Photo London 2021
Antony Cairns | Nicolas Feldmeyer | Whitney MCVeigh
Stand D6 | 9 - 12 September 2021
Installation image credits (Ollie Hammick, Barney Hindle)
Encounter is pleased to present a booth of internationally acclaimed artists Antony Cairns, Nicolas Feldmeyer and Whitney McVeigh at Photo London 2021. The exhibition will draw out questions of temporality and memory focusing on intimate groups of surreal and uncanny images. Through a range of innovative material processes the artist’s navigate between digital and analogue, representation and illusion to disrupt the boundaries of the photographic medium.
Taking the city and urban landscape as its ostensible subject, Cairns’ work engages deeply with the history of photographic reproduction, experimental printing methods and the aesthetics of abstraction. The artist presents a series of captivating images of cities at night petrified in e-reader screens. Functioning almost as contemporary relics, this series gained much critical acclaim after having been included in Tate Modern’s exhibition ‘Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art’ (2017). Devoid of people, his hazy photographs transform familiar cityscapes into a seemingly dystopian world, simultaneously gesturing towards past and future.
'Beginning in London, but then moving to New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo and Osaka Antony Cairns can be considered to have been in the process of making a single city of his own; a city in which it is always night, and where light is an artificial commodity: an aqueous, dreamlike space with a geometry resting permanently on the verge of abstraction' (Simon Baker, former Senior Curator of Photography, TATE)
Preoccupied with ‘the experience of places and spaces in dreams’ Feldmeyer painstakingly creates imagined landscapes that do not exist in the ‘real’ world. These places are not derived from photographs but are instead digitally constructed three dimensional models which occupy a new virtual space somewhere between drawing and architectural rendering. As Feldmeyer says;
‘I am fascinated by the process of reconstructing in great detail small everyday moments - the evening sun on a brick courtyard, or the trees at the end of the park, familiar scenes that seem to say something very clear to me, although I never know exactly what.’
In his ‘Estate’ series semi tangible details, such as the netting of a basketball hoop, fade into darkness and merge with more illusionary visual suggestions, creating an altogether disorientating effect. Feldmeyer examines and redevelops the Renaissance tradition of paintings within paintings, creating minute landscapes that operate as windows onto his own imagination. The presentation also includes unique works from the artist’s ongoing postcard collage series, several works from which recently entered The British Museum’s permanent collection.
McVeigh brings to Photo London a unique series of altered found photographs. The artist is widely acclaimed for her collections of objects and interventions into the archive having previously exhibited at institutions such as The Getty Villa (Los Angeles) and Kettles Yard (Cambridge). Embodying a sense of time and human imprint these previously unseen portraits occupy an engaging space somewhere between vision and knowledge, accumulation and erasure. Concerned with ‘the archaeology of memory’, McVeigh’s sensitive ‘interventions’ reflect an ongoing engagement with the potential of objects as channels for personal and collective history. McVeigh recently commented on this series stating;
‘The drawings form in collaboration, as if led by the existing image. There’s a sense of waiting to be shown what the material brings. Jung believed images exist in us before we are born, and the task in this lifetime is to draw these out. I work with space and time and preexisting matter. Like all of life, everything passes, has an end and we are left with traces.’
Antony Cairns (1980) lives in London and works across photography, installation and sculpture. Preoccupied with the material process of photography and its intrinsic interplay with technology, at the root of Cairns’ practice is the fusing of advanced means of image reproduction with traditional processes.
Recent solo exhibitions include; ‘CTY_TYO3 TYO4’, Webber, London (2021), ‘TY03TY04’, Akio Nagasawa, Tokyo (2021), ‘CTY-TY03’, Stieglitz 19, Antwerp (2020), ‘Touchstone’, The Photographers Gallery, London (2019), ‘CTY’, Akio Nagasawa, Tokyo (2019), ‘The Tale of Gordon Earl Adams’, Theatre de Verdure, Switzerland (2018), ‘TYO2-LDN4’, Roman Road, London (2017). Selected group exhibitions include ‘What Remains’ Encounter, London (2021), ‘Expired’ Sara Kay Gallery, New York (2019), ‘Artificial Impressions’, Stedelijk Museum Breda (2018), ‘Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art’, Tate Modern, London (2018), ‘London Nights’, Museum of London, London (2018), ‘A Matter of Memory: Photography as Object in the Digital Age’, George Eastman Museum, New York (2016), ‘Abstracts’, Copperfield, London (2015), ‘Memory Lab – Photography Challenges History’, Mudam, Luxembourg (2015), ‘Collected Shadows’ Polygon Gallery, Vancouver (2013), ‘ICP Triennial’ International Centre for Photography, New York (2013). In 2015 Cairns won the prestigious Hariban Award. His work can be found in important public and private collections internationally.
