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EVENT DESCRIPTION
THE SHOPHOUSE is pleased to present From Another Room, the first solo exhibition in Asia by UK-based artist Rachel Lancaster, featuring a new body of works on canvas that posits paintings as windows into other spaces. As if imagery transmitted from a parallel dimension, the artworks elucidate but solitary moments yet each containing cues of continuation. Evocative of suspense and displacement, the exhibition pieces together fragments of an omitted narrative, untold as to whether a memory, a story, or a daydream.
A turned head, an unopened box, an arm that reaches beyond the edge of the canvas – anticipation and the festering feeling of uncertainty are the marks of Lancaster’s works. Realized by the intentional withholding of information, the enticing tension between absence and presence is further enhanced by the artist’s masterful portrayal of imagined textures. Familiar sensations, such as the crisp of tissue paper or the residual heat of a pillow recently slept on, become both means of immersion and clues to the before and after. Activating the depicted scenes via the arousal of tactile associations, even the air within becomes vivid with density – almost palpable, separated merely by the surface of the painting.
Influenced by her childhood ways of image consumption, namely watching VHS tapes on TV, Lancaster’s paintings possess a luminous quality as if lit from behind. Her works are also characterized by a certain graininess that obscures the time-space of the illustrated narrative, wherein the audience becomes a remote and foreign observer. As the line of sight comes to an end at the edge of the frame, curious viewers are left to wonder the context beyond, as if reaching the cliffhanger of a story. The allure of Lancaster’s artworks emanates not from the answers they reveal, but rather the questions they leave behind.
