Monique Atherton & Liz Calvi & Paul Chapellier
curated by Ir Seager
12th - 15th MAY 2022
Seager will bring together works by two female artists, Monique Atherton and Liz Calvi, 2021 who are both concerned with the portrayal of women in an increasingly digital public sphere. Calvi focuses on the portrayal of subjectivity and sexuality on digital platforms, whilst Monique examines the construction and curation of identity within her self-portraits. In a time of endless images of portraits and self-portraits, these two artists raise questions about the politics of identity, self-expression & visibility in the 21st century.
From the curation of images she chooses to share, to using analog and digital manipulation, Atherton incorporates absurd gestures and composition to repurpose private moments for public consumption. Atherton's self-portraits span almost a decade and three bodies of work. She instructs models to pose as her in some photographs. While in others she enacts private performances in her bedroom while wearing cut-outs of printed studio portraits and digitally reshapes portraits of herself taken by studio photographers. She uses these images to explore the construction and curation of identity while also reflecting on the element of reproduction within the medium itself.
Calvi focuses on similar themes in her ongoing series "My Girls," in which she pushes boundaries by indulging in the often contested freedom of portraying sexuality and desire from a female lens. Calvi's critical concerns regarding how iconography is recycled, reconfigured and perpetuated from the silver screen to a digital sphere are investigated by her reappropriation of negatives of pin-up girls her father found in the trash. Instead of kicking the male gaze to the curb, Calvi digitally manipulates these archival images to refashion a traditionally male gaze upon the female body. Drawing from surrealist and feminist collage influences Calvi explores the construction of digital identities and sexual freedom. She uses digital manipulation to encourage self-reflexive experimentation with the medium to further consider how a world increasingly mediated by technology and digital communications is impacting how we create, view and digest the self & consequently others. Photo London will be the first time Calvi will show these pieces.
Monique Atherton (b.1980, Japan) uses photography as a launching point and incorporates installation, sculpture, and performance. Atherton explores intense personal moments created by means of rules and omissions, acceptance and refusal, luring the viewer into the various microcosmic states in which she exists. Her works uncover unspoken desires, tensions and passions that reside on a subconscious level among the people in her images as well as between the artist and the public. Atherton currently lives and works in New Haven. Atherton has exhibited in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, New Haven and New York. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Wassaic Project and a recipient of the 2018 Connecticut Office of the Arts Emerging Artist Grant. Her book, First Avenue was shortlisted for the 2017 Kassel Dummy Award. She received her MFA in Photography from the Yale School of Art in 2016.
Liz Calvi (b.1990, USA) is a graduate of the MFA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths University and is currently based between London and Connecticut, USA. Recent exhibitions include "All About the Light", Griffin Museum of Photography, 2020 "Rituals of Resistance", The Urban Collective, 2020 and "Shadow Screens", SEAGER, 2019. Her work has been featured in numerous publications including Der Greif, Aint-Bad and Fader. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is in several public & private collections.
Paul Chapellier (b.1989, France) is a London-based artist. His practice spans photography, sculpture, and installation to examine the intertwining of subjectivity and material culture. Architecture and objects are fragmented and reassembled into installations that emphasize how images act as objects and how objects survive in images. He holds an MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths University, UK (2018) and an MA in Photography and Contemporary Art from Paris 8 University, France (2013). His work has been exhibited internationally, most recently in “Transatlantico”, Mana Contemporary, Jersey City, US (2021); "Homegrown", Hauser & Wirth, online (2020); “Il Complesso della Mummia”, Palazzo Monti, Brescia, Italy (2020), “An Exceptionally Rare Shape” at SET, London, UK (2019) and "2068", SPACE London, UK (2019). He was the recipient of a Jerwood Bursary in 2019.