┐ Nigel Grimmer └

© Nigel Grimmer, Julie, Golders Green,, from the series Roadkill Family Album, 2001

© Nigel Grimmer, Eric, Big Bend, from the series Roadkill Family Album, 2010

“Nigel Grimmer takes the conventions of family album snap photography and gives them a weird twist that is at times amusing and at others faintly unnerving. Here the self-conscious poses, the banal compositions, the suburban settings are infiltrated with the kinds of surrealistic incongruities that one might experience in particularly bizarre or embarrassing dreams. His Roadkill Family Album is a collection of prone portraits of family members dolled up in joke shop animal masks and seemingly abandoned as roadside victims. Grimmer’s mother is an owl, his father a frog. His use of plastic masks and dolls imbues the images with a particularly kitsch and almost perverse form of nostalgia. It’s as if childhood memories have been inextricably confused with some kind of metamorphic and macabre fairytale.”

quote from Harley Gallery

Nigel’s home here

 

┐ Brendan George Ko └

© Brendan George Ko, Ablution, from the series The Barking Wall, 2010-11

© Brendan George Ko, Tomb, from the series The Barking Wall, 2010-11

I remember as a kid I used to cover my face with my hands, and peek at the world through my fingers. I could see the world, but the world couldn’t see me. Nowadays I find myself assimulating with the hybrid, a creature I share a betwixt nature with, for we are both between two worlds, having multiple origins, and demand our own realm, such as a gothic castle, a tomb, or limbo to serve as a haven, I seek to create a peace with a conflict of belonging.
The Barking Wall serves as a vault; a collection of visual memories that cross-pollinate with lived experience, and extended history (of past generations, oral tradition, and cinema), and spawn new hybrid moments. Applied layer after layer, these confused memories let go of specific places and time, and drift like phantoms, roaming free through the fields of imagination, meeting the visitor half-way, and letting one create their own narrative

Brendan’s work is here

┐ Marisa Portolese └

© Marisa Portolese, Maya, from the series Imagined Paradise

© Marisa Portolese, Celia, from the series Imagined Paradise

“The Imagined Paradise series is about having an aesthetic experience that is surreal and attainable only through flight of the imagination.
The images present the viewer with two distinct universes, the real and imagined. The subjects are solemn, still, contemplative and in awe. Their desire to escape is evident by what they see through the mind’s eye. And what they pine for is a place that is ethereal, vibrant, effervescent, but also beyond reach, fantastical and larger than life.”

More of Marisa’s work here