MESSENGER
Ed Harper
Dominic Bradnum
Melissa Burn
21 APRIL- 27 MAY 2017
Venue: BEARSPACE, 152 Deptford HIgh Street, London SE8 3PQ
Open: Wed- Fri 10-3pm / Sat 10-6 pm
BEARSPACE is pleased to present a group exhibition of three artists to the gallery: painters Dominic Bradnum and Ed Harper, with sculptures by Melissa Burn. ‘Messenger’ looks at the interplay between the artist and its subject in this case an everyday interaction with their landscape as the focus for their work. Through their ponderings on the often overlooked, they draw and communicate meaning and take or communicate a sense of the profound to something overlooked.
In daily life we often look beyond our immediate surroundings, which become familiar, of little consequence or represent the ‘everyday-ness’ of our existence. It is usually when we are discovering an unfamiliar place that these elements seem different to us and we might take them in as signifiers of something or being somewhere else. What if the bin bag on the street was a truly celebrated and almost virtual in form, the pigeons congregating on a pavement became strange, almost like modernist sculptures and the dreary seascape was brought alive with artists poetry in lights. These three artists bring an ‘otherness’ into the every day, interjecting a filter onto throwaway objects and landscapes.
Dominic Bradnum is a painter based in Worthing on the South East Coast. He studied Fine Art at Oxford Brookes University and went on to win the Wells Art Contemporary 2013/45 Park Lane Art Prize and has exhibited widely. Alongside making work the artist also composes analogue symphonies.
Melissa Burn is an artist based in Leeds, where she currently had a studio at serf. She has shown widely in the UK from Brick Lane to Glasgow and Margate in many curated exhibitions and also undertook an artist residency ‘The Wild Project’ in the Czech Republic in 2013. The artist studied MA Fine Art at University of Leeds in 2014.
Ed Harper is a painter based in Leigh-on-Sea, he studied his MA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths University in 1998, and has previously had a solo exhibition at BEARSPACE, entitled ‘What you see is What You Get.’ His work was selected to show as part of a contemporary painting exhibition at Southampton City Art Gallery and is now in the collection and an 18m long print, commissioned by The Northern Gallery of Contemporary Art was created to occupy the project space during their exhibitions.
BEARSPACE is pleased to present a group show of artists outside London, creating great contemporary work relevant to their everyday landscapes, demonstrating skill and technique as well as imagination.
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Image credit (Above and homepage)
'Crowstone Rd.' by Ed Harper, Acrylic on canvas, 92.5x66cm