Back to the Future

Back to the Future features the work of seven emerging artists whose interests lie in investigating temporally distant aesthetics, objects and images. Unlikely imagery and forms are drawn together in complementary arrangements, creating new languages and examining old ones.

Elena Damiani and Jorge De la Garza explore unexpected conflations in their collage and assemblage work. Damiani balances existing and historical elements, drawing attention to the act of documentation that she perceives as having assumed compulsive ubiquity today, while De la Garza's emphasises narrative, exploring representation and interpretation of his chosen imagery.

Rowena Hughes and Sam Burford test their intervention with found book pages. Hughes’ crisply overlaid geometric shapes sit with and against the dated images of the photographs beneath. Burford similarly experiments with the physical and cultural properties of his found subject matter, investigating ideas arising from folding printed images.

Apart from the re-imagined past of the collage works, Jan Kempenaers presents a failed optimism for the future. His photographs document the Spomeniks, strikingly futuristic Soviet era war memorials from the former Yugoslavia.

New scenes and possibilities emerge in the work of Viktor Timofeev, whose paintings envision a virtual reality of floating forms, recalling a surreal junkyard described through pixellated and computerised 3-D rendering. Sam Griffin’s meticulously detailed drawings assume similarly abstract, geometric elements. His outdated and mysterious-looking architecture is oddly familiar despite schematic borders and absent backgrounds.