Elliott’s interest in sculpture and in the three dimensional form in space can clearly be seen in her paintings, but there is frequently a use of decorative fabric design as a background. The three dimensional forms and flat patterned areas serve to play off one another in playful and subversive ways, confusing the picture plane, and undermining the polite intensions of such fabrics. The energetic shapes which leap across her canvases remind one of organic forms such as vegetables or roots. They are sometimes elegant, or baroque, sometimes abject, but ultimately they can’t quite be pinned down, confounding our desire to categorize and locate meaning.

Having documented a five-week driving trip across America in the Summer of 2007 from East coast to West coast, a process of editing then occurred. A residue of the journey was left: a slightly oblique take on the so-called ‘American Experience’.

In a world already saturated with images, the powerful ones remain with us. The emotive locations of David Lynch might precondition our sense of alienation in small town America, reinforced by the seemingly empty but nostalgic scenes captured by Edward Hopper. Even the sculptural work of Robert Gober that comments on suppression and certain marginal aspects of society can be brought into consideration on such a journey. One must obviously not forget Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road.

This particular collaboration brings together the performative and character-based work of Tom Colebrook with the analysis of space and notions of memory in James Bacchi-Andreoli’s imagery. Informal snapshots are combined with the hope and desire to create photographs of iconic quality. A sense of pictorial unification is somehow discovered: seemingly disparate images are brought together to develop new narratives. Eccentricities of local behaviour throughout the journey are juxtaposed with our own idiosyncrasies to produce a series. In Baudelaire’s Painter of Modern Life the artist or flâneur must pay attention to the everyday and the now. We hope to explore the gap between our expectations of the trip and what we actually encountered.

James Bacchi-Andreoli was born in 1977 in London. He graduated from Goldsmiths’ (BA) in 2000 and Chelsea College of Art (MA) in 2002. He has shown with the Contemporary Arts Society, The Arts Council and recently at The Lightbox Gallery in Woking. Tom Colebrook was born in London in 1978. He graduated from The Slade (BA) in 2002 and is represented by Allsopp Contemporary in London.

For further information and images please contact: j.bacchiandreoli@btopenworld.com / tom@barryandtarquin.com

Gallery Open: Wednesdays to Sunday 12 - 6pm
Admission Free
Disabled Access
Transport: Rail/Underground - New Cross/New Cross Gate Buses - 21, 36, 136, 321