Mirei
Mary Maclean Camilla Wilson
9 December – 15 January
Preview Tuesday 8 December 6 – 8pm
Mirei proposes a pairing between the work of Mary Maclean and that of Camilla Wilson.
Mary Maclean’s photographs focus on the architecture of public and private space, suggesting an inversion of the
habitual priorities of looking, bringing to the surface what might otherwise be disregarded aspects of institutional
space. Materially they involve combining the photographic image and semi reflective surfaces to construct a
changeable and illusive reading of interior space. These approaches serve to intensify the act of looking,
introducing an interaction with the viewer.
Camilla Wilson’s paintings deal with the representation of interior spaces, some glimpsed and fractured in mirrors.
The interiors themselves provide small stages of a sort, presenting an illusion of completeness, undermined by
internal repetitions, reversals, other interruptions, or projected light, which break the seamlessness of pictorial
space.
From a material standpoint, the pairing of these two artists raises the inevitable contradiction in the nature of the
surface, in tension between the flatness of Modernism’s ‘canvas’, and the endless relay of representational space
provoked by reflection.
The subject of the interior is here addressed not as a question of genre, but of experience. Through an articulate
approach to framing, with internal frames, breaks, blinds and thresholds, the works here may figure what Richard
Wollheim has called ‘the viewer in the picture’,1 of the witness prefigured, although not represented, in an
unsettling bond with what is witnessed. The fragment as a device here is instrumental, along with the sense that
normal habits of looking are denied, or displaced, even dislocated. Shifts in viewpoint and slippages foil or
undermine expectation provoking a spatial estrangement. This capacity for the familiar to turn upon the beholder,
in order to appear de-familiarised, de-realised, is a function of the Uncanny, which according to Anthony Vidler, ‘is
not a property of space itself, nor can it be provoked by any spatial conformation; it is, in its aesthetic dimension, a
representation of a mental state of projection that precisely elides the boundaries of the real and the unreal, in
order to provoke a disturbing ambiguity, a slippage between waking and dreaming.. ’2
Camilla Wilson has exhibited in Jerwood Contemporary Painters, Jerwood Space and touring, Continental
Breakfast, UGM Maribor, Slovenia, with SevenSeven Contemporary Art, Les Merveilles du Monde, Musée des
Beaux-Arts de Dunkerque, The Greatest Show on Earth, Metropole Galleries, ArtRoom, Cologne, New Artists,
Purdy Hicks, with solo projects at Fordham Gallery, Euro Miss and Eraser, Laurent Delaye Gallery. She was
awarded an ACAVA studio award, and a studio residency at Museum Insel Hombroich, Neuss, Germany. She
lectures at London Metropolitan and Bath Spa Universities.
Mary Maclean has exhibited in Outside Architecture, Stephen Lawrence Gallery, London; Civic, Galerie Drei,
Berlin; Before, The Room, London; Inspiration to Order, University of Stanislav, California; Jerwood Artist’s
Platform, Jerwood Space, London; Frenzy, The Metropole Galleries Folkestone; Almost Nothing, Neutral Space,
Brighton, Depth of Field, Mac galleries. Research awards include an AHRC award and Abbey Fellowship at the
British School at Rome. She lectures at the University of Reading.
Gallery opening hours: Tue - Fri 12 - 5
Gallery closed 22 December - 5 January
Unit 2 Gallery
London Metropolitan University Central House
59 - 63 Whitechapel High Street London E1 7PF
www.unit2.co.uk
Supported by the Research Capability Fund
Sir John Cass Department of Art Media and Design
1
2
Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art
Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny