Artists

Jen DeLuna, Karice Mitchell, Casilda Oppe, Unyimeabasi Udoh

Press release

An exhibition exploring the power of ambiguity, misdirection, and the act of concealment as a strategy for symbolic reasoning. This exhibition will bring together works that challenge perception; offering multiple perspectives, defying easy categorisation, and inviting deeper interrogation.

At surface level, things are not always what they seem. Across history, those who exist outside rigid structures of power have developed strategies of opacity, misdirection, and layered storytelling; both as a means of survival and as a tool for subversion. This exhibition seeks to engage with these ideas through works that blur, distort, or obfuscate meaning, challenging the viewer’s instinct to categorize, simplify, or resolve.

In an age of oversimplified narratives and rapid consumption of images, choosing opacity is a conscious act. This exhibition aims to highlight artists who reject easy legibility, instead embracing complexity, contradiction, and the subversion to be easily pinned down. Whether through hidden messages, unexpected material juxtapositions, or an aesthetic of elusiveness, the participating artists assert the right to control how (or if) their work is ‘read.’

Through abstraction, layering, material manipulation, and unconventional presentation, this exhibition explores how art can resist immediate interpretation, insisting instead on uncertainty, fluidity, and multiplicity. By refusing to conform to a singular narrative, these works hold space for contradiction, complexity, and open-ended encounters.

The physical properties of an artwork, the materials chosen, the way they are combined, their weight, texture, fragility, and durability play an active role in shaping how meaning is perceived, revealed, or hidden. This exhibition will foreground artists who engage with material as a conceptual force.