View Two Gallery

Jai Redman - Painting & Sculpture
May 4 to June 10 2006

View Two Gallery is proud to present the first public exhibition of paintings and studio based sculptures by Jai Redman produced between 2003 and 2006.

Jai Redman graduated with a BA Hons degree in Fine Art from Reading University in 1993. He has been variously employed as a prop builder, computer games developer and exhibition designer, as well as spending nearly 10 years as an environmental direct activist and social justice campaigner.

He has spoken on the importance of art in political resistance at the ICA and curated shows of politically engaged art. Currently occupied as Creative Director at UHC (the ethical design and art project he initiated in 2002) Jai is best known for the 2003 installation ‘This Is Camp X- Ray’ - a working recreation of the U.S internment camp in Guantanamo Bay, on waste land in inner city Manchester.

Jai Redman currently lives and works in Manchester.

View Two Gallery is proud to present the first public exhibition of paintings and studio based sculptures by Jai Redman produced between 2003 and 2006.

Over recent years, Jai’s main preoccupation has been political art-action and collective process - with UHC (now a seven member art Collective) Jai runs a busy and industrious studio. Privately, the act of painting and making, form an essential, personal and reflective counterbalance to the hectic negotiations of collaborative practice.

Working mainly on canvas and in oils, the paintings are large and contain areas of highly detailed photo-like reality often contrasted against expanses of loose expressive brushwork or flattened negative space. This use of flattened space seeks to either reinforce or pierce the picture plane, creating an uneasy stillness and surreal quality.

The thematic content reflects the unsettling nature of the work’s composition. Though deliberately political in subject, the work is not always easily read. On occasion the motifs seem simple enough, but the humour employed through juxtaposition is often left unconcluded - incomplete punch lines hang in the frame, uncomfortable in their uncertain perspective.

Though often executed on canvas, Jai also employs found materials - reclaimed wood, sandpaper, and various scrap materials, that generate a dialogue with the paint. The honest use of other people’s rubbish, a habit from years of making do with whatever could be found in skips near protest sites, reflects a punk tradition for bricolage, although here it sits deliberately at odds with the detailed brushwork.

The found object is picked up again in the sculptures. Toy ships and soldiers, old books and photographs, scavenged lead, years of carefully accumulated dust - flotsam from the past, customised and displayed with care and reverence, the work relates to the past and collective memory. But the artist is not concerned here with nostalgia - the work is a wry and (though gently executed) critical attack on how and what, we are made to experience and remember.