To mark their 10th Anniversary, DegreeArt proudly announces their Artist Residency programme at their DegreeArt Gallery space ‘The Execution Room’. The residencies seek to turn the exhibition space into a catalyst for; discussion, exchange, development and action.
Following her 2011 sellout, debut solo show we are delighted to announce that the first ‘Artist in Residence’
to launch the program is painter and DegreeArt artist Sophie Derrick, a BA graduate of Leeds University, who completed her MA in Fine Art at Wimbledon College of Art in 2012.
PIXEL ATE MY FACE from Sophie on Vimeo.
DegreeArt.com would like to invite you to witness Derrick’s evolution within the space…
Sophie Derrick utilises her aesthetic to challenge and revitalise the traditional notions and preconceptions of painting and photography by removing the barriers between them. Within her work, Derrick’s body, namely her face becomes the canvas. The process involves a level of trompe-l’oeil concerning the surface texture; impasto paint is placed sculpturally upon the subject’s face, then rendered flat through photography, only to be re-instated, as thick lashings of paint laid heavily across the surface. Derrick translates paint’s materiality and substance through photography and dynamically fusing the two mediums. The body becomes the object and is the subject. Derrick will use the residency to explore ideas of objectification, concealment, presence and absence, layering and adornment.
A collection of Derrick’s portraits will form a fictional tribe, which onlookers will witness organically evolving across the walls of the Execution Room to dominate the space. Through her layering and reiteration of the original image, Derrick alienates ‘The Self’ and pushes beyond reality into the realms of the hyper-real. Her body will play host to a series of different tribe members, using the paint as an agent of transformation to displace and conceal her identity.
The process of layering painting and photography stage by stage displaces my ‘self’ and converts my body into an object upon which the paint can shine. (Derrick, 2011)
When: 7th February -16th March 2013 Open daily 12-6pm
First Thursdays: 7th February 2013 / 7th March 2013
Artist Talk: 28th February 2013
