13 July - 4 September 2021

Group Exhibition

Rites of Passage

Unit London is excited to announce a new group exhibition entitled Rites of Passage. After more than a year spent in a seemingly intermediate state, Rites of Passage explores notions surrounding the liminal space. An international group of artists engage with ideas of uncertainty and trepidation, encapsulating an indeterminate existence set between reality and suspension.

Typically, liminal spaces are characterised by transition, presented in the physical forms of corridors, stairways or elevators, serving as waiting rooms between one place and another. They are often empty and abandoned, devoid of human presence. Yet, despite their disquieting indistinctness, these spaces remain strangely familiar, inducing an oddly combined feeling of eeriness and nostalgia. However, the works presented in Rites of Passage frequently include a recognisable cast of characters, inhabiting these liminal spaces and contending with their own periods of change. In this sense, by combining representations of the architectural and the bodily, Rites of Passages, implies how liminality can affect our mental existence when we are left in a limbo between one stage in life and the next.

The very form and materiality of the artworks themselves reflect these notions of the intermediate. These works often blend hyper-realism with a surrealist visual language, leaving us questioning the familiar yet beguiling worlds they create. Recognisable symbols are often slightly distorted or eerily perfected, building up to construct a seemingly alternate reality characterised by ambiguity. Simultaneously detailed and dreamlike, these works only ever verge on the abstract, hovering between the mimetic and the non-representational.

Alison Blickle

Alison Blickle is a Los Angeles based artist born in 1976. She received her BFA from the California College of Arts before going on to gain an MFA from Hunter College in New York. Blickle primarily creates paintings that depict women involved in mysterious rituals, exploring powerful female archetypes found in mythology. Her works explore connections to nature, ancestry and spirituality.
Chason Matthams

Chason Matthams, born in 1981, lives and works in New York City. He received his BFA and an MFA in Fine Art from New York University in 2012. Matthams describes his body of work as “a mind going into anxious overdrive trying to construct a narrative out of all the disparate information and random alignments one is confronted with daily.” The artist is interested in how the mind must impose a narrative onto this information in order to feel agency.
Chloe West

Chloe West is a visual artist based in St. Louis, Missouri. West earned her BFA from the University of Wyoming before going on to receive an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis in 2017. West’s works question the subjectivity of the body as it relates to place; she is interested in how the body relates to the space it occupies. The politics of looking and the relationship of the body to the private and public space is at the forefront of West’s image-making process.
Clinton King

Clinton King (b.1976) is an American born artist based in Brooklyn, New York. He received his BFA from Columbus College of Art and Design before going on to achieve an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His practice extends to a multitude of mediums, including sculpture, video and painting. King’s techniques range from unabashed and gestural blending to more simplistic applications of paint. Often using oils on linen, King allows his works to form without preconceptions of the end result, attempting to start each piece from zero.
Daisy Dodd-Noble

Daisy began her career working at the UN for the Department for Disarmament Affairs New York, then went on to work managing shipments into Basra port Iraq, from Dubai. In 2015 she returned to school to get her MFA at the figurative painting school New York Academy of Art, TriBeCa. She takes her inspiration from nature, particularly trees. She is interested in the communication between trees through mycorrhizal networks. Daisy is also interested in themes of collective consciousness, and human connection with nature. She explores themes of escapism through nature.
Haeji Min

Haeji Min (b.1995) is a South Korean artist who splits her time between London and Seoul. Min graduated in 2020 with a BFA from the Slade School of Fine Art before enrolling in an MFA in Painting at the Royal College of Art. Her work is influenced by external stimuli, her own self-awareness and a concern for topical social issues. As such, her subject-matter can range from observations of everyday life to depictions of social, political and natural crises.
Henry Hudson

Henry Hudson (b.1982) is a British artist living and working in London. Hudson’s critical practice is expressed through the exploration of various techniques and materials, including ceramics, plasticine, scagliola, oil painting, 3D printing, wax, sand and textiles. His practice is inspired by a multitude of sources, new and old, in which British art plays a formative role, including work by Leon Kossoff, Frank Auerbach and William Hogarth.
Jeremy Olson

Born in 1976 in Ojai, California, Jeremy Olson is a Brooklyn-based artist. He received his BFA from the University of Arizona and an MFA from New York University. Olson’s compositions explore the darker side of the human condition, evocatively rendering universal anxieties. His artworks frequently feature a cast of anthropomorphic characters, navigating surreal and otherworldly landscapes.
Jinyong Park

Jinyong Park is a South Korean artist living and working in London. She received her BA in Fine Arts from Kookmin University in Seoul before going on to receive an MA from the Royal College of Art in 2015. Park has long been attentive to our day-to-day linguistic experience, stemming from her interest in her own mother language of Korean. When she moved to London in 2013, her bilingual experience influenced her painting as it began to reflect her own experience of language. In her works, Park produces her own hieroglyphs that are able to tell personal narratives.
Marty Schnapf

