Sean Cummins, Alex Hidalgo, Luke Oxley, Kay Walsh

2nd March - 31st March 2002

'The Naked City' (Jules Dassin, 1948, US), is a film noir made entirely on location in the streets of a city as opposed to using backdrops or built sets. At the time the mundane and ordinary nature of the scenes made them look unusual, the filming made the familiar unfamiliar.


Cummins, Hidalgo, Oxley and Walsh use different media to articulate the city as a site of the uncanny. The artists in drain directly reframe notions of exchange within the everyday. The diverse nature of this exchange occurs within the psycho-geographical landscape of the city. The works revolve around the double take. As narratives loop, the audience is left to question their initial assumptions.


Taking photographs whilst travelling around London, Sean Cummins then uses slide dissolves to represent familiar spaces in fictional narratives, so that as in a film-noir, the urban environment morphs into another space. This conveys the confusions within us when, in some altered psychological state, we step outside of our own familiarities.


Through the erratic use of medium and reference Alex Hidalgo juxtaposes appropriated cultural elements into environments where encounter is mediated by desire and commerce.


Luke Oxley's work involves the re-processing of everyday encounters with visual representation revealing the blurring of transition. For this show Oxley represents a photocopied letter, which was passed to him anonymously, and displays it outside the gallery, unleashing the paranoid text outside on to street.

Focusing on social and local landscapes Kay Walsh's work uses photography and video to arrest or isolate details often overlooked within the constant stream of visual imagery encountered in the urban everyday. Unremarkable neon signage is reworked taking on a decidedly aspirational tone, suggestive of a hidden subtext within the city.