Alison Owen is a ceramicist and collage artist living and working in  Poughkeepsie, New York. She creates vessels that hover between two and three dimensions. Each piece is made from slab-rolled clay cut into shapes like a dress-maker’s pattern, and pieced together to create forms that are gently dimensional yet invoke the pictorial plane. One or both sides might be decorated with a drawing, painting, or collage depicting relics, rainbows, figures, or flowers drawn in the tradition of the still lifes that so often represent vases themselves. Just as her ceramics embrace the flat plane of the still lifes that they reference, her works on paper often enter the third dimension, with objects resting on exposed stretchers, or canvases cut, draped, and restitched. Throughout Owen’s work, she draws attention to interior space, interior life, the life of objects, and the stories they hold.

Anna Choutova is an artist living and working in London, UK. Choutova’s practice is best described as a “browse through a forgotten section of a Duty Free store.” She is fascinated by the things we consume in an effort to alter our identity. Coming from an Eastern European background and being thrown into a Westernized upbringing in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, her practice functions as a form of rose-tinted voyeurism into an idealized Western culture. The culture she was born into both fetishizes and demonizes American consumer culture. Choutova’s practice reflects this duality and comments on the push-and-pull of East and West that exists both within her and within most post-Soviet Eastern Europeans. She has put herself between Malevich and McCarthy and is on a mission to marry destitute bleakness with inconceivable excess in her own practice.

Presented in Collaboration with Arusha Gallery

Anna Rocke is an artist living and working in the United Kingdom and graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 2019. Her work acts as a safe and free space to explore the awkward and fragile interaction between familiar and unfamiliar spaces. Painting from memory, she naturally condenses images from first and second hand experiences using incessant patterns, providing a liminal space, in which these realities or fantasies can exist in their distorted, fragmented and transitory form. Uncanny figures and objects are held between areas of pattern, so reality is reordered, and space loses its logic. Shapes and figures have a slight distortion, which serves to reflect the warping of memory. Little clues to their place in time are left, ambiguous narratives evolve to appear unrecognizable, disorientating the viewer and creating a timeless between space. 

Beau Gabriel is an American artist living and working in London, UK. He graduated from Yale University with a degree in literature and then moved to France where he worked in a law office, studied baroque oboe at Versailles, and ultimately took up painting. He came to London in 2017, where he obtained an MA from the Royal College of Art. Gabriel uses traditional notions of formalism and materiality to express his American upbringing, relationship to history, and authorial role as a painter.

Carly Beck is an artist living and working in New York City. Beck worked for several fashion designers before turning to painting. Her playful, vibrant works include pet portraits, interiors, exteriors, fabrics, and wallpapers. The acrylic based paintings are inspired by vintage textiles, past and present fashion collections, and the day-dreams of domesticated creatures. Beck’s recent collaborations include: a wallpaper collection for The Carlyle Hotel based on characters and patterns from the 2022 Carlyle calendar illustrated by Beck; illustrating a children’s book “The Lost Umbrellas of Lexington;” and producing and illustrating a series of postcard books for Barnes & Noble of whimsical felines and sophisticated dogs against colorful patterned backdrops and city scenes.

Presented in Collaboration with Arusha Gallery

Casper White is an artist and curator living and working in Cardiff, Wales and graduated from Cardiff School of Art and Design in addition to receiving a masters at the University of Wales. His work centers on the history of portraiture and how an artist can approach the portrait. White is currently prioritizing how light articulates a subject and illuminates a surface. This can be seen in his candlelight paintings, included in the exhibition, which play upon similarities between images of people crying in classical works and images shared on social media. As co-founder and curator at LLE Projects, White focuses on creating relationships between works and using this to create conversation.

Colette Lavette is an artist living and working in the United Kingdom. At the center of both Lavette’s personal life and art practice is her passion for sustainability, as well as her interest in geological history and mythology. The gestures and postures of figures in her work, together with her use of light and dark, are reminiscent of Rococo and Renaissance masterpieces, reformulated in a contemporary, painterly language. Lavette has most recently exhibited her debut solo show “In Reverie” with Purslane and has exhibited work at Paul Smith, Act One Gallery, and OXO Tower Wharf. She was named June 2022’s “Artist of the Month” in Country Homes Magazine.

Presented in Collaboration with Arusha Gallery

Elaine Speirs is an artist born in Johannesburg and raised on the West Coast of Scotland. She completed her undergraduate degree at the Edinburgh College of Art before pursuing further studies at the Slade School of Fine Art. A regular exhibitor with the RSA, the SSA and the Mall Galleries, Speirs resume boasts a succession of prestigious awards including the Glasgow Club Award and the Caron Keating Memorial Award. Speirs has, in addition, been shortlisted for the National Open Art Competition and the Threadneedle Prize (2014). Historically, Speirs’ work has been informed by her children, their friends, and the identity she has herself carved out of motherhood. The biographical uncertainty of her own childhood -encountered first-hand in 2006, whereupon she returned to South Africa - have fostered in her practice the keen eye of a participant-observer. Speirs’ uniqueness is born of how absorbed in the life of her subjects her work is, how in constant protection of them her practice must be, but how, nevertheless, she is able to objectively and comprehensively chart the transition of girlhood to womanhood. Using bold gestures, fluid lines and a luminous palette, Speirs’ work sings with a kind of feminine perfume. Simultaneously compassionate and detached, profoundly implicated yet artistically removed, these are works which capture the candor of maternity and the innocence of childhood.