The Restless Image Bank Street Arts 6th-10th November 2012
In their first dual show, recent Sheffield Hallam Fine Art graduates Sophie Goddard and Robyn LeRoy-Evans, will be exhibiting all-new painting and mixed-media installation work at Bank Street Arts, Sheffield.
Stimulated initially by Closure (2001), a book of theory written by artist and philosopher, Hilary Lawson, Sophie and Robyn have been thinking on the opposing ideas of narrative and abstraction, openness and closure.
Following a recent trip to Los Angeles, Robyn’s installation experiments with stillness and movement, lightness and shadow. It is a deconstruction of a space she encountered, a room she felt mesmerized by.
Sound, image, light and texture are brought together to create a minimal, yet highly sensory experience. The ambiguous nature of her work provides an opening for her viewer’s own narrative interpretation, or perhaps instead, a response unbound by narrative altogether.
For her new paintings, Sophie Goddard inverts her previous interest in video painting, by painting video. Her work offers glimpses into the world of documentary, freezing an insignificant moment and re-configuring it in paint.
The composition determined by the space of the television screen, and the obscurity of the subject mediated through the video camera, both suggest moving image and provoke a search for narrative. Sophie questions how the tension between these elements and the still and finite nature of the medium of paint affects the viewer's experience of the images.
Both artists work to provoke new discussion and thought around the idea of The Restless Image – an image that sits twitching between the closed nature of familiar representation, and the openness of ambiguity.