THE HOLD – ET AL COLLECTIVE

OPEN: 5 December 10-4pm

PRIVATE VIEW:  4 December 6-9pm

et al. Collective’s debut exhibition, The Hold explores entangled ideas of social, environmental, political, and mental ecologies. Connecting 32 London based artists, the exhibition at The Crypt Gallery features painting, print, sculpture, installation, video, sound, and performance. Dichotomies and oppositions are examined – the stretched and strained boundaries of the external and internal, public and private, of seeing and being seen. In a time where perceptions of reality are constantly in a state of flux, artists signal experiences of time and space, the brevity of the present, and life after automation.

Overlooked realities are confronted and magnified and the viewer is encouraged to shift position and occupy an embodied ‘looking’, calling for a reckoning of mediated vision and image making, rupturing systems that reinforce hierarchies and affect ontologies. Art making in a time of crises and fatalism emanates through explorations of the precarious nature of transient life and environments, whilst principles of interdependence are brought to attention. Artworks are future relics in The Crypt Gallery, where the living and the dead coexist simultaneously. The Hold envisions the Crypt as a space of re-encounter, where unstable existential realities are amplified tenfold.

et al. Collective is a new artist collective created by Chelsea College of Arts MA Fine Art students, Anouk Baumgartner, Natasha Botelho Cook, Lilymay Healy, and Esmé Matthews.

Exhibiting artists:

Anouk Baumgartner

Lara Chahine

Jude Chantler

Kai Hsuan Chang

Yishan Chen

Natasha Botelho Cook

Oliver Dobson

Tina Forsyth

Jonathan Hadari

Daosheng Han

Lilymay Healy

Sarah Hopper

Laura Hornsby

Erinne Huston

Oli James

SeungWon Jang

Amy Kaluzhny

Abigail Kennedy

Willem Keys

Jay Lee

Esmé Matthews

Tingjiang ‘Skey70’ Meng

Kenenza Michiko

Amy Poliero

Thomas Josef Reading

Lydia Seaman

Karson Selah

Minchi Seo

Andrew Willms

Nuo Yang

Wanqi Zhu

Hantao Zhuang

Instagram @et_al.collective

Text by Tara Dowling @taraswork