Shadow Optics at Lubomirov/Angus-Hughes, Clapton: Things falling apart

An excerpt from Solveig Settemsdal’s Segment I.I.

The art world today is so vast that it’s impossible for any one individual to have a complete understanding of everything that’s going on at one moment,” says the gallerist Iavor Lubomirov.

Lubomirov is director of Lubomirov/Angus-Hughes in Lower Clapton, which describes itself as a “charitable venue for curators” rather than a traditional gallery.

“Commercial galleries tend to have a stable of artists they show regularly big institutions are usually looking retrospectively at artists careers, so that puts us in a unique position,” he says.

Shadow Optics is the gallery’s latest venture into curation. It brings together four relatively unknown artists and is curated by CJ Mahoney, a sculptor who runs an archaeological project space in Cambridge.

“She’s interested in things that have a sense of delicacy about them so as if they’re about to fall apart, barely holding together, and she’s also interested in light (which is fairly common among artists anyway). It’s these two themes she’s trying to bring together in this show.”

Among the artists featuring in the exhibition is Solveig Settemsdal, whose work exists in a hinterland between drawing, sculpture and photography. She uses materials that are easily affected by their surroundings – giving sculpture an almost liquid quality.

“I think if you at Solveig’s photos they’re fascinating because you have no idea how they’re created or what they are but there’s a sense of things floating in outer space or underwater,” says Lubomirov.

“It could be like an atomic explosion it could be an organic animal or an alien – whatever it is it looks like it’s about to float away and you’ve caught it at this precious moment of existence.”

A still from Georgie Grace’s Shedding.

The group show also includes work by Georgie Grace, whose videos look into technological change and our tolerance for flickering light.

And Reece Jones makes drawings that start off whimsical but which undergo repeated application and removal until they evolve into a finished image that is difficult to define.

“Of course the thing is these are artists who are not represented by our gallery or who are necessarily going to be seen together again, Lubomirov says.

“It is a moment that will come and then disappear.”

Shadow Optics
3–25 September
Lubomirov/Angus-Hughes
26 Lower Clapton Road
E5 0PD
lubomirov-angus-hughes.com