Guest blogger Steven Anderson, curator of York College Gallery, @york_college, invites you to their latest exhibition.
James Quin is a visual artist whose paintings are often described as narratives, exploring the contemporary life from an observer’s point of view. His pictures challenge people’s attitudes by showing the play between reality and unreality with unexpected and twisted outcomes. James was shortlisted for the Northern Art Prize in 2010 and the Liverpool Art Prize 2010 and received the People’s Choice award.
What is really interesting about the paintings are their ambiguity. Shapes and forms appear to come in and out of focus and as such the reading of the paintings changes with each viewing. We are really pleased to be showing James’s latest series of paintings at York College Gallery as he is a highly regarded artist and I feel that his painting will work really well in the gallery space.
Quin views the world through the filter of ‘unheimlich’, a world where the conventions of linear time and the stasis of place are supplanted by a world of conspiracy, paranoia and sense of dislocation. Quin’s drawing and paintings describe a world peopled by the displaced, contained within a familiar, yet alternate landscape of colliding timelines.
The title of the exhibition refers not to ‘constellation’ in its celestial sense, being a group of stars that form a recognisable pattern, but rather a group of associated or similar people or things.
This group of recent small scale paintings and drawings are not the result of a narrow thematic investigation, focused on any one particular subject. They function instead as a visual stream of consciousness where connections are made between paintings that generate alternate readings and prompt a related set of images that continue the process.
Between fifteen and twenty paintings are worked on together in order to maximise the potential for each image to subtly alter those around it, like a visual virus, resulting in images that have evolved substantially from their origins.
The exhibition runs from 12th May – 7th June, at York College Gallery,