Pablo Castañeda Santana | Rosalind Davis & Justin Hibbs | Nadine Shaban | Alexander Stavrou | Andrea V Wright

 

Curated by Alexander Stavrou

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Substance Bundle - a group show bringing together artists working across painting, sculpture, installation, film, and performance – reflects on how containment can be a tool to both enable and restrain. The dictionary definition of containment is ‘an action which keeps something harmful under control or within limits’. What these limits are, however, or what the contained object or entity is, shift constantly depending on context. Language itself not being immune to change, this show temporarily replaces a dictionary definition of ‘containment’ with the nonverbal efforts of the featured artists.

 

In Substance Bundle, this replacement is playfully investigated by artworks which become fragmented, occupy pockets of space, or hang over us as we negotiate our way around and through them. Some may appear to be separate worlds into which we peer, while others threaten to engulf us. The array of approaches all point us towards the question:  

 

to what extent is an entity or object defined and shaped by its containment, and is that containment the material reality of objecthood, or is it the perceptual pressure of a context?

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