place - displace

Ben

Cover image; Selo Snezhnoe (detail) by Veronica Smirnoff

place - displace

12 Northgate, Chichester West Sussex PO19 1BA 07794 416569

Veronica Smirnoff, Ben Crawford, Charlotte Evans

Candida Stevens Gallery is pleased to present place - displace, a group show exploring the enduring impact of one’s roots on the creative outputs of three artists who now live hundreds of miles from where they were born; Charlotte Evans, a British-born artist who first moved to the USA in 2011 and now lives in Toronto, Canada; Ben Crawford, an Irish-born artist who emigrated to Queensland, Australia eleven years ago; and Veronica Smirnoff, a Russian-born artist who moved to the UK as a teenager.

Stories of the past are deeply influential to the practices of all three artists, whose works are difficult to pinpoint to a particular time in history or location in reality. Instead, mirroring the inevitable feelings of ‘otherness’ that come from moving to a new environment, there is an otherworldly feel to the scenery presented. From the pink-hued skies of Crawford’s world to the loose washes suggestive of land and sea in Smirnoff’s panels, and the recurring forms of Evans’ saturated landscapes, a dreamlike quality emerges in their works.

In these paintings, images and memories from unconnected places combine to create new visions and open-ended narratives. In Crawford’s Briny Soldiers and Brackish Starfish, for example, a found image of boys playing on a riverbank merges with the sight of his daughters playing on the beach near their home and the artist’s own childhood memories of playing with his brothers. Connecting past and present, Crawford creates a scene that feels both nostalgic and surreal. In Smirnoff’s egg tempera panels, Russian icons are reimagined through the combination of art historical references and folklore to move even further into the realm of fantasy.

Figures interact closely with the landscape, reflective of the artists’ own efforts to navigate their way through uncharted territories. For Evans, this speaks of the ways in which she seeks to ground herself in her surroundings. Her characters appear as silhouettes and ghostly outlines barely visible on the horizon, or cloaked in patterned textiles that blend with nature, simultaneously emerging and receding from view as they travel through the land they have come to inhabit.

For Crawford, moving to the subtropical rainforest of Queensland was a leap of faith into the unknown. In the evocatively titled There’s a hidden dance tangled in the undergrowth in another time, we see the artist, quiet and contemplative, enveloped in dense foliage that is at once beautiful and overwhelming. His city trainers, discarded on the orange earth, have been exchanged for sturdy walking boots as he attempts to find his place in the landscape he now calls home.

Viewed together we see that, irrespective of when and why each artist left their homelands, there are ties that continue to bind their experiences of life and new places with their birthplaces. From Smirnoff’s innovative uses of a process and medium that is deeply entrenched in Russian art history, to the personal memories and dreams that have influenced Crawford and Evans, there is a to and fro that persists in the artists’ minds as they question their identities through time and place.

Veronica Smirnoff

Ben Crawford, Irish, b.1983

Storytelling is central to Crawford’s practice, from the moment in reality to which the painting is connected to the poetic and expressive titles that mark their completion. There is an autobiographical resonance to many of his paintings, which often have the feel of a dream or memory that has flickered into his mind, colours heightened and details slightly obscured. Figures huddle, faces cast to the ground and expressions hidden by shadow. Framed by foliage and pictured at a distance, Crawford’s paintings often give the sense of stumbling into a quiet or secretive moment from the past.

Fascinated by the way that imagery can transcend time and cultures in the evocation of place and emotion, Crawford finds inspiration in photography and uses resources such as Flickr: The Commons, a global database of public photography, saving images that resonate. Entering a single search term can yield thousands of results, taking the artist on a visual journey spanning several decades, cultures and landscapes. Using the process of digital collage, he then connects elements from seemingly disparate images alongside his own photographs and imaginings to create new stories and sketch captivating compositions.

By combining found images and personal memories, imagined characters and known landscapes, Crawford’s paintings appear both familiar in their portrayal of human relationships and interaction with the land and surreal in the ambiguity of time and place. We are reminded that whilst people come and go, the landscape remains constant, holding the experiences and secrets of its occupants past and present.

Crawford begins with a moment of painterly expression, applying a ground layer of acrylic paint with loose brush strokes and free movements to cover the bare canvas. From here, he works at a slower pace, enjoying the way in which the composition, palette and subsequent layers are guided and influenced by the spontaneous marks and colours below. This process, of allowing the abstract to shape the figurative, reflect the artist’s relationship with nature and acknowledgment of the extent to which his own experiences of life are shaped by the landscape around him.

