Radical Residency

End-of-residency group exhibition

Javier Torras Casas, Yu Ting Ong, Evy Jokhova, Eugene Macki, Paula Baader, Nemo Nonnenmacher, Ant Hamlyn, Julia Court and Diane Chappalley

6 – 13 April 2018

Unit 1 Gallery l Workshop is thrilled to present the result of the Radical Residency, a four-week residency with artists Javier Torras Casas, Yu Ting Ong, Evy Jokhova, Eugene Macki, Paula Baader, Nemo Nonnenmacher, Ant Hamlyn, Julia Court and Diane Chappalley. In the last month, the ten artists have challenged themselves and each others to produce new works. We are delighted to present this first exhibition that displays new paintings, drawings, sculptures and installations.

Javier Torras Casas
The development of mind and brain in relation to our senses is of central importance to human evolution. In his research Javier explores the cognitive and communicative qualities of our bodies and their importance to this. The high degree of neural attention that converges into our hands points to the significance they have in this process. His artworks show a material bond between human bodies and earthy matter. Bronze and clay suggest the continuous biological changes produced in nature as well as the development of human cognitive capacities through the use of hands. The study of the materiality of objects and their connections to the human body has a double aim, to see on the one hand how the habitat shaped individuals, and on the other hand how human interaction with the world triggered the remarkable evolution of their kind.

Yu Ting Ong
Yu works across different mediums such as painting, drawing, video, new media, where geometry and the abstract language of paint are consistent motifs. Those are the ground upon which she explores the correlations and contrasts between the medium and materiality of paint and digital constructions. Her practice contemplates the condition of “flatness” in today’s digital age along with how energy and forms become more fluid and behave differently in the less defined boundaries, spaces and dimensions we are inhabiting in. Yu’s work is a constant re-examination of the spaces in-between; the dichotomies of painting as a value-laden indexical sign, where every brush mark leaves as trace of the artist, which contrasts to the general pervasiveness of digital content sharing in various social, technological and creative dimensions today.

Evy Jokhova
Evy is multi-disciplinary artist whose practice is rooted in the dialogue between social anthropology, architecture, philosophy and art. Working with sculpture, installation, drawing, film, performance and painting on a project-by-project basis, she investigates the creation of social systems, invention of tradition, and how social behaviour can be altered through architectural construction. Engaging with the everyday as well as possible and impossible futures as imagined by architects, city planners, historians and politicians, Evy surveys the disparity between plan and reality using a paired down aesthetic of a muted palette, creating sculptures and performances with a strong focus on materiality, inserting objects into landscape and architectural space and creating large scale multi-media installations.

Eugene Macki
Eugene is a multi-disciplinary artist interested in the idea of making as a developmental process, and a meditative action. He explores the structural relationships through sculpture, drawing, painting, and performance.

Diane Chappalley
It is from sensory experiences; the synthesis and stimulation of new and past perceptions that the painting arises. Diane’s practice is a constant search in the making. A search guided to reach a sense of known, but one that is not quite possible to pin down. She creates landscapes where meaning lies beneath the surface, foregrounding emotion, while perception is disrupted. They are an exploration of the world, made with an impulse of diaristic introspection and intimacy.

Paula Baader
Critically-engaged walks. Living and experiencing London as a city and at the same time as a material. Making it both a concrete and abstract object of consideration, precise and atomized. Deserted spaces, but not without an implied human presence. Wide open areas and microscopic details. Structures, traces and scattered patterns that resemble my fragmented thoughts and knowledge of the built and designed spaces.

Public spaces and private rooms are translated in a distant and intimate manner, where psychic contours are mapped – often from a birds eye perspective – , producing unexpected associations and topics of discussion and sensation. The result of a relationship to walking, landscape and urban space that is defined by testing the ways in which observation and phenomenology can be relevant, contemporary positions.

Nemo Nonnenmacher
Nemo uses photography, digital sculpture and installation to explore how contemporary technologies affect our cultural identity, in what way the corporeal relates to the virtual and to what point presence and identity are articulated by both human hand and machine. Nemo graduated from Royal College of Art in 2017 and has recently been artist in residence at Outset Contemporary Art Fund in Baker Street. From 2012 to 2017 he has been a fellow of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation, exhibiting throughout the UK and Europe, including the Schleuse Opelvillen in Rüsselsheim, Germany in 2017 and the Fondazione Fotografia in Modena, Italy in 2016.

Ant Hamlyn
Ant is an artist interested in the moment it rains on a fairground, how it makes us feel, and how it makes the lights feel. He likes to occupy a territory between direct human experience, stagecraft magic and technology. By employing techniques such as boredom, sleight of hand, elaborate over-engineering and dull British wit, explore the subtle nuances of a contemporary hyper-active culture. Often played out via the of use of excessive, over-the-top façades underpinned by notions of apology, irony, expectation and self-worth. His works flirt between the live and the Live, the performer and the performed and the glamorised and the real. He feels the beautiful uncertainty of experiencing everything at once, and then have it all unravel in front of your eyes.

Julia Court
Julia’s concerns are with human aspiration and how this is reflected in the daily rituals of our lives and the coded routines we develop. She observes people, their gestures, their dress and the “tribes” they belong to. Her research consists of drawings, photographs, prints, and appropriated objects which she selects, refines and distils to produce work with a quiet and sophisticated aesthetic. During the coming residency she will focus on her current interest in the physicality and triumphalism of footballers. Julia will be using the time in the studio to develop her “existential” style of drawing based on imagery from the internet and sports pages in daily newspapers; whilst at the same time shaping both an appropriated and constructed environment. To bring the discourse into everyday territory she plans to present her work through the lens of the classroom where the activities of school work and the playground will be the canvas on which her ideas are played out. At this stage and she envisages an installation piece but within this she particularly aims to keep the daily activities of her practice, during the residency, very visible.