- Venue
- Kaleidoscope Gallery
- Location
- South East England
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“Local Artists’ brings together seven contemporary Kent artists working in a variety of media. Artworks selected for this group show look at what it means to be local, and why this is important within an increasingly connected global community.” To a degree it underlines its own point in the partial missing of it.
Globalism’s contradictions engage in fracture and healing, existing fault lines become apparent in brittle localism. Alice Randall’s ‘See England First’ exposes this brittleness. Her images of England, presented as a video slide show and accompanying commentary, prick at complacency.
Nostalgic, (1950/60s ?) pre digital images are taken from postcards and made raw by their digital transformation, serving to draw out the fragile nature of past sunny days. The disconcerting nature of the slides is sharpened by the insertion of collaged images -butterflies, birds, insects, and people, misplaced and uneasy in a disjunction of scale. In one image, two men stand apparently looking into woodland. One stands back. There is a foreboding presence; are they what they appear to be? Do appearances reveal deception? The confidence of the English Middle Class Gentleman celebrating all things English is borne along by the commentary. Assured that his place and that of England are secure, he continues unaware of the pantomime tragedy that Randall creates behind him.
Titled, ‘There is a Storm Coming’ Richard Osterlund “…..investigates how the photographic act can lift the perception of an anonymous person to heights of stardom. Employing techniques of scale and chiaroscuro more usually associated with painted portraits, the unknown sitters are graced with a monumental aura of importance.” he references images of theatrical stars. If photographs can be said to be ‘intensely’ detailed, Richard Osterlund’s images of a Carpenter, Photographer, Painter, and Illustrator are such. Larger than life, their detail is insistent, unrelenting. As with the detail so with lighting and posing, little is left to chance. The result is a set of images impressive in scale but strangely coercive and claustrophobic.
Paul O’Brien uses acrylic paint and collage – specifically individual lines of text cut from newspaper articles, text and paint engaging in a process of revelation and concealment. The underlying narrative of his tryptich, ‘Together The Future Alone’ refers to Past, Present, and Future in terms of past chance encounters, present community, and uncertain future.
Matt Rowe’s photograph of three 18th century redcoated soldiers posing before the sea at “The Day of Syn Festival,” (The Reverend Dr Christopher Syn, the first of which was published in 1915 by Russell Thorndike, is the hero of his series of novels based around smuggling in the Romney Marsh area,) Dymchurch, reveals a container ship, dimly visible, traversing the horizon, vehicle of the global.
In his, “Old Gaol, New Romney”. The floor of the cell is immaculate, now a trap for the tourist eye?
Jennifer Baird, recently returned from Tobago offers “Silent Forest” an image of delicate technique, in which a sun-like symbol sits divided by two wing shapes reminiscent of those of The Angel of the North.
The work of Ruth Homden and Sandra McKears Johnson feels adrift from the expressed global concerns of the exhibition. Ruth Homden’s exploration of Loose Allotments through traditional drawing techniques using charcoal and mixed media underlines the notion of local community whose stability revolves around shared activity and place. Does the presence of the sunflower, originally from North America in her drawing, imply an intention on the part of the artist to comment on the assimilation of the alien into the English allotment? Where once global connections delivered the exotic, memories gradually subside to be replaced with newer associations; spices and sugar now found in Sainsbury’s, the global disconnected by local habit. Sandra McKears Johnson’s wood engravings, (a medium originated by Thomas Bewick in the late 1700s) take as subject-matter historic local architecture, such as at Wolfe Green, Westerham where stands a statue of General James Wolfe, who died as his army defeated the French in Quebec. The notions of global and local ebb and flow somewhat. This is a show which also asks, perhaps unintentionally, what it means to be ‘contemporary’ in an ‘increasingly connected global community’.
