Alisa Aistova (born 1988 in Russia, Solnechnogorsk, lives, and works in Moscow and London) is an artist working mainly with photography as a medium. Her practice often deals with insanity, psychic transformation, obsessive neurosis, melancholy, rejection, anguish, fear, loneliness, violence (psychological and sexual), isolation, death, and desire of it.She graduated with BA in Computer Science from Russian State Social University, received a Foundation Diploma in Fine Arts (with Distinction) at London Central Saint Martins and was admitted to continue her education there on MA in Contemporary Photography program since 2020. Alisa had exhibited her works at various galleries and museums in the UK and Russia.
“Our perception is a dynamic chain of filters, which specific composition is defined by the perceived object and context. One filter recognizes specific shape, another perceives a color, third builds an ontology, forth establishes connections with past experiences, memories and makes associations. The task of perception decomposition and focus on one specific filter was by and large solved by abstractionists. Now we can look for new meanings and associations by activating different filters and therefore mixing perceptions associated with them.
One way to do so is transformation. We can transform an object, adding distortions, which activate specific perception filters. If we do that transformation far enough, so specific traits become vague and not right away recognizable, we may come to a point when we first feel associations without actually consciously recognizing the object causing them. If then in this unfamiliar visual stimuli we finally guess the initial form from which we departed, already established associations and emotions may allow us to look at the object in a new way. By this practice, we may see new meanings in familiar things.”a
Lynsey McGee is an oil painter whose urban landscapes are part of an on-going investigation into perception. Currently a Doctoral Candidate at the National Art School in Sydney, her research argues for painting’s continued relevance in contemporary art practice as a means of transforming perception.Nostalgia for the Blur, produced at Untitled Space, uses blur to signify the limits of the visual field. McGee hopes to re-invigorate interest in the optical and tactile properties of painting in our screen-dominated daily lives.This project was assisted by a grant from Create NSW, an agency of the New South Wales Government and supported by the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian State and Territory Governments. The program is administered by the National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA).
Mithra (b.1994) is a visual artist whose practice is strongly influenced by what the amygdala stands for. She creates fictional landscapes that are intimately bound up to represent the interior of her mind. Having graduated from Lasalle College of the Arts with a Bachelor of Arts (First Class Honours), she has participated in the Facebook Artist in Residence program (AIR) and has had her works shown in various group exhibitions.Positive thots (thoughts) as a series are fictional and non-binary landscapes. Mithra combines the fluidity of sexuality and emotions to construct these spaces. The spaces she creates are innate as she projects her emotions in a narrative sense through various symbols. Within her prints, she creates landscapes that house her Lotus Chimera. The Lotus Chimera is birthed from the writings of Donna Haraway and the “Ero guro nansensu” art style. This chimeric entity lies somewhere in between one and two, incomplete and exists as a fabricated hybrid.
Born in 1994 in Suzhou, China, Xu Yang is a master student at Tokyo University of the Arts. Instead of practicing specific artistic techniques, she transfers personal objects into shareable artworks. By questioning existing objects and ideas, playing with the ordinaries and rethinking rules and forms in different ways. Through her artworks, she questions the relationship between long-lasting art pieces and transient daily memories.In this exhibition, Xu based her work on the network resources accessible easily online, blurring the boundaries between individuals. In the Internet age, strangers’ movie reviews, pictures of the online shopping sites, e-books and all kinds of accesses are open to the public. As a result, our daily behavior, and the imprints left in the network are another kind of anonymous "presence". In Theodoros Angelopoulos’ movie Eternity and a day, the protagonist once talked to himself "Recently, my only connection with the world is the stranger opposite me. He responded to me with the same song. Who is he? What kind of person? I wanted to go to him but I gave up. It’s better to just imagine ." Before us, life has been repeated tens of millions of times, and perhaps, there are not be so different in our ways of presenting. Xu combines her resident experience in Zhujiajiao, approaching this existence in an almost self-talking way.
Yuji Kumon is a mixed media artist from Osaka. He currently works in Osaka and Chicago. He graduated from the MFA program in the painting department at School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2018.
“Through a residency at the Untitled Space, I experiment with encaustic paint and create a ridiculously simple drawing on paper from my daily life and memory. I try to present contradictions, such as humor and tragedy, romance and reality, rhythm and anxiety in life. I organize space that blurs this dichotomy and carries images that talk differently to each viewer from their perspectives.”