9 AM AGAIN
A collective exhibition by London-based artists Laura Kazaroff, Imogen Marsteller, Zully Mejia and Yixin Yang. Featuring works across various media, including painting, sculpture and installation, this exhibition examines and monumentalizes the surreal within the everyday.
9 am again brings attention to relatable concepts and experiences that shape daily life. This takes the form of an innovative depiction of time through the use of found objects and water in a sculpture by Argentinian artist Laura Kazaroff, deeply self-reflective figure paintings that explore human connection by British-American artist Imogen Marsteller, exhaustively detailed renditions of women of colour in everyday environments by Peruvian-American artist Zully Mejia, and an endearing yet sinister installation of a bedroom by Chinese artist Yixin Yang. The four artists met through the Goldsmiths MFA Fine Arts programme. Their different backgrounds foster dialogue across cultures, artistic expressions and media, but the exhibition conveys a clear unified appreciation for colour.
Laura Kazaroff investigates remembrance of everyday places and objects whilst honouring a desire to bring the past into the present and future. Significant themes in her work include gentrification, nostalgia, and the preservation of memories, both individual and collective.
Imogen Marsteller’s work focuses on women and women's lives, particularly the social and the secret, the theatrical and the intimate. She concentrates on the visual arts as art history in the making, reviving historical periods with a fresh and contemporary glimpse of life as lived within a new theoretical framework. She uses portrait painting to self-examine and capture female play, resulting in ennobling the lives of women and enriching her practice figuratively and literally.
Zully Mejia creates hopeful but defiant paintings and sculptures that depict real individuals and translate experiences tied to immigration, womanhood, and being a person of colour. She engages visual rhetoric to challenge identity stereotypes by conveying complex and diverse realities of experience within these identity groups. As a Peruvian-American immigrant, her work often draws from personal life events, memories, and encounters. Mejia uses visual rhetoric to depict leadership, resilience, and confidence.
Yixin Yang was heating food late at night in her flat and didn't turn on the light. Only the microwave glowed warmly, like early morning, like sunset evening. A place a friend told her about. They both liked the old roller skating rink, where everyone played hand in hand. They didn't even know each other, but the friendship and happiness at that moment was so real. Yixin always doesn't know how to say goodbye. She secretly doesn’t have the courage to throw things away. She sometimes feels a little sad but acts angrily and mean while facing fading friendship. Sometimes, she plays computer games for seven hours a day during holidays. Warmth of the machine is like tenderness and companionship. It protects this kind of moment. Someday maybe she will forget all the things they did together, but the wind, the dust, the mornings, the roller skating rink will remain. All the good things last forever.
Saturday 28 - June 1 2022
Enclave 50 Resolution Way, London SE8 4AL
“9 am again for me was an opportunity to try something new. I pushed my practice outside of my comfort zone, placing an emphasis on location and its relationship to identity. Both works depict women of colour and narrate experiences linked to immigration and the home.” -Zully Mejia //@zullymgmejia
“9 am again was the perfect context for me to push my ideas forward, especially the ones related to the surreal in the everyday. Also an opportunity to use mundane objects and push their structures to the limit, by creating a composition in which you can no longer identify the individual pieces and what they used to be”- Laura Kazaroff //@laurakazaroff
“9 am again for me is a space which loops back and forward at the same time: each day is a repetition and a new one. I try to create a time that lurks in the midst of the everyday, a time for all those moments that we go through without really living them.” - Yixin Yang //@sleepydoggy123
"The show was a chance to collaborate with a group of artists in a way that I have not in the past. To collaborate on the total transformation of a white space, by painting the walls and manipulating the lights. The work itself is a deeply personal narrative about searching for human connection. What gets lost in transition, being a student moving to a new city and not fitting in, looking for ways to connect, whether online or in-person, generally feeling out of place and foreign." - Imogen Marsteller//@negomi.imogen
Imogen in the studio
