Modern Mythology: Adam Dix, Jess Littlewood & Lindsey Bull

The Contemporary London presents Modern Mythology, new works by Lindsey Bull, Adam Dix and Jess Littlewood that draw on a rich lexicon of imagery to explore our understanding of the world and the constructed belief systems used to navigate it. Drawing on resources from folklore, cult, witchcraft, religion, sci-fi and the occult, the central themes of each include motifs of ritual, religion and mysticism that culminate in a private and mysterious, ethereal and haunting mythology that transcends and overlaps their collective worlds.

Adam Dix explores modern manifestations of illusion, apparition or figments of the imagination and spiritual and electrical manifestations of the subconscious. Drawing inspiration from events such as séances and the birth of the telegraph, where the knockings of spiritual awareness replicate the electrical intermittent pulses of the telegraph operator’s action, Dix brings together technology and spiritual superstition. Our contemporary apparition is the digital image, an illusion presented by a veil of pixels which once examined is hazy, unfocused and non tangible; an electrical spirit, a digital apparition. Through the thin layering of paint glazes, Dix’s painting process metaphors the shallow illusion of the digital screen and is an analogy to the surface character of printed material. As such Dix’s works speak about communication, society, and our relationship with the constructed image.

Jess Littlewood’s use of Internet search engines as a primary source of imagery further references our reliance on technology. Through delicate manipulation and fragmentation of found imagery, Littlewood creates vast and mesmerising otherworldly digital collage landscapes that are at once familiar and alien. The landscapes become testing grounds playing host to discoveries, rituals, triumphs, failures and exploitations in humanity’s struggle for power, knowledge, understanding and order. By utilising an imagined abstract notion of ‘America’, Littlewood explores ideas of a created mythology of place. By referencing 1970s cult movements, UFO religions and incarceration, Littlewood further interrogates societal conditions that inform private mythology.

Lindsey Bull's paintings explore fleeting and fragmentary instances where reality, illusion and the fantastical merge and shift the everyday into realms of spiritual, ritualistic or psychedelic perceptions. Referencing fashion magazines, occult magazines and film stills, her paintings often depict complicated, dark, idiosyncratic or misunderstood psychologies enveloped by abstract spaces, resulting in images that rest between the seen and the hidden. Bull’s new ‘Twin series’ celebrates the deep connectivity, whether mystical, psychological or physical, between two isolated figures and the strangeness and forces that inform their symbiotic relationship. Other figures stand in open forest clearings costumed and in performative meditation evoking a private mythology with history, landscape and the natural environment, where the forms or actions meld into the pattern and rhythm of the brush strokes.

Dix, Littlewood and Bull, each with their own distinctive voice, articulate and explore a circulation of connectivity. Submerged in mysticism and a sense of the transcendental and manifested through a language of ritual, this exhibition addresses ideas of human behaviour seen in the practice of religion, collective practice, mysticism, collective identity, community, communication and notions of how alternative realities and private mythologies realign our connection with the past and look to the future.