SEEP

Ruth Waters with Kristaps Ancāns, Josh Berry and Caroline Streck

28 September - 21 October  2017 Private view: 27 September from 6 to 8pm

SEEP presents the work of four emerging artists, who are all completing a year-long Acme studio award for recent graduates. During this period the artists have had continued discussions about the production of new works for the exhibition, which has created a subtle infiltration of ideas across four distinct practices.

Kristaps Ancāns makes floor-based sculptural assemblages using found or easily acquired materials that often incorporate a kinetic element. The descriptive titles of the works provide a kind of narrative for the work and are thought of by the artist as another material in their production. Humour is often combined with a kind of pathos in these works, so that “They maintain at a precariously balanced point where formal values, physical laws and allusive references are all set in play – on a brink of undermining each other all the while holding together in a disconcerting harmony.”

Josh Berry’s work is often derived from his sense of play, and an instinct to toy with the liminal space between the known and unknown. His focus begins with the tangible world, working with ubiquitous objects, building materials and things designed for utility. Berry invites us to engage with his re-reading of these items from their commonplace existence into objects of more significant potential. The work made for PEER comes from his interest in the parametric arch – a structural curve that is created by a chain hung between two points. When inverted, the arched shape that is produced has particularly strong load-bearing properties. For Berry, the work takes that simple act of inversion as a starting point.

Caroline Streck works with minimal forms found in the built environment and the everyday. She considers how architecture and structure relate to basic shapes through repetition and rhythmic forms – and then isolates and contextualizes them as paintings and drawings. The compositions become de- and re-stabilized during the process of construction. At PEER, Streck will show recently completed work in the gallery as well as make two site-specific paintings outdoors, one for the very public space in front of PEER and another more discrete intervention will feature at the rear of the building.

At the core of Ruth Waters’ practice is an interest in how ever-present pressures exerted upon us by late capitalist networked society affect our daily lives, and how this has impacted on our levels of anxiety. For the past 6 months she has been conducting Skype interviews with people who suffer from severe phobias.  Her new video installation tells the story of REDSKY66, a young man who has extreme Apeirophobia – fear of eternity – and what happens when he sends a viral tweet.

Kristaps Ancans completed MA at Central Saint Martins in 2016 and was awarded the Helen Scott Lidgett Studio Award.

Josh Berry is the recipient of the Adrian Carruthers Studio Award for 2016/17. Receiving the prize after completing the MFA in Sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art.

Caroline Streck is the recipient of the inaugural Chelsea MA Studio Award (2016/17).

Ruth Waters graduated in 2016 and is the holder of the Goldsmiths MFA Studio Award.

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