30 April — 5 June 2011

Phil Filby & Rob Root, a two person exhibition by Rob Filby and Phil Root.

Phil Root explores painting through different mediums to create multi-layered environments that can be viewed as whole or separate entities. The motivation to create an environment rather than a singular work is so that people can have a bodily, as well as intellectual, interaction with the work.

Untitled (Legs) was inspired from a figure in a tarot card and is deliberately medieval. The patterning and bordering are suggestive of card like qualities, bringing out its relationship to image and object. The work is also the basis of the limited edition screen print produced for the show. One of Root’s most striking pieces features ceramic bowls on top of an ice plinth, which gradually melted over the course of the exhibition leaving the bowls floating in a trough of water. The piece explores the idea of erasure and references works by Francis Picabia such as En faveur de la critique (1945). Root exhibited a range of new work created especially for the exhibition including installation, sculpture, ceramics, paintings and wall drawings.

Rob Filby’s practice is object orientated, but crosses into the two dimensional in the series Mood Boards which imagines future works, and the Work & Co. photographs which document his sculpture in the company of cats. In the exhibition space which he filled with musk incense, Filby exhibited a new body of sculptural work including re-conditioned glow-in-the-dark agricultural parts, re-coloured newspaper, and a sausage casing 'necklace'. Filby's practice is interested in the meaning and unmeaning object, and amused by the possibility of communication through such convoluted and obtuse means as art making. His limited edition comprised an insertion into a local paper advertising some of the exhibited works as for sale.

Works in Phil Filby and Rob Root  were for sale, and could be purchased through Own Art, the interest-free loan scheme. Wysing Members, Supporters, Patrons and Collectors enjoy a 10% discount.