All images © Helen Sear
To those of you who are heading to New York for the festival why not drop by Klompching Gallery and check out the exhibition of work by Helen Sear.
In this new series of work, Beyond The View, Helen Sear continues her investigation into the sublime — and an engagement with the retinal and digital —through her innovative use of image superimposition and erasure. The dialogue between the artwork and viewer, as well as the labor of the artist’s hand, is enhanced by a shift in scale that emphasizes the artist’s concern with the viewer’s habits of looking.
Beyond The View is an ongoing exploration, with the photographs originating in and around the agricultural lands south of Milan. The images are a response to the ‘hidden’ presence of women in this rural environment on the edge of the city. Within this series, Sear develops the notion of a visual subterfuge, both in the construction of the image itself, as well as positioning the presence of the female subjects within a precarious dichotomy of power/subordination, referencing the clichés of landscape and portraiture, particularly the Northern Romantic tradition of painting.
This exhibition follows Helen Sear’s highly successful first show with Klompching Gallery in January 2009. Later that same year, she was named as one of the UK’s 50 most significant artist photographers by Portfolio. The artwork of Helen Sear (b. 1955) has been published in Arts Review, Creative Camera, HotShoe, Art Newspaper and Art Monthly amongst others. Her photographic practice has developed from a Fine Art background of performance, film and installation work made in the 1980’s with her photographs becoming widely known in the 1991 British Council exhibition, De-Composition: Constructed Photography in Britain, which toured Latin America and Eastern Europe. Collections holding her work include Ernst & Young, Victoria & Albert Museum, British Council (Rome) and the Paul Wilson Collection. She lives and works in Wales (UK).
Artist reception: Thursday 13 May 6-8 pm
Highly recommended.
