gallery, London.
