hannah casey-brogan : July 2013

open today until 4pm

Long they look, and deeply is the first exhibition of contemporary painting at Satis House. Responding to Virginia Woolf’s A Haunted House,the artworks displayed in this intimate space explore, in a variety of ways, notions of architectural, spatial and psychological interiors and exteriors.

In Woolf’s heavily layered and abstracted narrative, a spectral pair of protagonists move through different rooms of a house, searching for an unknown treasure that was once theirs. The rich imagery, describing light, shadows, and reflections resonates particularly within the work of Hannah Casey and Flora Moscovici. Casey adopts an intuitive and atypical approach to watercolour painting which, in this instance, has resulted in a loosely figurative depiction of an unknown interior occupied by a lone skeletal form. In the incredibly subtle installation by Moscovici, the artist has responded to the specific architectural features of the gallery space, considering how people move within the room, and referencing the room’s previous identity by outlining in phosphorescent paint an area once occupied by a wardrobe. This work necessarily only comes to life in the darkness, when the space is empty and hidden from public view.

Tim Millen’s Stitch (Satis House) is a fractured and muted detail of a window on Deramore Avenue, executed using the ‘Street View’ function on Google Maps. With this knowledge of the image source, and through the use of a monochrome palette, context here is splintered and specific histories of the site are distorted or removed.

An interest in the absent, what is not there, or a lack, is evident in the work of Dougal McKenzie, Christopher Hanlon, and Fiona Finnegan. In an approach similar to Millen’s, these artists depict specific spaces, forms or objects, but deliberately remove or occlude certain details so as to create uncanny scenes that are at once familiar and unknown. Hanlon’s piece presents the viewer with a peculiar pleated structure, floating in an unidentifiable interior, whilst Finnegan’s Ceremonyisolates the hair of a group of six ghostly figures, creating a darkly surreal scene in response to Woolf’s text. McKenzie’s dense exploration of 20th century biography, literature and cinema has resulted in a painting that moves beyond A Haunted House to consider the author herself, Edward Ablee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?(and its filmic counterpart), and Barnett Newman’s seminal Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue paintings series.

The painted assemblages created by Jeffrey Dennis often feature fantastic imagery and incongruous combinations, placing highly contrived interior scenes in his characteristic ‘bubblescapes’. His approach to painting is not unlike Woolf’s approach to writing, where she introduces a variety of themes and images, juxtaposing them to create a constant sense of both unity and discord.

Andrew Cranston’s paintings also often focus on interior scenes - disused rooms and indeterminate in-between places which are unstable, and where human presence might be discernible but is almost always absent. In The Silent Treatment, Cranston explores how all kinds of interventions can leave unknown resonances within a given space.

The works on display in this exhibition require the viewer to look as long and as deeply as the artists themselves have done in creating these individual pieces. Overlapping fictions and realities are defined here through many eyes, exploring a multitude of positions and approaches within contemporary painting.