AfterImage

AfterImage is a 3 part international group exhibition with accompanying cultural arts programme. It is the 8th in a series of annual cultural events promoting international dialogue and cross-cultural exchange. Participants includes: Robert Ellis, David Ryan, Charlotte Knox-Wiliams, Chris Short, John Frankland, Trish Wylie, Erica Winstone, Mark Sowden, Matt Hale and Barbara Nicholls. The exhibition series will be accompanied by musical, live and literary performances by Matt Nicholls, Lina Lapelyte, Emma Alonze, Anne Caldwell and Sarah Darwin. I am co-organising, co-curating and exhibiting 9 paintings in the programme. AfterImage's curatorial aims are to contribute an original engagement to an understanding of what might constitute an AfterImage through multidisciplinary contemporary art practice. The idea of the afterimage may associated with a residual optical impression retained after looking at a light source once your eyes have closed. This ghostly shadowing may be perceived as a reversal of the original, a negative afterimage, such as a photographic negative or positive where the colours remain in place. This possibility of a perceptual double take or repositioning of an image through light suggests an optical movement or impression that persists momentarily and then fades. However, the works in this exhibition take this premise as a starting point. Whilst referencing the visual phenomena of an optical glow, this is opened up to reinterpretation, offering a distinct and original repositioning of what afterimage might mean politically and philosophically