Supportico Lopez is pleased to announce its first solo exhibition with British artist Emily Wardill featuring the film “Basking in what feels like ‘an ocean of grace’, I soon realize that I’m not looking at it but rather that I AM it, recognising myself”.
In “Basking in what feels like ‘an ocean of grace’, I soon realize that I’m not looking at it but rather that I AM it, recognising myself”, the interest of the artist is focusing on the exemplary and the symbolic but instead of taking a symbol that was constructed ideologically then applied to reality, Emily Wardill took the setting of a ‘focus group’ giving us the possibility to look at them but not to listen what they are talking about. In this way the group become a composition of forms where the spoken language is substituted by bodily gesture and sound. The 16mm film is structured on a soundtrack make with a computer software to compose music that would appear symmetrical when seen laid out as sheet music and the centre of the music, where it began to play inverted, coincides with the middle of the film when we pass from the inside of nightclub to the vision of the focus group trough a series of combination of mirrored surfaces and reflections.
Philosophical, political and psychoanalytic concepts are the substratum of Emily Wardill’s works, reworked into a rich visual repertoire that retraces the history of thought, playing with a narrative of complex interrelations. The structure of the language and its transformation at the hands of the media are at the heart of her investigation. In this sense the means by which ideas are expressed takes on fundamental importance as the use of 16mm film – which Wardill finds essential – is not a purely aesthetic choice but rather responds to specific desire to restore the lapidary nature of objects through the filmic image. Metaphors and allegories undergo a metamorphosis to adapt to the communicative codes of different historical eras, always moulding a language that skilfully incorporates additional meanings.
Emily Wardill lives and works in London. Recent solo exhibitions include NKV Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden, the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), London, Galerie Standard Oslo and Jonathan Viner / Fortescue Avenue, London. Her works have also been included in group exhibitions such as “Lightbox” at Tate Britain, “Ballet Mecanique” at Timothy Taylor Gallery, “Word Event” at Kunsthalle Basel, “Reykjavik Experiment Marathon” curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, as well as “An Ambiguous Case”, curated by Emily Pethick at MUMOK, Vienna. Wardill, in 2008, won the Follow Fluxus–After Fluxus grant. In 2010 she will have a solo show at De Appel, Amsterdam.
