Yeo Workshop is delighted to present Apertures, a group exhibition featuring the work of Mike HJ Chang, Merryn Trevethan, Xue Mu, and Filippo Sciascia in a presentation of contemporary artefacts, comprising drawing, painting, photography and sculpture, that come together to present conceptions of light and its role in visual perception.
The artworks in this exhibition are indices of the contemporary experience, highlighting the lenses of perception that currently filter the everyday experience of individuals. Collectively, the works conceive a narrative of light and luminance as that which informs and structures our sense of perception and experiences of the world. As apertures into each artist’s universe, the artworks acquaint us with the artist’s practice in the studio – the place where new worlds are born.
Mike HJ Chang deals with perception and inadequacy in his drawings and sculptures. Thinking about optical mechanisms and configurations such as camera obscura and Plato’s cave, he explores notions of sight, light, and dimensions. The spherical sculptures are representations of heads or small worlds, each evoking a particular way of perception to explore how the internal mechanisms of the mind illuminate the individual experience. Using heads and the artist studio as metaphors and sites of mediation, Chang examines the limitation of human faculty, and also the woe and bliss that come with it.
Filippo Sciascia’s work engages with the photographic medium where the photographic image that persists in our mediated experience is put at the forefront to question modern perception. Sciascia references light as a fundamental artistic device in his works across painting and sculpture. Images in his works are drawn from photographic sources, where forms and materials from everyday life work together to present a dialogue between the painted and sculpted image. Lux Lumina is a concept that focuses on the re-depiction of the photographic image on canvas, placing emphasis on light as a visual element in photography and video. Reconsidering illumination, Sciascia’s works delve into the notion of light that aids visual perception, yet proves to obscure and distort vision.
Merryn Trevethan cleverly utilises lines and swatches of colour to create perceptions of light and depth in her abstractions of cityscapes that capture the essence of urban city life across geographical boundaries. Her paintings are spatially ambiguous, where a convergence of urban cues highlights the limitation of visual perception. Uncertainty of perception and complexity of vision are ideas that consistently materialise from Trevethan’s observation of urban landscapes, drawing parallels to the dizzying pace of the globalised economy. Snaking their way around walls, her tape murals confront viewers with transforming spaces and redefining how depth is perceived.
Xue Mu’s drawings are a mainstay of her studio practice, where the fundamental act of drawing is constantly returned to in her digestion and distillation of a media and information-saturated world. Her large-scale Black Diamond drawings reference the transformation of value, from the simple charcoal to a beautiful object of high value, and represent the transformation of worldviews. In her dynamic drawings exist a snapshot of a present past – through the containment of movements, representative of an abstraction of thought. As such, Mu’s lyrical mark-making gives the impression of a mind racing through our globalised world, in a bid to keep up with its ever-increasing speed of development.