Ben Crawford is an Irish-born artist who emigrated to Queensland, Australia, in 2011. He lives and works in Currumbin Valley, a semi-rural area of subtropical rainforest and banana plantations bisected by a creek running from mountain to sea. Immersed in a landscape so exotic and foreign to his upbringing, Crawford explores questions of identity, place and belonging within his work, combining curious narratives with picturesque landscapes to create timeless scenes of intrigue.

Ben Crawford studied painting at Crawford College of Art and Design, Cork, Ireland, and graduated with a first class honours degree in 2007. He lives with his wife and two daughters on a farm in the Gold Coast hinterland of Queensland, Australia. He paints from his studio, a self-converted shipping container, immersed in the landscape.

Briny soldiers and brackish starfish, 2022 Oil, acrylic, oil stick and charcoal on linen x 112 cm

Contretemps of the dethroned (despotic domino games), 2022 Oil, acrylic, oil stick and charcoal on linen 84 x 102 cm

Hear the voices call Echoing in the valley Like dissonant hymns, 2022 Oil, acrylic, oil stick and charcoal on linen 56 x 61 cm

From bell push to faucet, 2022 oil stick charcoal linen x

The red house (after Munch), 2022 Oil, acrylic, oil stick and charcoal on linen 66 x 76 cm

Honeyed euphony A song to calm the waters And make wise men mad., 2022 Oil, acrylic, oil stick and charcoal on linen 84 x 102 cm

There’s a hidden dance Tangled in the undergrowth In another time, 2022 Oil, acrylic, oil stick and charcoal on linen x 112 cm

Companions of misfortune, 2022 Oil, acrylic, oil stick and charcoal on linen 112 x 84 cm

All was lost in the song of the butcher bird, 2022 Oil, acrylic, oil stick and charcoal on linen 61 x 61 cm

Charlotte Evans

Charlotte Evans, British b.1981

Charlotte Evans is an artist concerned with connections; connections to place, to people and to our pasts. Growing up immersed in three very different environments - the inner city of London, the vast landscapes of Suffolk and the mountains of Northern Italy, Evans combines childhood memories and familiar landscapes to create atmospheric and dreamlike paintings that meditate on the way our place of upbringing weave with memory and help form our identity and inform our experience of the world.

For Evans, a familiar sight or sound will conjure an image, a suggestion of a painting with fleeting clarity. These elusive moments, translated using a saturated colour palette and abstracted, recurring forms, are presented with a purposeful sense of theatre. Tree trunks, fallen branches and long-stemmed plants are arranged almost as theatrical sets framing each scene. Enigmatic figures, some presented in costume, crowned or cloaked in colourful pattern, others visible only as silhouettes under the spot lit glow of the moon or shining beacon as they cross the stage.

The viewpoint lowered, there is the sense of being given front row seats to the artist’s imagination and yet, the identities and emotions of the characters are obscured. Instead, clusters of flowers burst upwards, dominating the foreground. Thistles, a nod to the artist’s distant Scottish heritage and symbols of courage and resilience, form a prickly wall. Bright bursts of yellow dandelions, symbolic of hope and new growth, and the floating orbs of their seed heads dance across the canvas. These are the flowers that Evans notices, weeds seen every day, their beauty often overlooked as their roots spread underground.

Inspired by the story telling of Persian miniatures, the precision of Medieval illuminations, the blurred reality of contemporary painters including Jules de Balincourt and the atmospheric landscapes of Mamma Andersson, Evans combines elements of each to create her own distinctive and intriguing paintings which lure us in.

Evans studied fine art at Byam Shaw School of Art, now part of Central St. Martins in London. She currently lives and works in Toronto, Canada. Her work is held in public and private collections around the globe including those of the UBS bank and the Imperial College Healthcare Charity Art Collection in the UK.

