Gina Parr & Ian Hoskin: Deceived with ornament

British artist couple Gina Parr, painter & photographer and Ian Hoskin, photographer, present their latest works in Deceived with Ornament, a timely series of photographs from two months of journeying through Sri Lanka earlier this year.
The photographs show their accumulated experience and perspectives from those travels. Seemingly insignificant elements of life captured on camera in abstract forms of expression bring these collected fragments together in the grid of the exhibition and create keys for understanding the unfamiliar. What follows are images both fragile and poetic, with messages of encouragement to explore behind one’s own realities.

Gina Parr ́s approach is a microcosm of surface, fragments of diversity founded on variety of exteriors; some human made, others adopting form by natural causes. Their very strong presence lends them the appearance of enlarged particles, those vibrant atoms of the country. The images exist by themselves, without need for definitions or description and, with their tactile and lively texture, seem as paintings. Parr removes from the viewers the possibility of knowing what the images really are; and her practice is to expose a world of illusions where the viewer self experiences the works purely by their visuality and not by their predeterminate definitions.

Ian Hoskin ́s works are repetitive images of colourful circles with dark background. Their appearance of three-dimensionality and lightness remind of floating candies at amusement parks. The images are actually tires wrapped by manufacturers in various plastic foil. With the different wrappings and logos, they compete with each other for customers’ attention. Hoskin ́s simplicity of representation and his careful treatment show viewers the possibility of excavating beauty in everyday objects. Tires possess significant importance in the life of their users. Hoskin’s take here is the different attitudes we may have in relation to everyday objects at the centre of our lives.

The exhibition borrows its title from Shakespeare ́s Merchant of Venice: the phrase deceived with ornament symbolically points to peoples ́ tendency in making opinions based on shiny, outer appearances that differ often from inside characteristics. Both Parr and Hoskin explore the ideas of value scales and the subjectivity of perspectives based on these considerations. With this exhibition they repurpose the beauty in ordinary details and the viewer’s own responsibility for seeing.

The artists will be present at the opening reception Thursday, 16 May from 5-7pm

Gallery hours are Tuesday – Friday 12-5pm, and by appointment.

Kilde: Renata Maiblum Gallery