Christian Newby : Blue and Blonde and Among the Living

Space In Between is delighted to present Blue and Blonde and Among the Living - an exhibition of new work by Christian Newby, and his first show with the gallery.

This exhibition is the first part of an ongoing collaborative project for which Newby is inviting peers – both artists and designers – to contribute ideas and designs for new work, as part of an ongoing ‘social sculpture’. The project aims to both highlight and disrupt the semantic divisions and formal hierarchies between art and design, in order to create a dialogue between the two - encouraging the people and places that exist within it to participate as part of a larger creative matrix.

Seeking to emphasise the connotative properties beyond an image’s surface qualities, Newby takes both formal and decorative objects and images and distorts, or reconfigures, their temporal properties. For Blue and Blonde and Among the Living this attempt takes place in the form of a single domestic item – a carpet, which Newby has hand-tufted from a design submitted by a painter. Objectively the carpet, as a prettifying interior item, provides a fundamental and cosmetic constant - on occasion ambient and overlooked, at other times aggressively demanding of attention.

For Blue and Blonde and Among the Living Newby will exhibit the carpet along with several other object-works including a painted paper column and two cyanotype prints. The prints, deliberately reminiscent of cinema or theatre posters, provide a narrative arc to the other works. Existing as a group of arrested objects - real but still implementing themselves as agents of influence and ambiguity – the works on show create an underlying tension between process and exhibition, acting as a conduit for a temporal state between object and image.