JEM, a group exhibition in November 2025 that will look to the mechanics of painting and its subjects to explore new connotations of identity and and multiple ways of seeing. Named after the American animated musical television series that ran from 1985 to 1988, a series about a record company owner’s singer alter ago, the exhibition will look to nostalgia and history and examine how we look at paintings to understand identity, duality, mood and culture.
Artists in this exhibition deal with multiple facets of identity and the self; heritage and history, cultural identity and duality, womanhood, gender and feelings of ‘otherness’. They depict an ever-revolving reality of inner and outer worlds through various means.
Many of the works are images taken from photographs (staged or otherwise) and film stills, repeating and altering intimately cropped scenes that create intimacy with the viewer. There is an analogue bleariness to these scenes, extracted from a memory or the brevity of a moment. These are reinterpreted moments that open up a space for invention and imagination, something that resonates with the past but rebounds to the present.