Summary
British-born artist Kit Wise has a practice that ranges over photography, sculpture, drawing and digital animation. A recurrent theme in his work is the subjective and malleable experience of location in an increasingly transcultural and globalised world.
Artworks such as the digital prints in his ‘Elsewhere Series’ present a mash-up of cityscapes, familiar and unfamiliar urban views interleaved with natural landforms and represented through shifting scales, perspectives and colour planes. Saturated in dim light, these works suggest an ‘in betweenness’, a twilight zone – not one place or another, not one time or another – a certain ‘Blade Runner’ effect but without the dystopianism.
In fact, on the contrary, these composite cityscapes are fantastical representations that reconfigure the disparate urban scenes of their source material into unified urban utopias. Like the trippy, fragmenting and wondrous worlds of a turning kaleidoscope, the scenes come into easy communion to suggest new possibilities. With a viewpoint that affords a long gaze across a trans-geographical landscape, the viewer not only comprehends the fragmented landscape from an elevated position but projects their desire for exotic otherness onto the scene that unfolds below. The Art and Heritage Collection holds three works from Kit Wise’s ‘Elsewhere Series’ – numbers 2, 4 and 5.
