Contact information
sales@hyphacurates.comDigital systems dominate our lives with a logic that thrives on precision, quantification and the elimination of ambiguity. In this context, the analogue could be regarded as simply a nostalgic opposite but choosing analogue as a means of expression is more incisive than a longing nod to the past. The analogue is also a mode of resistance and through it we can find the gaps that the digital can never fill.This exhibition explores the analogue as a relational, elastic, and metaphorical space.
Some exhibited artists foreground hands-on engagement with materials such as clay, textile, glass, or cardboard. Here, making is visible and each medium is exploited for its intrinsic properties – clay’s pliability and sensitivity to heat, or cardboard’s rigidity and its application in model making, for example. Practices grounded in haptic processes such as plaster casting, embroidery, carving, or trompe l’oeil painting, underscore the role of time and labour. They are knowing rejoinders to the disembodied and apparent ease of digitally produced imagery and virtual experience.
Other artists draw on subject matter rooted in lived experience – Alexis Zelda Stevens’ plaster cast of keys lost down the back of a sofa and Louise Wan’s mechanical shoeshine – alluding to and transforming a familiar sensation into a metaphor. Then there are artists interested in what the digital struggles to compute, like uncertainty and nuance – Ewelina Skowronska spreads dye across a silk surface, for instance, seemingly guided by intuition. Indeed, many works champion the analogue as a way of knowing shaped by experience and care.
The artists presented here propose the analogue not as a refuge from the digital, but as a mirror to its limitations. Ambiguity, embodied making, and sustained attention may be our most valuable forms of knowledge.
About the curator
Sarah Lee Elson developed Launch Pad out of a desire to support emerging artists directly, develop her collection, commission new work, and participate in the creative process. With Launch Pad, she has aimed to foster dialog about commissioning and collecting new art by exposing the process to the public. Through this process, she offers an alternative model of art philanthropy.
Elson is an art historian and collector with professional expertise as an advisor to private and corporate collections. Since 2008, she has devoted herself to the cultivation of not-for-profit arts organisations that she supports. Sarah’s philanthropic activity includes writing and curating as well as fundraising and strategic development. She established an International Artist Residency at Princeton University where she serves on the Advisory Council of the museum, and a fellowship for UK-based craft artists at Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina, where she served on the board. Her collection includes specially commissioned works by both fine and applied artists, and ranges from ceramic to video, photography to furniture. Sarah received her BA in Art History from Princeton University and her MPhil from Columbia University.
Artists in the show
- Pauline Batista
- Claudia Barreira
- Michael Coppelov
- Spike Dennis
- Stathis Dimitriadis
- Srabani Ghosh
- Neil Groom
- Liz Harrington
- Nicky Hirst
- Libby Hoffenberg
- Jota
- Susan Ker-Seymer
- Helen Kincaid
- William Lowry
- Sanna Namin
- Jennifer Nieuwland
- Alexis Over-Papatzaneteas
- Lisa Pettibone
- Kirsi Pirhonen
- Owen Planchart
- Anusha Ramchand
- Zara Ramsay
- Lenka Rayn H
- Vivien Carolyn Reinert
- Monya Riachi
- Zoe Scutts
- Ewelina Skowronska
- Alexis Zelda Stevens
- Gwennann Thomas
- Claude Vergez
- Josephine Wood
