Towards is pleased to present Neither One Thing Nor Another, a two-person exhibition featuring the work of Parker Kay and Kate Sansom. Through the lens of these two artists, Neither One Thing Nor Another explores ideas of narrative and context, alternative histories, and the slippages that occur when one tries to translate stories into objects.
For his installation, Parker Kay turns his attention to the legacy of modernism. Using architecture as an entry point, Kay physically transforms the gallery space, inserting drawings into walls and installing coloured plexi-glass within the window. Kay’s drawings, through both their materiality and their line–work, have a fleeting quality to them. Not quite discrete objects, they appear as fragments, bearing traces of their material history. In contrast, the window acts as a mediator between the interior and the exterior. Through a combination of built space and ephemeral light, it connects the tangible to the intangible, linking the gallery to the outside world and vice versa.
Kate Sansom’s work takes a more narrative, albeit enigmatic approach. With a large painting at the front of the gallery, Sansom begins to weave the narrative trajectories that make up this body of work. Functioning as character sketches or moodboards for a short story, her drawings, painting, and sculpture operate as part of a larger narrative whole. Sansom embraces traditions of surrealism, pairing this with the personal anecdotes, psychologies, and hysterical perspectives symptomatic of contemporary social interaction. The re-occuring elements begin to the tell the story, a gestural stroke here, a hat there, pineapples. They culminate in a lone figure at the rear of the gallery. This figure, an incomplete skeletal form faces the wall with a melancholic air. Failed by his re-telling, his incomplete manifestation, he embodies the failure of narrative that is underlying the works of both artists in the exhibition.
