Where All The Wild Things Are is a group exhibition showing work by four London graduates: Katja Farin, Jacob Freeman, Michael Gao and Mia Wilkinson.
The show explores our space through strangeness and a sense of transgression as each artist lets us into their own world, or rather lets their world out. The gallery is a civil smokescreen for unruly forces.
Katja Farin paints vignettes, snippets of scenes playing out on a single canvas. Reality and subconscious collapse and the daily mundane is distorted by imagination. While the figures are identifiably human, they bear no signifiers of gender, relating to each other and us by means of longing looks. Huge, hollow eyes stare out at the viewer, prompting a response or simply looking for acknowledgement. They appear tired, frowning and gritting their teeth. Distortion of reality has condemned them to dysphoria. Farin’s practice includes ceramics, one presented hanging here with a mirror. Missing the forlorn faces on canvas, they allow us to enter our own story and see ourselves reflected in the work.
Jacob Freeman paints a fantasy, with a focus on worldbuilding instead of people. Freeman’s subjects all exist within the same universe, his own universe. Methodical in their grouping, builds a world starting from the smallest cell. Colours go between bordering on neon and all black. There is a contagious joyful energy through frogstack or Ricky as their mouths hang open in awe or excitement. His work benefits from these tongue-in-cheek titles, their peculiarity bringing a lot of life to the subjects. As if there is already a narrative thread linking each work, all the elements are there for us to fully be immersed.
In the works of Michael Gao’s, we see his aesthetic intersection with the digital. Our eyes need adjust to the uncanny flatness of his paintings, using an airbrush technique that equates them closer to the style of a video game than anything else. Confined to this digital space, his subjects are canine, as he toys with the assumed status quo of the domestic space. Man’s best friend runs amok, smashing and spilling. The human figures are carefully framed, we see their hands or feet and have to imagine their exasperation at this behaviour. Gao perhaps seeks to remind the viewer of the wild things we allow, even invite, into our homes - is it ridiculous to expect a dog to have the same reverence for interiors as we do?
Mia Wilkinson’s ‘grotesqueries’ are brimming with energy, practically vibrating off the canvas. Her human subjects are women, naked, as they appear in the domestic settings, ironing or lazing on the couch. These are uncompromising figures displaying a lack of propriety, either unaware that they have audience or totally uninterested in the fact. Wilkinson turns these places of comfort on their axis and forces us to reconsider these domestic scenes. A carnivalesque role reversal occurs between the anthropomorphic animals that accompany these feral women. If man’s best friends are dogs, Wilkinson makes the case for cats in relation to women as these prickly felines infiltrate our most private time.
Where All The Wild Things Are is a gathering of visions, a conversation and an exploration of how four different artists contain their 'wild things' in their work.
