LOCATION: PECKHAM ARCHES, SE15 4QN

08.05.24 - 18.05.24

Open Thursday - Saturday, 1 - 6 pm

PV: Wednesday 8th May, 6 - 9 pm

LIQUIFY, co-curated by Jon Baker and OHSH Projects, is a show about how people record the body using experimental photographic techniques. The artists in the exhibition expand the medium by incorporating processes including assemblage, photomontage, painting, digital manipulation or by playing with image quality. Bodies are stretched, remixed and transformed.

The works are created for different purposes whether documentary, medical, galleries, fetish or fashion magazines. These contexts cross-contaminate each other showing photography as a culturally relevant medium with a huge scope for experimentation and evolution.

ARTISTS:

Jon Baker
Jonny Briggs
Alannah Cyan
Valentina De'Mathà
Hester Finch
Rosie Gibbens
Benjamin Jones
Anna-Lena Krause
Eric Kroll
Roger Weiss
Kasia Wozniak

LIQUIFY will also be open for Peckham 24 - the free weekend festival that champions new voices in contemporary photography, which will have a special late opening on Friday 17th May from 6pm - midnight.

  • Jon Baker (b.1977) is an artist working with photography and drawing. He makes photographic images using a room-size macro camera. The highly detailed images reference the human body, puppets and children's art. Recent drawing work has included watercolour and ink images that take an X-ray view of the body revealing mechanically enhanced limbs and organs. Jon is interested in the future of the (his) body and the role of technology in enhancing it.

  • Emerging from the natural landscapes of Ireland and Switzerland, Alannah Cyan is a London-based artist who specialises in crafting tender, dream-like nude portraits with a focus on photography and an appreciation for queerness in this field. Cyan’s practice is focused on creating a new visual language for queer erotic photography that invites curiosity beyond its sexual and erotic value. Inspired by the landscapes of her native Ireland and Switzerland, Cyan infuses her photography with a sense of natural beauty and tranquillity, employing techniques reminiscent of traditional landscape painting. Through her photography, Cyan delves into themes of intimacy, identity, and its links to folklore, aiming to redefine perceptions of queer eroticism. Crafting fantastical, surrealist narratives in her work, she aims to offer a fresh perspective on exploring queer identity. In 2023, Cyan graduated from Central Saint Martin’s, studying a Fine Art BA. She was selected for the 2023/2024 Bloomberg New Contemporaries.

  • Hester Finch (b. 1981, UK) has recently shifted her focus back to painting, after a period of five years spent working almost exclusively with soft pastel and the female nude. Whilst still using some of the same compositional devices such as splicing and fragmenting, her exploration of psychological terrains and self-portraiture is evolving through collating, juxtaposing, and collaging a variety of oftentimes seemingly random imagery, in pursuit ultimately of a dense gestalt. Hester studied at the Ruskin School of Art (1999-2002) and is currently undertaking a MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art.

  • Benjamin Jones (b.1994, UK) is a London-based artist who studied photography at the Bath School of Art and Design, working primarily with analog photography. His practice deals with the way that we draw meaning from the photograph as both image and object, often in relation to the natural world. Jones holds a BA in Photography from Bath School of Art and Design (2013-16) and studied at the New Media Summer School, Communications University China (2015). He has undertaken residencies at Gonzo Unit, Thessaloniki, Styria-Artist-in-Residence (St.A.i.R.), Graz, the Spike Island Graduate Fellowship, Bristol, and Porthleven Prize, Cornwall. Jones is represented by LOOM Gallery, Milan.

  • Eric David Kroll (b.1946) is an American photojournalist, fetish photographer, erotica historian, and book editor. Kroll worked and lived in many worlds at once; fashion, music, and the art and film scenes. During the 70s and 80s, he photographed everyday scenes from his personal life, photographed celebrities, fashion and the New York social scene for Elle Magazine, Vogue, The New York Times and Der Spiegel. He photographed personalities and artists such as Madonna, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, and Korean video artist Nam June Paik. In 1976 he published "Sex Objects," with a grant from the New York State Council of the Arts grant, a book documenting sex workers across America. Artist Richard Prince appropriated an image from the iconic book "Sex Objects" in one of his works that sold for around $2 million. In the early 1980s, he turned away from portrait photography with a series titled "Fetish Girls" (1994), which remains one of the best-selling books in the publisher Taschen's history. Kroll worked with Benedikt Taschen from 1993 to 2007 as photo editor and erotica historian. For OHSH projects Erik is exhibiting a photograph of the artist Kimberly Austin who had the song “Kimberly Austin” written about her in 1996 by the band Porno for Pyros.

