Gabriella Lo Presti & Clare Wigney

STOCKROOM

A collaborative exhibition between artists Clare Wigney and Gabriella Lo Presti, ‘Unearthly Bodies’ presents a series of portraits – ghosts, celebrities, lace, aliens, religion, gardens – as simulations construct our reality, there is little separation between myth, fact, truth and speculation - mortal and supernatural worlds have fused into contemporary life. The exhibition conjures doubt within themes of authenticity, fiction and otherness - questioning notions of representation earthly, otherworldly and the infinite.

Gabriella Lo Presti works across photography, sculpture and installation – interested in the oscillation between place and placelessness, the real and the reproduced, ornament and function, the private and the public; her practice engages with realisations of identity through aesthetic features of the everyday. Fascinated by narratives of the extraterrestrial, mythological and non-place, Lo Presti examines how we locate ourselves between the physical and the versions of culture, history, imagery and reality in contemporaneity.

In her paintings, Clare Wigney works to deconstruct and reconstruct images pulled from their circulation through the world. She is interested in the concept of existence within the physical, virtual and invisible realms, and how it is represented and materialised in images. In gathering images from virtual and digital spheres, immediate physical surroundings and popular media, she attempts to scrutinise the nature of reality as being constructed by images – images that endlessly multiply, circulate, proliferate, and mask themselves as truth, or fiction. This theme of truth and fiction is paramount in recent paintings, wherein broken visual information may appear as something, indicate, obscure, clarify or blur; they are about the belief that painting can be a device of misrepresentation, a deconstructive tool designed to undermine the certainty of appearances.

“the daily encounter with reality, the fictions, the surrogates, the ambiguous poetics or alienating aspects, all seem to preclude any way out of the labyrinth, the walls of which are ever more illusory, to the point at which we might merge with them... Our duty is to see with clarity, to attempt to determine the identity of humanity, things and life, from the images of humanity, things and life”

Luigi Ghirri, Kodachrome, 1978 - The Complete Essays