Beautiful

Lullaby,

Kings

Friends and relations,

Bloom, 2022 Oil on canvas 56 x 51 cm

Duke, 2022 Oil on panel 25.5 x 20.3 cm

Kith and Kin, 2021 Oil on canvas 61 x 46 cm

Pause, 2021 Oil on canvas 61 x 51 cm

Kings of Queens, 2021 Oil on canvas x

Prop, 2021 Gouache on paper paper image

There were trees on both sides, 2022 Gouache on paper

18 x 18 cm image size Framed size 47 x 42 cm

I was always here, 2022 Gouache on paper

18 x 18 cm image size Framed size 47 x 42 cm

Crown, 2021 Gouache on paper

18 x 18 cm image size Framed size 47 x 42 cm

Vanishing, 2021 Gouache on paper

18 x 18 cm image size Framed size 47 x 42 cm

Skeleton, 2022

Gouache on paper

40.5 x 30cm paper size 18 x 18 cm image size

Hidden or unseen, 2022 Gouache on paper

40.5 x 30cm paper size 18 x 18 cm image size

Convoy, 2022 Gouache on paper 40.5 x 30cm paper size 18 x 18 cm image size

Echoes, 2022 Gouache on paper 40.5 x 30cm paper size 18 x 18 cm image size

Veronica Smirnoff, British, B. 1979

Working in the medium of egg tempera on gessoed wood, Veronica Smirnoff’s paintings are highly distinctive. Inspired by profound religious beliefs, folklore, fairy tales and mythology, the artist combines references of old and new to create fantastical scenes of delicacy and mystery. Intricately depicted characters, often cloaked in ornate costume, are presented in abstracted landscapes that possess a timeless and otherworldly feel.

There is a deliberate uncertainty contained within Smirnoff’s works, from the beguiling gaze of her protagonists to the uncanny settings from which they emerge, transporting the viewer to a surreal world of open-ended narratives. Employing symbols and mythologems, which like fairy tales, allude to the idea of encompassing more than reality itself.

Smirnoff’s practice is founded on her fascination with Asian tradition and Byzantine iconography. Orthodox icons traditionally feature a sacred image recessed in the ark of a small wooden panel to create a manifestation of the holy world. The female subjects of Smirnoff’s paintings are derived from a wide range of sources including self-portraiture, different historical languages, miniatures, pre-Renaissance painting and frequently contain abstract references to the Virgin Mary. Their beauty tempered by a fragility or pensiveness as they gaze beyond the painted surface.

At the heart of the artist’s practice is her choice of medium. Egg tempera is ground pigment that traditionally comes from minerals and semi-precious stones mixed with white wine and egg yolk to make the paint. Myriads of semi-transparent layers dry rapidly, creating a depth of colour and tilted perspective. Achieving a detailed finish is a time-consuming process, where small brush strokes mark the passage from the abstract to the figurative. Smirnoff takes full advantage of the medium, using it not only to depict elements with startling realism - the individual hairs on a fur coat, feathered wing or head - but also embracing its transparency to create evocative, textured backgrounds and luminous abstract effects of colour. In doing so, Smirnoff can be seen to personalise both the technique of the icon painting and its visual culture to create her own tales of collective memory and identity as well as bring the metaphors directly into our real world.

Veronica Smirnoff is a British artist of Russian origin, (born Moscow, Russia, 1979). She gained a BA from the Slade School of Art and postgraduate diploma from the Royal Academy of Arts. She was awarded the Terence Cuneo Prize in 2004 and was selected for the John Moores Painting Prize UK in 2010 and Women to Watch UK in 2009. She has exhibited internationally in Milan, Paris, Berlin, London, and New York. She lives and works in London.

Harvest at Night, 2018 tempera on wood x 30 cm

Requiem, 2022 tempera on wood x cm

Selo Snezhnoe, 2008

Egg tempera on wood 50 x 40 cm

Amour Tebia, 2014

Egg tempera on wood 40 x 30 cm

Bellows, 2012 Egg tempera on wood 90 x 70 cm

Camel_ and the eye of a needle, 2021 Egg tempera on wood 22 x 27 cm

Maria of Egypt, 2022 Egg tempera on wood 27 x 32 cm

Master of Silence, 2022 Egg tempera on wood 30 x 27 cm

Antidote, 2020 tempera on wood x 30 cm

Gethsemania, 2021 Egg tempera on wood 18 x 25 x 6 cm

Published in September 2022 by Candida Stevens Gallery on the occasion of an exhibition featuring the work of Ben Crawford, Charlotte Evans and Veronica Smirnoff.

Catalogue © Candida Stevens Gallery

Images © The Artist

Text © Isabella Joughin

Photography © Dan Stevens

All rights reserved