  • Kasia Wozniak (b.1983, Poland) is a photographer whose artistic exploration revolves around the themes of memory and time. Through the predominant use of the wet plate collodion technique, she delves into the tangible nature of photographs and challenges contemporary perspectives on viewing them. Wozniak's work raises questions about the concept of 'truth' in photography, prompting an inquiry into our experience of the present and the past. Utilizing the analog medium, Wozniak employs long exposures, intricate darkroom experiments, and manipulations to stretch and distort the perception of time. Her artistic process involves a deliberate departure from the pursuit of accuracy, embracing approximation and navigating towards a more elusive realm. The resulting photographs bear witness to this exploration, with each anomaly becoming a visible element on the photograph's surface. Alongside her artistic endeavours, Wozniak is deeply committed to preserving the craft of photography. Her passion for the medium is evident in her dedication to both personal projects and commercial commissions. Through various collaborations, she continues to navigate the intersection of art and technique, leaving a lasting imprint on the evolving landscape of contemporary photography.

  • (b. 1985, London) lives and works in London. In search of lost parts of his childhood, Briggs explores a reality outside of the one he was socialised into by creating new ones using himself and his parents as the main subjects. Briggs uses photography to explore his relationship with deception, the constructed reality of the family, and to question the boundaries between child/adult, self/other, nature/culture, real/fake in attempt to revive the unconditioned self, beyond the family bubble. Although easily assumed to be photoshopped or counterfeit, upon closer inspection the images are often seen to be more real than first expected. Involving staged installations, the cartoonesque and the performative, Briggs looks back to his younger self and attempts to recapture childhood nature through assuming adult eyes.

  • Valentina De’Mathà (b.1981 Italy) is an Italian-Swiss artist who lives and works in Switzerland. The research of Valentina De'Mathà, a protean artist, ranges from figuration to abstraction, always with a conceptual strictness in the name of freedom to experiment with different disciplines and take on different formal codes each time. The result is an apparently unstable identity imbued with experiences and relationships that are the result of sudden changes and instinctive approaches to multiple experiences, but also to profound intimate reflections over extended periods of time. Thus, traditional languages are rendered in a completely experimental form. De'Mathà's works contextualize and localize possible, ambiguous and transitory relationships such as our thoughts about ourselves, about things and actions, with unpredictable consequences, determined by the loss of control, by error/wandering, which inevitably produces wonder. Central to the artist is memory, which holds things together and makes them persist over time, attempting to give order to the disorganized and subjective matter of which emotions and the vision one has of personal and collective events are part, in a continuous delicate balance between intimacy and relationship with the world.

  • Rosie Gibbens (b.1993, UK) makes performances, videos, sculptures and photographs that feature her body. Using absurd humour, she explores gender performativity, sexual politics, consumer desire, labour and the slippery overlaps between these. She often makes sculptures that combine everyday objects with sewn body parts and become props in the performances or films. The mindset behind her work is of someone attempting to participate seamlessly in contemporary life, but not quite managing. Rosie studied ‘Contemporary Art Practice’ at the Royal College of Art (2018) and ‘Performance Design and Practice’ at Central Saint Martins (2015). She has exhibited and performed at institutions including Matt’s Gallery, TJ Boulting, South London Gallery and Whitechapel Gallery. In 2022 Rosie won the Ingram Prize, was shortlisted for the Mark Tanner Sculpture Award and was awarded a Sarabande residency. In 2023 she was chosen as one of nine ‘best young artists working in London’ by Eddy Frankel, art editor of Time Out.

  • Anna-Lena Krause is a multidisciplinary artist based in London. Her research, rooted across numerous fields of psychology and behavioural science, results in artworks questioning the bonds connecting people in the modern world. The Berlin born artist delves into photography, sculpture, performance and continues to explore new ways to research and dissect the themes relating to the being and our perceptions. She obtained her BA in Photography at the University of Applied Science in 2018 in Berlin and her MA Degree in 2021 at the Royal College of Art in London. Krause has had various group exhibitions including the Rencontres des Arles, France, the European Months of Photography in Berlin, ‘Sweet Harmony‘ at Saatchi Gallery in London, ‘No Photos on the Dance Floor‘ at the C/O Berlin and ‘Up All Night: Looking Closely at Rave Culture’ at KUMU Art Museum in Estonia.

  • The photographic work of Roger Weiss delves deeply into contemporary Anthropic identity. Weiss, a Swiss photographer, graduated summa cum laude from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Italy, re-elaborates human bodies through fragmentations, hybridisations, dilations, and photographic reconstructions, to reveal the archetypal form of the human being. Weiss’s work is more pictorial than photographic, capturing every nuance — each skin pore, hair, stretch mark, and detail — in sharp focus. His close-up perspective consistently begins from the base, ascending until the head gradually disappears. In his art, every element is central; nothing is arbitrary. Each detail has significance and weight, including the texture of the stool/pedestal supporting most of his figures, and the yellow dots used for focus during macro photography, which contribute to the distinctiveness of his creations. This unique approach offers an authentic and provocative look at the definition of beauty, changeling the stereotypes perpetuated by modern culture. The Human Dilatations series, from which Monolith and The Hug subsequently emerged, serves as a critical look and a call for a reflection on the abuse of these aesthetic canons.