Means of Escape

Artists

Simon Yates

Andy Grinham

This exhibition aims to shine a spotlight on our day-to-day existence, reflecting on our experiences as individuals and as a society whilst examining topics around capitalism consumerism and society’s sub-cultures alongside celebrating the mundane, the bizarre and the absurd of modern-day life.

By focussing on the overlooked, they redirect our attention away from expected outcomes, disrupting our current thinking and exploring possible alternative realities.

The exhibition features sculpture painting and drawing, that uses the urban environment as a backdrop to the work to conjure notions of control, escapism and the traces of human activity. Some of the work uses readily available objects that have been disrupted or manipulated alongside found or discarded materials that come with their own inherent sets of meanings. Other works have been carefully crafted by hand reflecting time spent focussing on process and the value of making within our throwaway culture.

Simon Yates is a mixed media sculptor based in London coming from a former career in furniture making. He graduated with a first-class degree in Fine art from the Art Academy London in 2022. He won the trustees choice award and the Liberty Arts Prize Award.

Andy Grinham is a multi media artist based in East London working in painting drawing sculpture and installation. He graduated with a first-class degree from the Art Academy London in 2020 and went on to graduate from City and Guilds London with an MA in Fine art in 2023.

Andy’s work explores topics of hedonism, escapism and carnivalesque whilst investigating heterotopic spaces and scenarios that offer escape from a hum drum existence and the capitalist ideology. He makes work, often using readily available objects, to project ideas of consumption, commodification, and excess. The results present unsettling imagery that offer uncomfortable insights into society and society’s sub-culture and confronts us with our own acceptance of how we exist in the current socio-political climate.

Simon’s work is a commentary on our shared social and cultural experience, shining a light on the overlooked, questioning our perception of reality and seeking out alternative futures and different realities. Often, loaded with contradictions, Simon’s work unfolds, turning in on itself, altering the direction of flow, and subtly confronts our perceived sense of stability, revealing the absurdities of our everyday existence.

Whilst approaching from different avenues, both artists, using the urban environment as a backdrop to the work, culminate in a place where the human condition, society and its varying states of entropy are brought into sharp focus whilst consumerism, advertising and media corrupt our current belief systems and nibble away at the periphery.

Made and found objects are manipulated and disrupted to create new perspectives. Questions arise around what is fiction and what is reality, of the boundaries between public and private space, of dismantling current systems of order and investigating what it means to be disordered.