Sadaf Chezari, Siân Macfarlane and Sharon O’Neill | Into View
Sadaf Chezari
Sharon O'Neill
An exhibition featuring work by BA & MA photography graduates Sadaf Chezari, Siân Macfarlane and Sharon O’Neill.
This is a new exhibition slot dedicated to emerging photographers selected by the Photofusion Gallery Committee from the 2013 summer BA and MA degree graduate shows.
We have selected 3 artists including Sadaf Chezari from the BA Photography course at LCC, Sharon O’Neill, an MA Photography graduate from Brighton University, and Sian Macfarlane, an LCC MA Photography graduate who was also awarded the LCC Photofusion Award 2013.
The exhibition collectively explores the concepts of space, architecture, alienation and identity through photographic archival found footage, staged domestic settings and video. Each artist is presenting an extended body of work since graduating and the exhibition brings into view some of the directions emerging photographers are currently taking.
Sharon O'Neill
Sharon O’Neill’s project Flats is a photographic exploration of an architect’s vision of the ‘modern world’ as told through the lives of the current inhabitants of one of his buildings. Through a mixture of archive material and contemporary photographs, the work centres on a council block constructed in 1956 as part of the massive post-war house-building programme and was designed by Sir John Leslie Martin, principal architect of the Royal Festival Hall. Flats is presented in the form of photographic prints mixed with extractions of archive material and accompanied by a book.
Sharon O'Neill
Sadaf Chezari
Continuing to investigate our relationship to space, Sadaf Chezari’s project Somewhere Else presents an interrogation into the concepts of empty spaces, alienation and identity. This project has evolved from a series made during her BA and consists of a collection of photographs documenting her father going about his daily routine alongside an archive of old family pictures which has led to conflicting feelings of detachment and sentiment towards her origins. The resulting exhibition serves as a record of attempting to make sense of a past, whilst creating a restrained relationship between the images and the viewer through a repetitive use of objects, geometrical patterns and vandalised imagery.
Sadaf Chezari
Sian Macfarlene
Working with video, Siân Macfarlane traces paths through archival materials, unearthing parallels, and using instances of repetition or synchronicity to dictate direction. From the starting point of a series of annotated photographs from 1946, she retraced the journey dictated by these photographs, uncovering a history of landscape painting based around a church in North Wales, and discovering an archive of letters between a Victorian artist, Lily Whaite, and her father, and ephemera; gallery listings, pamphlets, dried flowers. A car crash that had happened when the artist was a child was revealed to have occurred in this location. We will meet sooner than two mountains explores a re-encounter with a place where people and their experiences exist as latency, and a search to reveal them.
© Sian Macfarlene. Still from the moving image piece We will meet sooner than two mountains