This Must Be The Place is an exhibition bringing together three painters living and working in Dundee for whom colour and the materiality of paint play a central role in their practice. The exhibition invites the painters, who are students and graduates of DJCAD, to respond to the idea of place through exploring themes of belonging, dwelling and home in a way that celebrates the medium of paint. This Must Be The Place aims to offer an insight into different approaches to painting, both figurative and abstract, whilst attempting to unite three artists and creating a platform for contemporary painting in Dundee.
Yasmin Davidson graduated from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in 2013.Her work is an exploration of her own childhood experiences, examining the ephemeral nature of memory and how the lens through which we look at the world changes with age. The artist invites you in, to engage and to position yourself within her private world and the skewed reality the work inhabits. The work displays both humour and poignancy in equal measure, straddling between the familiar and alien simultaneously.
“Recently my art has been focusing on my own personal experience of growing up in the 90s, being a teenage girl and having pre conceived notions of sex and what my adolescent idea of sex actually meant. The topic of puberty, growing hair in unusual places, voices suddenly breaking and the frustrating emotions of falling in love for the first time is something that we all can relate to.”
Natasha Dijkhoff is a Dutch artist woking in drawing, painting, printmaking, film and sound. Her work explores ‘painting’ through the processes of screen-printing and waterless lithography. She works on large and small-scale prints on different surfaces that include metal, copper and paper. The works are experimentation with colour, layering and textures that contains organic shapes, as well as gestural and geometrical mark making.
“My art is influenced by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s assertion: ‘we make new connection with experimentations; to release the fresh air of other possibilities’. Deleuze links creativity with processes of life, defining art as a ‘language of sensation’. My work combines diverse organic structures with gestural and geometric marks to create a natural expression, through the language of art.”
Nicola Wiltshire is originally from London and has lived in Dundee for the past 8 years. Alongside painting, she is also interested in making connections between art and artists through writing and curating.
She is currently developing a series of paintings called ‘Contemporary Icons’ that make connections between Christian Icon paintings with other areas of contemporary culture. She is really interested the idea of God, or the leader, and worship in the many strands of culture and subculture. By pulling together fractured elements of Christianity, Islam, Tarot, fashion and music, she hopes to create something universal(ly meaningless).
“My work is figurative, but isn’t quite portraiture. Instead, the people in my paintings coalesce in a way that fabricates a sort of ambiguous community. Through painting someone, I am allowed to make permanent a throwaway moment in time.
The purpose of bringing the three of us together is to explore our similarities, highlight our differences and begin to create a narrative between our work that otherwise wouldn’t be there.”
This Must be the Place:
Venue: Meadow Mill Projects, Wasps Studios, Meadow Mill, West Henderson’s Wynd, Dundee, DD1 5BY. Directions.
Preview: Friday 31st July 2015, 7-9pm
Exhibition continues: 1st and 2nd August (12-6pm)
www.yasmindavidson.com
www.newbloodart.com/artist/2148/natasha-dijkhoff
www.nicolawiltshire.com