Lewis Ronald

colour laser ​print-outs

Laure Genillard is pleased to present an exhibition with Lewis Ronald and Adam Thompson at Hanway Place. In their practice both artists reveal an approach to exhibition making that relies on the material nature and context of their surroundings. This exhibition brings together a shared interest in notions of the ‘found’, appropriation of material and the re-interpretation of use value.

In a series of new works Lewis Ronald engages in a process of discrete interventions in to the public domain. Neither sabotage nor of any clear social value, these actions in fact only become consolidated in the space of the gallery, where irrational relationships can transpire. Thinking simultaneously about the ubiquity but also the unstable nature of images, Ronald takes the notion of the found and distributes imagery through layers of context and various forms of the production platform. Ronald’s investigation into the nature of images, ‘found’ material and the various methods by which information can be received is made visible through a process of intervention and subsequent re-appropriation which highlights Ronald’s interest in the status of images and their place within a specific context.

Adam Thompson’s work centres around found objects, collected detritus from a neglected functional past, appropriated without evidence of the artist’s touch. Thompson’s sculptural arrangements are not simply imbued with a new cultural value through relying on the context of the exhibition space. Instead, the artist composes these almost unidentifiable objects into a form of archaeological minimalism, where their material nature in that exact moment of time is rendered static. Extracted from their original context and left unaltered the artist offers us an associative reading through means of gestural arrangement. As the mere presentation of part decayed or eroded material articulated as the unaddressed expression of time and weather on surface, the work places objects not in contradistinction from the human, but within an ecology determined as the interrelatedness of things as they appear in the world.