Border Controls by Rosalind Davis and Justin Hibbs

BORDER CONTROLS
Rosalind Davis and Justin Hibbs
The Sevenoaks Kaleidoscope Gallery, Buckhurst Lane Sevenoaks, TN13 1LQ

Special Event:
Saturday 24 November 2.30-4.30pm.
Artists in conversation with Sasha Bowles. Talk begins at 3pm. Free

Read an exhibition review by David Minton here
Excerpt: As an infectious notion of composing takes shape, we are both empowered and constrained by the frame to choose and compose, reject and move on. Looking from the ‘other’ open end of the piece, the ‘back’, alter-ego to the mirrored surface, is softer in black and grey, pulling, as it were, its mirrored side out to escape to a freer space; ground, welded corners and workplace matter-of-factness of steel subvert any illusions that the reflections might harbour of what might be real….

Sensibilities and sensitivities inhabit touch and mark, eye and concept, point and counterpoint. Inferences resonate knowingly through the works here in a to-ing and fro-ing of aesthetic positions.
The implicit notion of taste that infuses this show offers hints and tints of suggestion, of control and direction, the collaboration dance-like, leading and following, point and counterpoint…..

Exhibition: 6-24 November 2018
Opening times: Monday to Friday (except Thursday) 9-6pm | Thursday: 9- 8pm | Saturday: 9-5pm
Only 35 minutes from Charing Cross, 27 minutes from London Bridge with frequent trains.

Border Controls – Rosalind Davis Justin Hibbs

Border Controls is an exhibition considered within the shadow of increasingly restricted borders and political controls with regard to migration and the increasing isolationism seen both here in the UK (with Brexit) as well as the wider geographical tensions seen currently in Europe and America. The collaboration between Davis and Hibbs see’s the artists’ consciously inhabiting the thresholds and boundaries between their respective practices in an attempt to openup conversation and discourse around these issues. The personal and political dimensions of art-making and authorship are seen here as a lens through which to consider wider social concerns and questions that address the dynamics of power, autonomy and control.

For their exhibition at Kaleidoscope Gallery, Davis and Hibbs will show the piece ‘Border Controls’– a large scale sculptural installation that brings together different aspects of both artists practice into direct dialogue with one another, creating a single collaborative work. Alongside this the artists will also exhibita number of individual artworks that extend this conversation. Within the parameters of the gallery neither artists work can be negotiated without experiencing reflections of the other within them. Physical borders cross, overlap, fluctuate and collapse within an installation which transforms, dematerialises and disorients our understanding of space.

Border Controls – Rosalind Davis Justin Hibbs

Davis and Hibbs have collaborated informally for years; over shared thematic concerns, overlapping research interests and an ongoing ‘conversation’ around one another’s practices and curatorial projects. Both have independent careers but also are a couple who share a studio, where inevitable questions arise about how and where to set boundaries.

‘Artistic production is nodal, networked, and a perpetually unfinished project, things nudging each other, domino effects transpiring. The real-world analogue of this is that in an artist’s studio, it’s always a transitional moment: the detached artwork as standalone statement is a falsity, a piece of theatre. In reality, one thing leads to another, all kinds of ambient forces shaping what’s made’(Martin Herbert).

The artists individual practices share common references to the social, political and aesthetic agendas encoded within architectural structures and in different ways renegotiate the visual and ideological legacies of modernism to probe both real and idealised notions of space. They create structures where interpretation and the reading of context is contingent on the audiences’ individual and relational responses.

“Davis’ sculptural interventions have an ability to change composition in a circular narrative portraying how we move through space while adapting to the structures and how we adapt structure to the way we move through space.’ (Jillian Knipe. Wall Street International).There is an ongoing negotiation between our perspective of being external to the structure and our bodily experience of interacting with it.

Hibbs’ site-specific installations, sculptures and wall drawings re-map the relationships between architecture, spatial perception and it’s representation across different formats. With a sense of constantly shifting perspectives the work plays off the spatial illusionism of the image with the structural language of three-dimensional construction processes.

Artists biogs here .

We will be hosting a talk with Rosalind during our next show with Jordy Kerwick, which you can find out more about HERE