“One source of the sublime is the infinity”
Edmund Burke

bo.lee gallery presents a show that explores liminal spaces – a place somewhere between one that exists and one that is conjured up in our minds eye. Time, light and narrative can evoke new meaning in a landscape, taking you from somewhere that is calm and inviting to a place that you might not want to inhabit alone.

Saad Qureshi’s sculpture and drawings explores mental and physical landscapes; his work poetically probes cultural belonging, interconnectedness and separation through scale, material, and metaphor. Fascinated by memory and time, and how they affect landscapes – both internal and external – he seeks to deconstruct stereotypes and subvert narrow notions of belonging. Three dimensional landscapes presented in wooden drawers create worlds within a world, taking literal and metaphorical compartments, playing with scale, and examining their relation to the viewer.

Patrick Jacobs produces miniature sculptures of hyper-realistic environments embedded into walls and viewed through glass portholes. Viewed at close range, his works are lit from within, revealing themselves with fisheye luminosity. Working with paper, plastic, acrylic gel and metal, he constructs three-dimensional landscape dioramas.

Hannah Brown, The Field Next To Tesco

Hannah Brown will be producing a site-specific floor installation alongside a selection of paintings. She intentionally searches for quiet, potentially unsettling places with a peculiar type of beauty, favouring views away from the well documented vista that have the possibility of being read in different ways. This ambiguity leaves space for the viewer to enter into a dialogue or begin imagining a fiction. She spends time in the landscape captured, absorbing the sounds, weather, seasons and terrain; in this way the paintings become distilled versions of the time she spent there. Deliberately exploring these concepts in predominately domestic sized objects, she seeks to open a dialogue about nature and the way we use it, commodify it, own it, and project emotions or identity onto it.

Sue Williams A’Court, Lady in Blue

Sue Williams A’Court will be showing a series of ‘portraits’ first shown in 2017 at the Saatchi Gallery which began with an instance of pareidolia – the brain’s tendency to impose meaningful patterns where none exists, be it a face in the surface of the moon or shapes in the contours of clouds. The pieces play with the idea of perception questioning reality. By conflating genres of landscape and portrait painting, they hover ambiguously on the boundary between our inner and outer worlds to present a ‘landscape of the imagination’ – a state of mind, rather than a specific location. The monochromatic, muted palate of the portraits sets a reflective, contemplative tone, whilst the incredible detail of their miniature scale encourages observers to lose themselves in a private, intimate space where we no longer feel separate from what we observe.

Anouk Mercier, Cascade II (Cascades du Parc Montsouris)

Anouk Mercier’s drawings rely heavily on the nostalgia of Romanticism to depict melancholic worlds, undefined by time or space. Combining fragments from 17th and 18th Century landscape etchings as well as references to Victorian postcards with her own mark making she confuses the boundaries of what is ‘real’, giving her works a dream-like quality and inviting the viewer to follow the paths of the fantastical landscapes depicted. Mindscapes captures the allure of the sublime with a selection of works that contemplate the infinite and mysterious qualities of both mind and matter. From a portal into another dimension to the intensity of colours at dusk, Mindscapes will stop you in your tracks, taking you on a journey into the unknown…

MINDSCAPES

16 March – 28 April

Private View | Thursday 15 March 6 – 8pm

bo.lee gallery, 222 Rye Lane, London, SE15 4NL
Opening times: Wednesday – Friday 11am – 6pm, Saturday 11am – 5pm

(or by appointment)

www.bo-lee.co.uk

Sue Williams A’Court | Hannah Brown | Daniel Crawshaw | Patrick Jacobs David Kowalski | Anouk Mercier | Julian Opie | Saad Qureshi

Images: Hannah Brown, The Field Next to Tesco | Sue Williams A’Court, Lady in Blue | Anouk Mercier, Cascade II