Sunday Preview. Stories we feature next week

This week of stories invites us to an investigation of a mysterious death, a story of a couch and its inhabitants during the COVID lockdown and a very creative take on the transformation of London by global corporations and "its brutally disorientating effects" with images that could literally make you dizzy.

Enjoy responsibly!

Rik Moran: Chance Encounters in The Valley of Lights

Monday, 15 Nov

It’s like something straight out of Agatha Christie’s books, a typical whodunnit mystery. Zygmunt Adamski’s body was found resting on a ten feet high pile of coal, miles away from his home. He was a local miner and there were no signs of foul play — the only peculiar feature on his body was a mark, evidently a burn on the back of his neck and head.

This is the very abridged back story to what would eventually become Rik Moran’s investigative body of work Chance Encounters in the Valley of Lights. It follows multiple lines of inquiry including, but not limited to, transcripts of interviews, hypnosis sessions, found photographs and materials and original images taken by Moran.

— Rik Moran

Nicola Lewis-Dixon: The Corona Couch

Wednesday, 17 Nov

As Jo Spence, who has been majorly influential to Lewis-Dixon’s practice, claims, all the typical family album does is tell a very curated, highly polished and glossed-over story from the point of view of the adults. There are glaring omissions in almost all albums that create gaps and absences — they only document the happy and proud events, brushing anything that can’t be classified as a happy occasion under the proverbial carpet.

What Lewis-Dixon attempts with The Corona Couch is to subvert these expectations of the family archive showing only eventful memorable moments — in some of her pictures there is not that much happening and that is part of the point. Family life is not all about birthdays, weddings and graduations, much of the other 99% of the time is highly mundane and repetitive, like watching the telly every evening or cleaning and doing the dishes.

Lewis Bush: Metropole

Friday, 19 Nov

As Lewis Bush states, “once the Metropole, or mother city, at the heart of a vast global empire, London is now the dominion to a new world power”. The photographs in his body of work Metropole are predominantly black and white and they combine multiple exposures, overlaying and found material from development billboards. The effect is complete disorientation, dizziness, perhaps even a slight headache. Images like these are powerful at any size — both tiny screens and huge billboards — but they achieve their full potential when printed large, in particular the monochrome double exposure photographs.

— Lewis Bush