EXPOSURE 14 Award

Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art is pleased to announce the winners of their EXPOSURE 14 Award: Jon Baker, Sarah Roberts and Aaron Wells, three graduates of the Chelsea College of Arts. Their works are to be exhibited at Parasol unit from 12 October – 9 November 2014, alongside the main exhibition, Japanese contemporary artist Shinro Ohtake. The prestigious annual EXPOSURE Award gives the winning graduates of a selected London art school an opportunity to exhibit their work professionally and to present their work for a panel discussion at the gallery.

Jon Baker
For his exhibition at Parasol unit, Jon Baker presents a series of large photographic works entitled Gape, which explore masculinity and the power men can exert through acts of display and how that can define their relationships with women. The much examined and criticised ‘masculine performance’ is something Baker believes society both valorises and fears. The objects Baker manipulates in his photographs are themselves analogous to the exertion of male power, and simultaneously celebrate and warn against it. Jon Baker lives and works in London.

Sarah Roberts
Ar Lân [beside], 2014, is an abstract ensemble in plaster, glitter, glass and vinyl, inspired by Borth, a Mid-Wales hinterland of pastel-coloured beach bungalows and terraces, rendered immensely visible by its collision of form and colour. Sarah Roberts’s palette draws both from the material and the inspirational façades of the bungalows, which are peeled off, collected, reverberated into form, poured into and smoothed over other surfaces. Existing somewhere between its origin, the studio, and the gallery space, Ar Lân remains rooted in the actuality of matter, offering a reflexive encounter with the ‘thingness’ of objects and the power of visually driven connections. Sarah Roberts is currently based in London and Mid Wales.

Aaron Wells
The film and video works of Aaron Wells explore the illusory nature of images and language within cinema, media and the everyday. In his work he aims to deconstruct the cinematic viewing experience through narrative and image. Wells examines movement, objects, function and place within film, often focusing on spaces – such as an abandoned estate or a blank reel of film – from which some element is missing. Often-humorous correlations are made between image and language, but always there’s a deeper, more philosophical questioning of the wider world. His aim is to prompt a new perspective not only on film but on our everyday surroundings. Having studied Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts, Aaron Wells now lives and works in London.