THE FACT OF THE MATTER
Ali Bailey and
Jessica Labatte
Private view: Thursday 13 January, 6.30 –
8.30pm
Exhibition continues: 14 January – 26 February 2011
Poppy Sebire gallery’s latest show brings together material and
materialism: two young artists interested in consumer culture and physical form,
whose work revolves around the surprising, playful and sometimes unsettling
transformation of found objects.
ALI BAILEY’s work
tackles advertising and branding culture. His sculpture, ‘Ralph
Lauren’ (pictured above) juxtaposes a slick, luxury brand with a raw
hand-made aesthetic, using the label’s ‘designer paint’ to
create a billboard-shaped form with a rough, putty-like texture, and including
the tin itself as a sort of bathetic logo. Also showing are works on paper
tackling similar themes: magazine advertisements defaced, reshaped and framed so
we see them as much for their formal qualities as objects as for the
advertiser’s intended message.
JESSICA LABATTE’s
photographs also manipulate space and form. Some turn mundane objects
found in thrift stores into beautiful, unrecognisable, abstract compositions
that bring out their components’ essential aesthetic qualities; others
shift the pictoral plane to make complex 3D arrangements appear flat. She
achieves these effects entirely through the careful adjustment of light, focus,
mirrors and backdrops, rather than through digital manipulation. And she
maintains
the
tension between illusion and honesty by including the occasional playful clue
for the sharp-eyed viewer: a shadow here, or a tell-tale edge there to break the
spell.
Biographical details:
Ali Bailey (British, b. 1982)
lives and works in Los Angeles and received his B.A. in Fine Art from University
of Brighton in 2006. He has had two major solo exhibitions with Golden and
Andrew Rafacz, Chicago in 2009 and 2010 respectively. He was chosen by the
Saatchi Gallery to participate in the Zoo Art Fair in 2007.
Jessica
Labatte (American, b.1981) lives and works in Chicago and received her MFA at
the School of Art Institute of Chicago in 2009. She had her first major solo
exhibition with Golden, Chicago in 2010. She has also exhibited in group shows
at the Hyde Park Art Center and the exhibition Partisan, Art Chicago in 2010.
Labatte was named as Chicago’s ‘2010 NewCity Breakout
Artist’.
Notes for Editors:
Image
captions:
Top left – Ralph Lauren, 2010, Ali Bailey, wood,
construction adhesive, paint can, 182.9 x 121.9 x 152.4 cm
Top right
– Circularity, 2009, Jessica Labatte, archival inkjet print, 50.8 x 61
cm
Address: All Hallows Hall, 6 Copperfield Street, London, SE1 0EP
Opening hours: Tuesday – Saturday 10am- 6pm or by appointment
Contacts and further information: +44(0)20 7928 3096 gallery@poppysebire.com
www.poppysebire.com
