Behind the Curtain featuring Andrew Beck, Elle Chae, Kelly Grace, and Jay Li

Exhibition: Behind the Curtain featuring Andrew Beck, Elle Chae, Kelly Grace, and Jay Li
Exhibition Dates: May 1 – 17
Vernissage: Thursday, May 1 @ 5 – 7 pm

From May 1st through 17th, WALL SPACE GALLERY invites you to join us for the presentation of “Behind the Curtain,” a group exhibition of paintings by Andrew Beck, Elle Chae, Kelly Grace and Jay Li. The artists in “Behind the Curtain” construct worlds through the collapse of linear time, combining past eras or moments from personal archives in snapshots of layered imagery that capture the stretching and tidal current of time in motion.

Beck, Chae, Grace and Li pull the curtain of storytelling aside to focus on the act of creation itself, balancing illusion and reality through their respective use of cinematic influences or the imaginative possibilities within painting. They place us within environments of uncertainty, offering glimpses of stories and settings that shift continually under our feet.

Elle Chae’s figures exist in spaces in a constant state of becoming, their bodies caught in the fragmentation of visual planes and swarming with the coalescence of the botanical, interior spaces of the home, and moments documented from the artist’s daily life.

Jay Li’s renderings of vintage machines such as typewriters and cameras dissolve the structure of these mechanisms into abstract lines and patchworks of vibrational colour. The image of the vintage mechanism barely clings to recognition.

Grace’s process begins with staging the models she photographs and paints; collecting vintage props and designing their ‘character’ through hairstyling and costume design. Appearing like an alternate universe where multiple eras have collided, her figures are immersed in hints of storylines that remain captained by our imagination.

Beck’s scenes cobble together multiple reference photos from movie stills, art history, and the wide index of internet images. He uses the odd relationships he forges between visual imagery to touch on the uncanny – a déjà vu that we can’t quite place. What enthralls him is the painter’s ability to reshape shared visual culture into something entirely new and vaguely voyeuristic, like taking on the first-person perspective in a dream.

Beck, Chae, Grace and Li reveal the ways in which we are drawn to creating meaning through visual imagery, and subsequently, painting’s ability to question the solidity of the structures underlying that meaning. Each uses the malleable constructs of time, cultural memory, and personal experience to grasp the slippery threads of reality, if only for a moment.