Angell Gallery has a new website: https://angell.gallery

Neil Harrison

Works / Exhibitions / CV

Knowns

ANGELL GALLERY is pleased to present Knowns, a solo exhibition by gallery artist Neil Harrison. The exhibition shall be on view March 17 to April 24, 2021, with a virtual artist talk available on YouTube. Schedule your viewing appointment HERE.

Although it’s human nature to be curious, in times of extraordinary upheaval and divisiveness, of inequity and information overload, a moral imperative to know seems increasingly self-evident. But knowing can be a fraught and privileged position, because “boundaries don’t exist in nature,” says Harrison, “they have to be invented so that people can have things.”

In this exhibition, ten square surfaces float in the negative space of the gallery’s walls. White boundaries contain each of the surfaces, as well as traverse them, defining networks of adjacent colourful spaces that call out for a label and a category. 

The meandering boundary in Harrison’s paintings becomes emblematic of the pursuit of knowledge, enacting both a systematic and non-linear progression. The resulting compositions hint at compulsion and choice as contributing factors in their structures. In addition, “The boundaries in these paintings aren't perfect. As I run them back and forth across the surfaces, effectively closing them, they leave leftover gaps. I fill the gaps with colour so that they can become things. The things tell me what the boundary does, what it’s doing here.” 

Knowns envisions the phenomena that arise in the pursuit of knowing with the structures of knowing that are used to quantify them; those structures which serve as monuments to what has become known, and to what was done to achieve that knowing.