- Venue
- Copeland Gallery
- Starts
- Wednesday, November 10, 2021
- Ends
- Sunday, November 14, 2021
- Address
- Unit 91, Copeland Park 133 Copeland Road Peckham London SE15 3SN
- Location
- London
- Organiser
- Copeland Gallery
Journey Into Unknown: the show that might never have been! presented at Copeland Gallery, Peckham, opening on the 11th of November 2021, is an exhibition that portrays the journeys of twenty-three emerging and established artists who convened while studying for an MA at Camberwell College of Arts, one of London’s most prestigious art Schools.
They were the intake that would experience the art world as they knew it, being turned on its head. Within weeks, galleries closed, exhibitions and lectures went online, and as students were re-dispersed back to their reciprocal corners of the globe, they and the entire world were thrust into a forced extraction from their peers and their systematic sources of inspiration and motivation. They experienced a forced withdrawal into their individual resources and private studio practices, which some cases meant anywhere from balconies, to kitchen tables in the company of children or their family bedrooms. Deprived of their Final MA presentation, this exhibition comes to fruition in its place.
This group show is an exhibition of works, created in isolation but also through a collective lens. The viewer is invited to journey into the unknown with the artists and to experience the challenges that the students faced while questioning the prevailing attitudes in the art world and greater society and watching it all unravel. The collaborative idea that evolved from each individual studio, is the shared intuition of travelling along a new, unchartered route towards the future. All twenty-three artists, as well as you, the viewer, have been working from a script that is not written. These artists come to this exhibition with unique stand points, but from a shared threshold of unimagined pathways. This exhibition relates the story of their journey and the art they produced in response, as they battled to maintain a connection with each other and remain committed to producing artworks that they feared might never be shown.
The works produced as a result and exhibited now in Journey Into Unknown, explores paths of investigation through urban cities and traditional rural pastures. It reflects on the self, scrutinises society, interrogates culture and subverts stereotypes and social norms. It projects into the future while reviewing the past and utilises science, medical annals, history and personal experience as reference. The work is produced through a combination of performance, film, sculpture, drawing, etching, lithography, photography and painting. Some works manifest through vibrant, gestural brush marks, others though intricate detail and explicit imagery, while some speak through dark and monotone hues. The diversity presented within the collection exudes a pervasive magnetism in the way that each individual artists’ journey into the unknown has brought them, now, to this cumulative coda.
