It's a Front

Solo Exhibition: An installation of a new suite of digital prints with related painted canopy.

It’s a front is a series of watercolour sketches of cafes, bars, restaurants which are all named after the title of a film. In the tradition of watercolour as a medium for topographical and landscape painters, of the eighteenth century and as an accepted accomplishment for the educated classes, these sketches offer a journey recording the details of specific sites and places. Originally made en plein air and on location, the images are sourced now from the internet, with watercolour perhaps the most appropriate medium akin to the low-resolution of the digitally-sourced images. Here is a Grand tour of the café fronts, all named after films from across the globe.

Restaurants and bars are often the first sign of an emerging community within a foreign location. The choice of name is often poignant and telling: romantic, pioneering, nostalgic, full of hope. The name conjures up associations in all of us and unites in common experiences, however different or strange the distance between us. It’s a front connects to the idea of diaspora and displacement. The displacement between the chosen name and the reality of the place: the displacement between a film title and the canopy of a café; the displacement perhaps of an emerging community: a displacement with the way cinema allows us to project a sense of who we are or what we might become.

It’s a front continues the artist’s sustained engagement with image streaming across media and forms and includes the painterly mock-up of a café canopy The Thief of Baghdad, originally commissioned by Cornerhouse in 2010 with a sketch for a proposed second canopy To the Shores of Tripoli.

• https://www.websta.one/media/Bh6kn0qhcFE