Decade – 10 years of Totality

Exhibition runs: 18th – 23rd Oct 2013
Location: Gallery and Project space

To mark ten years of Place Marketing, Totality is delighted to present an exhibition offering an overview of work from the past ten years. The place marketing specialism marries our skills in branding and design with an ongoing fascination with places and why people may choose to live, work or visit them. In all work, we seek to define and create a unique and motivating ‘sense of place’, this being the foundation for developing a strong destination brand. A photo essay on Nottinghill  by Jon Stevens gestures towards Totality’s birthplace, whilst demonstrating the importance of individuals in shaping place.

The evening of 17 October will see a private launch of Decade, a publication offering Totality’s take on the last ten years, created to mark our anniversary.

Sci – Fi Lullaby by Machiko Edmondson

Exhibition runs: 8th – 13th Oct 2013
Location: Gallery and Project space

Edmondson refers to her practice as the ‘representation of painting’. Despite the overt use of faces as her image source, she regards her work as neither figurative paintings or as portraits, as they are not ‘portraying’ any particular person in a conventional sense; they are better described as ‘anti-portraits!’

Employing the momentary seduction of fashion photography to lure the viewers into the world of idealised beauty and yearning, her paintings mimic the styles and codes of the desire industry to question the value and obsessions of aspirational perfection.

Just as in fashion photography where the model is a support for the product and contextualises it, such images also support and contextualise Edmondson’s paintings. Although seductive, the ideal they present becomes hyper-real: the image is devoid of identity and is a paradoxically empty facade, which is quickly consumed, giving way to the anxiety and obsession that assert these paintings as paintings. Beyond the image that gives them their presence, what is being portrayed is the question of the aspirational perfection of painting itself. As the viewer engages with these works and scans the surface, shifting their reading between fantasy and modernist abstract painting, the skin of the image and the skin of the painted surface, these works become paintings of unattainable desire.

In this way, Edmondson’s paintings are really about ‘language of painting’.

www.machikoedmondson.com