Lightsmiths @ Rough Print Gallery

Amel Mahfouf, Ryan Flint, and Joshua Alexander, alumni from the recently threatened CASS School of Art, work with experimental analogue photography processes, and are proud to present ‘Lightsmiths’ in RoughPrint gallery, Dalston’s brand new and eagerly awaited art space.

Using photograms, film celluloid, experimenting with large scale printing and voluntary film degrada- tion, each series centres on innovation, introspection and exploration. Each artist, in their own way, challenge the ambiguous frontier between abstraction and tangible reality.

Amel Mahfouf is a French art director and photographer from Paris, based in London. With her series, soberly entitled ‘Drunk’, she explores nightlife in East London and the effect of alcohol on both people she met and her medium. By soaking her negatives in red wine, she obtained random, unpredictable and uncontrollable results, just like her subjects. These visual incidents create a new aesthetic, far from the common ‘night-out Instagram filtered’ pictures, and generates brand new narratives to the scenes she captured.

Ryan Flint’s work is an introspective analysis of natural objects which challenges people perspective and pre-conceived notions concerning the natural world. Inherent characteristics and structures are examined through camera-less photography, which operated a little like an x-ray revealing internal, hidden structures. This technique transforms the viewers’ understanding of nature, unveiling the unseen details and life journeys, subsequently producing beauty and evoking ambiguous connotations

Joshua Alexander is a photographically based artist who works with the abstract and non-representational, creating pieces without the use of a camera. Instead, he uses the interactions between light and photo-sensitive paper to produce photographs, causing patterns, streaks and fields of colour which would otherwise not naturally occur in a photograph.

Wine and a luxurious cuisine will be available at the White Rabbit restaurant next door during the private viewing on the 12th of November, from 6.30pm.