In The Wake

Workplace is pleased to announce a new solo exhibition by Rachel Lancaster. Continuing her longstanding interest in the intersections of cinema and painting, the artist’s new body of work explores a quiet tension between familiarity and mystery, capturing the uncanny backlit glow of pre-digital media. 

Based on films from the 1980s and 90s, the new series of paintings further draws out the ‘noise’ and visual distortion of analogue footage. Rooted in the artist’s own formative experiences with VHS tapes and other physical media, the resulting works reflect the particular light and colour of a past time, evoking a culturally specific aesthetic sensibility through a painterly quality that is equally haunting, curious and dream-like.

Working with photographic stills from films, alongside her own archive of images, Lancaster uses oil paint to heighten the psychological intensity of the scenes and weave an ambiguous narrative through seemingly insignificant subjects: passing shots, commonplace interiors and close ups of inanimate objects. For instance, in A Thousand Faces (2023) a faintly rendered makeup, a hair brush and mirror sit atop a table, yet the ghostly lighting disturbs the ordinariness of the scene. Both Around The Room (2023) and Witness II (2023) are set within quiet domestic moments, but the pronounced point of view creates an unsettling tension.

Lancaster’s world is constructed through fleeting moments and fragments of memory, always existing on the edge of comprehension. Is that the shadow of a bird in flight? Is a detail of clothing or strand of hair from someone passing by? In Held (2023), the closeness to the subject straddles a line between comfort and claustrophobia, as a tight cropped view of a man’s chest shows ample detail of fabric and shirt buttons but crops out his face or other identifying features. Others have little action in the centre, instead placing emphasis on the furthest edge of the canvas, as if the point of view was a panning shot around a room. Textures of paper, silk and fabric define the ambiguous paintings, such as Air Between (2023) and Glimmer (2023), while elsewhere a dream-like aesthetic of gentle fades and hazy vision appears to be on the verge of sleep.

The paintings are made by applying successive thin glazes of translucent oil paint, allowing many layers of colour and texture to accrue over time. Slipping between definition and abstraction, her surfaces contain an array of optical effects. Often, anticipated details give way to looser, minimal rendering that is revealed as a painterly abstraction upon closer inspection. The artist carefully considers subtle decisions about cropping the source material, and through an open ended, intuitive process, evokes a narrative that is full of mystery and intrigue. A careful attention to multiple scales – life size, close up, zoom, at a distance – establish distinct modes of viewing, placing the viewer in different vantage points, either on the floor, at eye level, looking down upon the subject. The eerie scenes are as if they are within their own temporality, either stuck in the past or in a limbo state. Reflections, colours and action point beyond the canvas, suggestive of what else is happening outside the image, lurking out of sight.