Angelina Davis: Coming Up For Air

Tuesday 26 April 2022 10:00
Sunday 22 May 2022 16:30

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The exhibition is available to view and buy in full for delivery or collection

John Rank Gallery

A solo exhibition of the paintings of Angelina Davis. Davis was selected for the Bloomberg New Contemporaries exhibition 2021 and has recently had a major painting enter the Government Art Collection.

Artists Statement

Early works explored domestic interiors, where rooms occupied themselves through playful anthropomorphosis. This developed into an interest in reconstructing accidental narratives using found material, other peoples holiday films, abandoned ephemera etc projected onto domestic objects, and paintings that explored nostalgic illustration as a vehicle for personal stories.

I grew up in an era where exposure to television was a deliberate and shared experience and my recollection of TV as a child, one of the earliest influences on my interest in narrative, is that it was slow, deliberate and awkward with gaps between to speculate. I have long been interested in the strong associations that one has with a particular visual form from a dimly remembered past. We respond to the world through internalized colour memories and visual languages; a world mediated through film and television and the screen.

I am currently revisiting the rural english landscapes of my childhood, fabricating landscapes from multiple sources including recollection, direct experience through drawing and walking in the landscape and found imagery. I am restoring the English Elm as depicted in historical paintings and recollected films as a metaphor for a distant idea of englishness that has uncomfortable associations in contemporary British life. The English Elm disappeared in my lifetime and seems to me to have become a powerful representation of loss and nostalgia. It appears in all English landscape painting, and then disappears as it disappeared suddenly from the landscape through Dutch Elm disease. The settings for these landscapes are ambiguous claustrophobic studio interiors that reveal the edges and hidden spaces that result from these painted ‘fabrications’.

Painting is fabrication with truth at its core.