The Café Grove Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of photography by artists exploring some of the deepest and most ingrained aspects of what it is to be human: notions of identity, faith, belonging, taboo and the subconscious. Working in a variety of genres including portraiture, landscape, still life and staged photography, these artists are bound by a desire to illuminate the un-revealed aspects of life.
Photography has long been used as a medium of self-expression, the works in this show raise questions around what it can reveal. Can it be a physical expression of a psychological state, can it contain truth or be a vehicle for self-revelation? The photographers offer you a glimpse into their worlds by exposing their hopes, fears and dreams and by doing so invite you to recognise shimmers of your own life and experiences through the work.
The exhibition showcases new work from exciting emerging photographers alongside photographers who have recently exhibited in venues including the PM Gallery, Liberty’s, Proud Central and the Viewfinder Gallery. The artists have diverse backgrounds, coming from Spain, Bulgaria, Albania, Poland and Iran as well as the UK.
Curated by: Ana Milusheva, Ruth Joy and Adela Tudela
Rick Hanley
UNCOVERING MASCULINITY
Uncovering Masculinity is a project that aims to uncover personal interpretations of masculinity by capturing the body language and poses of regular men. Each image represents a 10 year age span which may show a defining generational characteristic of masculinity.
Adela Tudela
UNDENIAL (2008-09)
The paradoxical construction of the term Undenial relates to the idea of understanding social taboos as equally paradoxical constructions: both initially seem to negate while, perhaps in a subtle way, they can be said to reveal rather than repress. A series of interesting dualities come into play between the acts of stating and denying, expressing and repressing.
Within this project, the visual expression of these dualisms translates into juxtapositions of an apparently duplication of the subject. This acts as a metaphor for the dual condition of the ego and its struggle with taboos and the socially acceptable.
Undenial has allowed challenging views on taboos, through a personally therapeutic creative process.
adetuco_hotmail.com
Monika Drzewicz
Self-portraits have been a method of self-exploration since humans first gazed at their own reflection in a pool of water. For me, self-portraits are an opportunity to see beyond the image in a mirror and begin to search into the soul, unearthing a diary of hidden fears, my feelings as a mother and foreigner and other fervent emotions.
BACK TO EXHIBITORS
Elahe Kianpoor
These photos are depictions of the photographer’'s nightmares. In her nightmares, she dreams of short darkly-veiled women who keep chasing her and she finds herself bathing in a tub of blood. The nightmares started after her release from prison. She was arrested during the demonstrations following the fraudulent 2009 elections in Iran. They are expressions of the life of an Iranian girl who has been uprooted from her homeland and the recent upheavals after the tampered election in Iran has thrown her into yet another turbulent phase of life. This is the story of an Iranian woman who has had to deal with the ordeals of life after prison. Her hopes and aspirations are in a state of suspension. She experiences moments of peace and freedom but is still haunted by the memory of the dark moments of the past, which are symbols of desperation and helplessness.
She is trying to have a fresh beginning and redefine her life again. It is an experience of self-discovery by going through and revising all that has been in the past. These are steps towards emancipation, but they bear the mark of a painful past too. This is an encounter with the life of one Iranian woman who has undergone the pains of moving to a new country but also the difficulties of being thrown into an unwanted separation as a result of a political earthquake which has left thousands of Iranians scattered around the globe.
Ruth Joy‘
BIND US, RENEW US, RELEASE US’
“In nothing be anxious”. These words from Philippians Chapter 4 verse 6 are handwritten on the flyleaf of my Great Nan’s tiny pocket Bible. The verse seems to accompany me through life although I rarely follow the advice.
These photographs are the result of several months’ reflection on my faith.
I realised that I see faith as a journey that involves a constant, dizzying reversal of priorities, a stepping out onto uncertain paths that I often shy away from. I also pondered on how whilst it provides me with both comfort and acceptance, it also challenges me to follow a God who calls me to move beyond the allure of consumerism and success, and to love and accept both myself and other people.
The images take over where my words fail. Through them I have attempted to express thoughts, feelings and emotions involved in the intangible and yet intimate nature of my relationship with God. In this way the process became a kind of prayer and visual meditation.
ruth.joy_talk21.com
Mark Denton
DOMESTIC FABLES
Domestic Fables is an investigation of the domestic space as a place of fiction & ritual. I’'m interested in using photography to visually reformulate the familiar and mundane confines of the domestic environment in which 'home' becomes transformed from a place of prosaic safety, comfort and familiarity into a locus of disquiet, disruption and unexpected encounter.
The project centres on the creation of staged tableaux using members of my family to enact constructed scenes set in and around my own and my familial homes. These tableaux are derived in part from my memories and the journeys of imagination I took as a child growing up in what I felt was a stifling and overwhelmingly anodyne environment. Part biographical and part imagined, they are a way for me to explore and attempt to reconcile myself with my upbringing and my past. It is photography as a process of psychological excavation, a form of therapy, a way of visualising and giving shape to partially hidden and half-glimpsed memories and experiences: a blending of fact and fiction, history and fable.
mark_mark-denton.com
Ana Milusheva
THE UNCANNY
The uncanny explores the human mind and its endless abilities, with the conscious and subconscious feeding off each other. It’ is an examination of the individual, or the ‘I’, as well as notions of home and belonging that often trouble the soul. It looks into hidden places, showing familiar spaces in a new light and revealing long forgotten scars from the past, carried into the present.
Home is a psychological concept fed by physical entities: a place, a house, friends, family, country, food, etc. When we are no longer familiar with our surroundings, we become disconnected and psychologically weaker as a result. From this, questions of identity arise: feelings of longing, isolation, acceptance and self-worth.
This project is a showcase of ones mind. The worries of everyday life are being examined from three different angles, searching for the right answer to rescue us, to take us to the end of the corridor: to escape!
anamilusheva_gmail.com
Roland Serani
THE DELICATE PORTRAIT OF LOVE AND DESIRE
In this project the artist follows the memories of his childhood, “painting” the curious child on one side and the adult fascination on another. The images are influenced by dreams and fantasies, luring the unconscious into the vision of a young reader, itself often drawn from the banned books of foreign writers read as a child.
Albanian-born Serani developed his imagination watching “puppet theatre”, as Freud referred to it in his Interpretation of Dreams, and most of Serani’'s work emerges from encounters with French Surrealism and Connoisseuratis where their psychological depth of spirit creates poetry of suggestion.
Those that linger long enough to see that when melancholy speaks, the surreal and dreamlike becomes physical, tangible and intoxicating, so that the viewer feels free to pour light in the compositions their own torch.
rolandserani_hotmail.com
CAFE GROVE
65 The Grove
Ealing
W5 5LL
TEL: 020 8810 0364
Opening Times
Monday to Thursday 6pm - 9pm
Friday & Saturday 11 am - 11pm
Sunday & BH 11am - 10.30pm
Private View
Friday 13th May 6pm-11pm
Licensed Polish Restaurant.
Time out calls the food 'first rate'.
TUBE: Ealing Broadway, South Ealing
BUS: 65, 183, 12, 207, 607, 226, 297, 427, E1, E2, E7, E8, E9, E10, E11.
unrevealed.revealed_gmail.com
Photographic Exhibition
13th May - 3rd July 2011
Private View: Friday 13th May
6pm
The Grove Gallery