Whitney McVeigh (born 1968) is an American visual artist, best known for her paintings and installation art. She has travelled extensively to carry out her practice and held residencies in Mexico, India, China and South Africa. Her work investigates personal and collective memory and alludes to the layering of time. Upcoming exhibitions include; Photo London, Somerset House, London (2021) with Encounter. Recent solo exhibitions include; ‘Temporality, Cardi Projects, Cardi Gallery (2020), What is Worthwhile Doing in this World, Mount Stuart Visual Arts, Scotland (2019), Elegy to Nature, Eykyn Maclean, New York (2018), Language of Memory, Summerhall Arts, Edinburgh (2016), Inventory: Invisible Companion, Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge (2015) and presentation of the film ‘Birth’: Origins at the end of life at the Royal Academy, London (2015). Recent group exhibitions include What Remains, Encounter, London (2021), Artist Rooms, Encounter, London (2020), ‘Shapes in Clouds’ Encounter, London (2019),Plato in LA: Contemporary Artists’ Visions, Getty Villa, Los Angeles (2018), Not a Single Story, The Wanas Foundation, Sweden and Nirox Foundation, South Africa (2018), Culture Lines: Sans Frontieres, Metamatic-Taf Foundation, Athens (2016), Unlocking the Diary, The Archiving of Nameless Memories, Folkestone Triennial, Kent (2014) and Glass Stress, White Light/White Heat, 55th Venice Biennale, Venice (2013).
Whitney McVeigh was featured in the BBC4 television documentary, Where is Modern Art Now (2009) alongside Sir Anthony Caro, Michael Landy, Grayson Perry and Cornelia Parker. Simon Schama’s recent essay on McVeigh’s practice ‘The Happenstance of Illumination’(2018) was included in his book Wordy (Simon & Schuster), published in June 2019. Her work was recently included in ‘Imagined Spaces’ edited by Kirsty Gunn & Gail Low with Voyage Out Press & Saraband Books, an anthology that creates a “space” between understanding and the imagination. In Autumn 2021 a new collection of McVeigh’s limited editions will be launched at Renzo Piano Building Workshops’s newly designed building Shard Place (London). McVeigh’s work can be found in important public and private collections worldwide.
Nicolas Feldmeyer (1980) was born in Switzerland and lives and works in London. After completing an MSc in Architecture in Zurich he went on to study Fine Arts at the San Francisco Art Institute on a Fulbright Grant. Feldmeyer received an MFA with distinction from the Slade in 2012. His work has been awarded the Saatchi and Channel 4’s New Sensations First Prize 2012 and the William Coldstream Prize amongst others.
Feldmeyer has regularly exhibited at important galleries and institutions internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include; ‘Fading Light’, Encounter, Online (2020), ‘Beacon’, Hammersmith and Fulham Townhall, London (2018), ‘Towards the Horizon’, Fano Island, Denmark (2016), ‘Lacunae’, Lacuna Project Space, London (2015), ‘Subliminal Spaces’, Maddox Arts, London (2015), ‘Nicolas Feldmeyer’, MC2 Gallery, Milan (2014), ‘Untitled (Crypt)’, Christchurch Spitalfields London (2011). Selected group exhibitions include; What Remains, Encounter, London (2021), ‘Photo London’, Encounter, Online (2020), ‘Shapes in Clouds’, Encounter, London (2020), ‘Everything Must Go’, Assembly Point, London (2019), ‘Photographs’, Sotheby’s, London (2019), ‘Border Lines’, Maddox Arts, London (2019), ‘5 Trillion Times’, China Academy of Art, Hangzhou (2018), ‘Aesthetica Art Prize’, York Art Museum, York (2018), ‘Art of the Postcard’, Handel Street Projects, London (2017), ‘No Lemon, No Melon’ Flowers Gallery, New York (2017), Artist Rooms, Encounter, London (2017), ‘Right Through You’, Koppel Project, London (2017), ‘Perfectionism’, Griffin Gallery, London (2015), ‘Lumen Prize’, New York Institute of Technology, New York (2014), ‘Hacking Spaces’, Bosse and Baum, London (2014), ‘Fresh Faced and Wild Eyed’, The Photographers Gallery, London (2013), ‘Saatchi Gallery and Channel 4 New Sensations’, Victoria House, London (2012). Feldmeyer is a guest lecturer at the AA School of Architecture, The CASS, Metropolitan University, and is Associate Lecturer at Camberwell College, University of the Arts London.His work is included in numerous public and private collections worldwide including The British Museum, UCL Art Museum and Sellar Property, British Land.