Holly Rowan Hesson – New Work, & Model, Leeds, 11 February – 5 March 2016

Holly Rowan Hesson makes abstract works that derive from the photographic capture of colour, surface, shadow and light in specific architectural locations. They emphasise the fragility, transience and ambiguities of what may initially appear solid, weighty and permanent. Blurred uncertainty disrupts the reading of the rich colour and complex surface of her projections, prints and ephemeral installations.

Hesson’s residency at &Model over recent weeks has allowed her to make an intensive exploration of its surfaces and spaces during which she took hundreds of photographs. These photographs form the basis of all the new works in her current exhibition which is installed in ways that merge with or accentuate elements of the architecture of our building rather than being imposed upon it.

The images Hesson makes, often blurred or bathed in a bleaching light or rich with intensely saturated colour, are produced by her manipulation of the camera when shooting them rather than through any digital post-production. The post-production that take place lies in the manual activity of overlaying and layering, physically or through projection, or in the material processes of printing on various materials that are sometimes themselves re-photographed.

These works resist the realm of visual ‘truthfulness’ that has come to be associated with photography and aspire to a quality of otherworldliness that gives shape to the ephemeral. Architecture melts into light and air, or takes on the blurred split-second of vision when you wake in the morning unaccustomed to the brightness and straining to focus. The shifting images revealed in this work are tangible yet uncanny, familiar enough to be recognisable but somehow as a dream image that doesn’t ‘look’ like a room, rather it ‘feels’ like a room, or perhaps even a memory of a room.

On Thursday 11th February, 6.00 – 8.30pm please join us at & Model for the opening preview of two simultaneous new exhibitions. All welcome at the preview, free bar, the artists and curators will be present.

After this the exhibition will remain open Wednesdays to Saturdays 2pm-5pm until 5th March 2016.

On the ground floor: Seven Turns: Meditations on a Coffee Mill, curated by Keith Bowler and Peter Suchin, presents work by Wolfgang Berkowski, Keith Bowler, Peter Fillingham, Simon Patterson, James Rogers, Peter Suchin and Julian Wakelin, in response to Marcel Duchamp’s painting, The Coffee Mill, 1911.

& Model
19 East Parade, Leeds, LS1 2BH, UK
http://www.andmodel.com