Open Up to Right Here

Open-Up-To-Right-Here   

14-27 January 2023 at Sett Studios Gallery @settstudios. 
Produced by Forest Arts @theforestarts and The Forest Edinburgh @theforestedinburgh

The exhibition centred around the film Surveillance Footage, by Agatha Scaggiante @agathapple with music by Griffin Jennings.

The film is composed of excerpts of open-source CCTV video feeds from around the world, accessed online from the artist’s own computer. It is a haunting collection of moments that reveal the strange and the beautiful of the everyday, moments caught on camera without the subjects’ and landscapes’ awareness of their being watched.

"Open-Up-To-Right-Here and then you will have something coming from your experience that the whole world will admire and need." - Ishmael Reed.
Link to full film: 
https://youtu.be/u9CMnPK56fQ

Complimenting the film are works exhibited by several other talented artists who similarly explore the intersection of the liminal and the mundane. The fact and process of observation itself is the subject matter for this collection of artists who use their various practices to capture the intertwined beauty and oddness of people and places that are easy to overlook, unless one is looking out.

Molly Wickett @mollywickettart :
My practice explores liminality through locating work in spaces which are neither here nor there. Instead of focusing on queerness and my disability as something negative, I want to explore the possibility of liminality as a tool for future building. These photographs were taken every morning at Sunrise, when I took my ice hands to the beach and watched them melt. Some mornings when I arrived, it was still dark. I loved the cyclical nature of the water returning, the tides moving, that for one hour I reached out and then it was all gone. Traces of the melting ice were left on the desolate beach.

Rachel Stanley @r.achelstanley  :
Rachel Stanley (b.1996, Epsom, based in Edinburgh, UK) is a painter whose practice speculates on the possibilities between abstraction and figuration. Taking reference from natural forms and the human body, the paintings perform a shifting of perspectives - looking across, over, under and through - in order to obscure and undo the landscape. Bringing sentience to otherwise static forms, the works exist in a grey ‘between' area, suggesting double meanings and requiring multiple visits.
The works employ a playful consideration of materiality and surface, utilising burlap, calico and muslin in place of canvas, and painting in varying degrees of thickness - gently staining, thickly layering, and using gestural mark-making more akin to drawing. This is an intuitive and sensory process, whereby paintings reveal themselves over time.

David Rae @davidrae_studio :
The locations forming the basis for my work are mainly those that featured in my childhood, places visited or those that are re-imagined. Capturing a sense of place is an important aspect to each piece; alluding to an atmosphere in which I explore the presence of absence. The depicted scenes can be a fusion of multiple places, creating somewhere believable but ultimately never an exact setting, populated by objects that suggest human interaction and originate from my wider interests, sport being a prime example. Within the paintings I like to include subtle narratives creating an element of curiosity but not to an overpowering level, just enough to question the viewer’s judgement of what the work could be about.
The title and compositional elements within the paintings will inevitably offer clues regarding each painting’s subject.

Daisy Mason @daisymason.studio :
New Lanark marks the beginning of an ongoing photographic project engaging with often overlooked yet omnipotent surveillance objects found all over the UK. This work aims to nod at the panoptic structure of government bodies and private companies who feel the need to monitor even the most innocuous locations.
Daisy Mason graduated from Fine Art Photography at The Glasgow School of Art in 2022. Her practice is a combination of installation and photographic work exploring surveillance capitalism and culture in domestic and industrial spaces.

François Giro @girofrancois :
François Giro is a self-taught artist based in Edinburgh, who works primarily with ink on paper. His work explores the psychological dimension of space. He either draws directly on location or improvises drawings that are more ambitious in his studio, without a preliminary plan, in order to intuitively respond to the impressions and observations that he remembers of real places (usually familiar neighbourhoods in Edinburgh or places observed while travelling). He is interested in showing how our mind, but also our most mundane gestures, shape the environment that we inhabit.

Millie Player @__mllplr :
I view time as an empty vessel, into which we may pour our perception of it. We may each create our own visualisations of time, mythologizing lives and a past that are not ours. Seemingly meaningless jottings can become talismans of a different existence; Past and present textures can quietly resonate next to one another in temporal suspension.

Rachel Howarth @rachel_howarth_  :
My art practice is concerned with ephemerality and ephemera - with things not built to last, lest become ‘fine art.’ Often, I paint from analog images that I can rifle through by hand (such as postcards or in magazines). However, sometimes a screen presents me with something to ‘screenshot’ and paint. When watching Who Wants To Be A Millionaire reruns during the national lockdown, I noticed how strange and intense the show looked. In painting these strange moments, of random contestants chosen for their facial expressions, they become even stranger. The intimate closeups paired with multiple choice questions out of context look quite absurd. 

Special thanks to Emily at Forest Arts for making all of this possible.
Serious thanks as well to all the Forest Arts volunteers, Aleks for kindly and perfectly installing all the work, Sophie Nardi-Bart for countless help, the crew at Sett Studios and of course the talented artists who have put their time, energy and creativity into this show.