STATEMENT
Sasha Bowles is a London based multi-disciplinary artist, working across painting,
objects, film, installation and performance. Bowles creates performances, artefacts and
installations housed within provisional environments that are a means of storytelling but
are not a narrative. Playing with ideas of facade and fakery, her practice is an evolving
loop, dealing with illusion, intervention and metamorphosis; immersing herself in
historical tropes encountered in houses of grandeur and often using as a jumping off
point; the Baroque bravura of artifice.
You are asked to enter through a backdoor of theatricality and pass into hallways of
reconstructed grandeur, where the once grand patrons of illustrious houses are
reimagined alongside metaphysical surreal like artefacts. Through appropriating once
familiar objects, old master paintings, found ornaments and etchings fallen from
historical books; Bowles erases, mischievously rearranges and discretely brushes over her
unwitting sitters and artefacts. Using elements of the museum, the collection and
display, the works are re-contextualised, opening new interpretive possibilities.
The object interacts with its context and vice versa; by playfully twisting her narratives
presented in facsimiles of environments, Sasha is examining the boundaries that cross
between spaces and how the display and context of objects and artworks effects our
reading and engagement with it. The known becomes uncanny and challenges us to re-
evaluate our interpretation and engagement of the familiar.