Dreaming through –on
& into the exotic
paula roush & maria lusitano
paula roush & maria lusitano
Private
View: 4th of April : 19.00 – 21.00
4th of
April – 18th of May
Opening
times: Mon. - Fri. 11:00 - 17:00
198 Railton
Road, London SE24 0JT
In the show
Dreaming through –on & into the exotic we present a mixed media collage
salon, which explores travel and collage as interlinked cultural feminine
practices in its relationship to contemporary art. Through visual essays
and publications, we revisit narratives, which combine historical archive and
speculative fiction into the study of the modernist collage- novel.
The main
subjects of these works range from Mary Delany’s invention of botanical collage
(Flora Delanica, 1772-1782), to Max Ernst’s collage novel Une Semaine de Bonté
(A Week of Goodness, 1934) and Valentine Penrose’ poem-collage Dons des
Feminines (Gifts of the Feminine, 1951). This journey makes visible ways
in which collage creates spaces that facilitate experiments with botanical
taxonomies as metaphors for gender and sexuality and also a critique of the
domestic setting conveyed through escapist dreams and travel to exotic
locations.
These works
were developed in residency at Stockwell Studios (former Annie McCall’s
hospital) and are a tribute to the artist’s community that built the studios’
wild life garden, a constant source of inspiration, that is
being now destroyed by the Lambeth Council to make space for luxury flats.
