10th March 2008
Nowhere is here: Axel Antas, Nogah Engler, Franziska Furter, Reece Jones, Damien Roach
Nowhere is here is an exhibition, curated by The Drawing Room, which taps into the capacity of drawing to capture the contingent quality of the natural environment and our complex relationship with it. Four of the artists have gravitated to London from different parts of the world including Finland, Israel, Switzerland and Botswana. Each brings a different relationship to the natural environment, be it imagined, experienced or remembered, emotional or dispassionate. The artists use drawing to create hybrid worlds that could suggest a repositioning of our relationship to nature and society.
Axel Antas spends time with the natural environment, interacting with it in unconventional ways and then using photography and video to record his observations and interventions. Drawing forms another significant strand of his practice and Antas uses the resistant medium of the HB pencil to translate these photographic representations into drawings that possess an uncanny resonance of human activity which nonetheless eludes the viewer.
Nogah Engler shares with Antas a tangible relationship with the natural world - but it is more emotional than physical. Engler alternates between periods of drawing and periods of painting and in both she uses landscape and nature as metaphors for expressing experiences that deal with memory and history...
