Untitled {OK if you insist, The Brit Melt}, lettrasets & beeswax on canvas, 2004 When in Rome II & III Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, 2004 Habitat, Exeter, 2004 ‘When In Rome’, a group exhibition curated by Raimi Gbadamosi, featuring work by Hurvin Anderson; Daniel Baker; Ansuman Biswas; Suki Chan; Wilma Ehni; Nooshin Farhid; Amanda Francis; Raimi Gbadamosi; Paul Jones; Silia KaTung; Margareta Kern; Takafumi Homma; Ronee Hui; Maria Meade; Agnes Poitevin-Navarre; Harold Offeh; Paul O’Kane; Sadia Ur-Rehman; and Raymond Yap. ‘When in Rome’, features artists engaged with a range of personal issues within their practice, which then interacts with the socio/political space of contemporary British Art. In presenting artists of ‘cultural diversity’ who consider their practice a profession, the show functions as a discursive space, a forum, to debate the consequences of history, language, and artistic authority. ‘Art as a language’ extracts various definitions from these artists. For some it is a political act, for others it is a conceptual exploration - a processing of ideas. For some individuals, it is the formulation of an emotive and personal language. To read more about When in Rome please click here. Expectations4, lettrasets and beeswax on canvas and wall, 2004 Expectations4, is a part temporal installation, consisting of 8 small canvases, text and wax. Through the physicality of the work being at a low eye level, I am exploring the footnotes of the language, and the social spaces. The necessity of the viewer to be close to work in order to read it, and the almost knealing down position one has to take to actually read the text, creates the uncomfortable tension, where the work is aestheticaly pleasing but the uncomfortable facts are lurking beneath the surface. Text is taken from the footnotes on the report on the Campsfield detention centre, which can be read in full here. Untitled shown in Habitat, Exeter, 2004 Untitled {OK, if you insist 'The Brit Melt'}, was part of When in Rome II, and a wider network of exhibitions in Exeter, titled Homeland, that brought art into everyday spaces. The work explores the distortion of the facts in the media, through the process of applying text taken from the tabloids then melting it then applying the same text again. The result are fragmented sections of readable and unreadable text. Text used was based on an article in The Sun, about asylum seekers eating Queen's swans. All 'asylum seeker' and 'refugee' words were replaced by an ethnic group category commonly used in the equal opportunities forms. The text becomes distorted and each ethnic group takes turns at being accused of stealing Queen's swans, thus putting in context the objectifying of asylum seekers that occurs so frequently in the media. Homeland is a multi-site contemporary art project including a series of exhibitions, interventions, performances and events in different contexts around Exeter city centre that essentially ask the question “What is Middle England?” It involves thirty-four artists, commissioned to make new works or to show existing pieces in everyday contexts for the first time, including Turner Prize-winner Grayson Perry, celebrated Latino-American performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Beck’s Futures-winner Rosalind Nashashibi.

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