“The daily encounter with reality, the fictions, the surrogates, the ambiguous poetics or alienating aspects, all seem to preclude any way out of the labyrinth, the walls of which are ever more illusory, to the point at which we might merge with them..."

— Luigi Ghirri, Kodachrome, 1978 - The Complete Essays

For their collaborative exhibition, Unearthly Bodies, artists Clare Wigney and Gabriella Lo Presti have sifted through the detritus of a life spent sailing through limbo, that is, the liminal space between digital and tangible realities. What they've emerged with is a series of portraits - of ghosts, celebrities, lace, aliens, religion, gardens (all relics of the everyday and the otherworldly) - that hold a mirror to our pursuit of authenticity and truth.

What Unearthly Bodies interrogates is how these virtues are distorted when performed online. Suggesting that with the digital bleeding heavily into the tangible and vice versa, it's near impossible to find certainty in either.

Ahead of the opening of Unearthly Bodies at China Heights Gallery on October 29, here at RUSSH we're priming you with a glimpse of Gabriella Lo Presti and Clare Wigney's show - one not to be missed.

 

Through photography, sculpture and an emphasis on placement and installation, Gabriella probes the tension between binaries like the real and reproduced, function and form, as well as the private and the public, to name a few.

More importantly, in Unearthly Bodies Lo Presti asks her audience to locate themselves among images of the mundane and everyday; to identify and find their place within seemingly benign features like wrought iron, nature and urban decay found in the digital and physical realms.