Sasha Bowles is a London based multi-disciplinary artist, working across painting, objects, film and installation. Bowles creates artefacts and installations housed within provisional environments that are a means of storytelling but are not a narrative. 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.