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FEATURED CONTRIBUTORSFine Art Photography
The RCA Battersea Show is a cosmic smorgasbord of pastiche, breeze blocks, syncopated geometric shapes and medieval wooden contraptions, revealing the ripe new artists leaving their respective courses at the highest professional standard.
This year the RCA's Battersea campus is exhibiting graduates from painting, printmaking, sculpture and photography MA courses spread through-out three buildings. This is the first time photography will be shown at the Battersea campus, teaming up these alternative contemporary approaches will lead to some exciting reciprocal links; it is clear from the start that the curation of space was a prescient force through the whole show.
The sculpture building brims with pseudo-scientific objects and drawings, such as Sonsoles Marquez's CMYOK!, a large ripped piece of material with photographs split into cyan, magenta and yellow fields. Or Fay Nicolson's more formal silk prints and split screen video installation involving geometric shapes. The language used in the titling of these works recognises a salient rationalism or academic problem solving, teasing out an informal stratification of analogue solutions to digital problems. The hefty constructions of Mark Davey's sculptures offers a more tongue in cheek perspective, his systematic assemblage seen in the neat wooden joins of 'poster stroker' echo the construction of a medieval Treubuchet.
The Sakler building across the road houses mostly painting, printmaking and photography. Our perpsective is channelled, as smaller divisions of space are used to draw attention to intricate, fantastical or spiritual places. Jenny Ekholm's HD 16mm transfer film 'The Fossil Forest - of time and things we cannot see' slowly exposes a stark greying landscape of rocks audibly swallowed in the static of the ocean. This cinematic narrative seems familiar, if not nostalgically apocalyptic, the unrealised expectation that Charlton Heston might just wander into shot.
Testbed is the third building at the RCA and is a more industrial warehouse space, the lack of white walls lending to works such as Greta Alfaro's Fall on Us, and Hide Us. a piece suggesting phantasmagoric happenings. Other Highlights from the show include Cindie Gottlieb Cheung's macabre video installations and Nick Jeffery's flippant semi-spiritual painting and installation.
