Sally Lewis

Lewis’s work takes a subversive stance in relation to our ‘knowledge of things. Visual knowledge is dependent in part on context, and this is exactly what her work will strip away. It may seem contradictory to describe such visually seductive works as subversive; but seductiveness is indeed an aspect of their particular presence, it is also developed as a strategy that is concerned with how the look of things is codified.The approach taken...

Lewis’s work takes a subversive stance in relation to our ‘knowledge of things. Visual knowledge is dependent in part on context, and this is exactly what her work will strip away. It may seem contradictory to describe such visually seductive works as subversive; but seductiveness is indeed an aspect of their particular presence, it is also developed as a strategy that is concerned with how the look of things is codified.The approach taken by Lewis favouring reconstruction over history is suggestive of a resurgent recognition of the role of imagination in art and in the languages of art. Something that was once a tablecloth, a handkerchief, a torn piece of silver dress, a length of curtain material, or a cut out piece of sewing design, becomes part of a picture puzzle whose final form, like an object of quantum physics, is expressed only as a probability. As in quantum geometry, the works propose a picture that could not exist in the classical reference framework. The critical reference of time is compressed into an indeterminate present, without the reassurance of any retrospective certainty.