Elephant Lab X Art Gazette Summer Residency
Bex Massey and Long Huang were selected from an open call to spend 6 weeks during summer creating artworks in their studios using materials provided by Elephant Lab.
The works created during the residency are on display and available to view at Art Gazette’s studio for three weeks.
Bex Massey
1st Aug – 18th Sept
During the residency I have been researching lesbian histories and their lack of mainstream visibility. I have therefore experimented with ways in which to document this ‘invisibility’ in paint. Works exhibited form two different lines of investigation surrounding these themes: Firstly via Apps and looking at myself and lesbian consciousness in the present date and secondly working with historical underpainting with a 3D twist in looking at two of my Queer 1930’s hero’s-the painter Gluck and the author Radclyffe Hall. In looking to the present date I have taken the term ‘invert’, coined by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in 1897 to describe ‘homosexuals’ and applied it to two images of myself with the aid of the Photoshop’s ‘invert’ tool. These paintings have left me unrecognisable and as such invisible.
In looking to the past I have centred work on a ’Jack’ – a 19th Century slang term for ‘lesbian’, recently popularised by the BBC’s adaptation of Anne Lister’s diaries in ‘Gentleman Jack. I have therefore painted ‘Jack Dawson’ of Leonardo do Caprio and Titanic fame over the two historic and pioneering lesbians and as such rendered them near invisible.
Guests of the show are asked to interact with the two inverted canvas via this Instagram filter (or QR code on site) to transform them into more realistic forms.
www.bexmassey.com
Long Huang
1st Aug – 18th Sept
In partnership with Elephant Lab X Art Gazette.
During my time on the residency I will be creating a series of small paintings along with one or two large scale paintings to continuing shaping my current painting practices in terms of skill, technique and subject. My goal is to find a way that helps me bring my current painting styles together into a balance that it coexist both abstract elements and narratives.
This series contains 6 small-size paintings. The name of the painting was inspired by Vladimir Eshkilex who proposed a method in Metamodernism and redefined the artistic approach from a literature perspective, which depicts the image of an idealized world and reshaped it by individual empiricism. Post-Pandemic retrospection: this theme contains two paintings that I tend to play with the idea of how people rethink of Covid-19 pandemic period and how they perceive the meaning behind these epidemic prevention measures such as face masks, disinfectant spray, and rapid lateral flow tests.
www.longhuangart.com