Marty Schnapf (b.1977) lives and works in Los Angeles California. Schnapf received his BFA from Wittenberg University in 1999 and was heavily influenced by his studies abroad in Cortona, Italy. His paintings unfold slowly before the viewer in intimate compositions that allude to the dynamic interiority of individual experience while exploring the complexity of human relationships.
Millie Kelly

Milly Kelly, born in 1993, is an artist currently living and working in Exeter. She received her BA in Fine Art Painting from Wimbledon College of Art in 2015, going on to receive the Clyde and Co award in 2016. Millie Kelly’s recent paintings develop ways of exploring the natural, emotional and imagined world through her love of the materiality of paint itself. Her closeness geographically to the sea, nature and her hometown have influenced recent works. The water element is prevalent throughout, an ode to the feminine; what it means to be a female painter, questions of motherhood, and the nostalgia of her childhood in Devon.
Muzae Sesay

Muzae Sesay, born in 1989, lives and works in Oakland, California. Sesay’s artworks explore the feelings that arise from blending representations of everyday life with strict architectural and manufactured forms. His artworks employ unique perspectives to collapse space and shape into two-dimensional, geometric surfaces. By taking imagery and reducing it to rudimental forms within a fragmented and harmoniously coloured picture plane, Sesay’s artworks challenge our process of memory and perceptions of reality.
Oliver Clegg

Oliver Clegg (b.1980) is a British interdisciplinary artist based in New York. Clegg constantly searches for subjects with indefinite narratives, creating open-ended paintings with ambiguous meaning. His works explore existential notions of objecthood and matter, images and signs, language and communication, thought and action, creation and being. After completing his MA in Fine Art, Clegg went on to exhibit widely in major cities across the world.
Rex Southwick

Rex Southwick, born in 1997, is a visual artist based in London. Southwick’s artworks confront the idealised manipulated imagery of luxury domestic environments disseminated by digital platforms. The artist works primarily from photographs provided by building contractors to present the real process behind the creation of these seemingly perfect homes. Southwick constantly challenges our perceptions of environment, luxury and privilege by encouraging us to question idealised spaces by presenting a messy raw reality.
Sasha Ferré

Sasha Ferré is a visual artist living and working between London and Paris. She holds an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art. Ferré paints directly on unstretched canvases, creating works that are influenced by her interest in ecology, biology and process philosophy. Ferré’s practice investigates the world as a constantly shifting network of connections. Ferré has exhibited widely across the US and Europe and was the recipient of the Hine Painting Prize in 2020. Recently, she has participated in exhibitions at Saatchi Gallery in London, Fold Gallery, Daniel Benjamin Gallery and Josh Lilley Gallery.
Sholto Blissett

Sholto Blissett was born in 1996 in Salisbury in the UK. He attended The University of Durham where he received a degree in Geography before undertaking an MA in painting at the Royal College of Art. He paints large-scale, oil on canvas works that depict imaginary landscapes, exploring the collapse of the subject-object relationship which exists between humans and nature. Influenced by the German Romantics, Blissett’s works blend the Sublime with the surreal to create ethereal, yet strangely familiar scenes.
Simphiwe Mbunyuza

Simphiwe Mbunyuza (b.1989) is a South African artist, living and working in Oklahoma. He is currently working towards his MFA from Oklahoma University. Mbunyuza creates striking objects and vessels that combine stoneware, leather, fabric and steel. His richly textured ceramic objects feature traditional African iconography, employing a coiling technique that has been used by the Xhosa people for centuries. Mbunyuza has exhibited widely across South Africa and internationally.
Suchitra Mattai

Suchitra Mattai (b.1973) is a multi-disciplinary artist of Indo-Caribbean descent. She received an MFA in painting and drawing and an MA in South Asian art from the University of Pennsylvania. Her work explores how memory allows us to unravel and re-imagine historical narratives. Her primary pursuit is to give voice to those who have been silenced. Using both her own family’s history and her research of colonial indentured labour during the 19th century, Mattai seeks to expand our sense of “history.”
Tahnee Lonsdale

Tahnee Lonsdale (b.1982) is a British born artist currently living and working in Los Angeles. Her artworks represent a new direction in quasi-abstract painting. Ethereal and flowing figures populate her vibrantly coloured picture planes. Lonsdale’s paintings evoke universal feelings of tenderness, warmth and human connection. Lonsdale holds a BA from the Byam Shaw School of Art in London. Her works have been exhibited widely in her native UK as well as the USA.

In the liminal space, we exist on a threshold between realities:

Between sleeping and waking, between rural and urban, between childhood and adulthood. Time stretches between ‘what was’ and ‘what is next’, leaving us questioning the relationship of the past to the present and the unknowable future that awaits. As such, the exhibition strives to present how liminality extends beyond the physical and the material, seeping into our interior lives. In essence, Rites of Passage captures the feeling of being in the liminal space, waiting on the cusp of something, in between one point in time and the next.