“Between Two Worlds” open June 27 – August 31st , 2022 with Jeffery Becton and Andrea Hamilton
AH Studio 68 Kinnerton Street, London SW1X 8ER

I recently attended a gorgeous exhibition with visiting Maine artist Jeffery Becton at Andrea Hamilton studio on Kinnerton Street. If you have been to the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy already, you may have noticed his picture “Pilot House”.

JB The Pilot House, 2014

Jeffery Becton is a pioneer in the world of photobased art. Using digital tools, he creates pictures that look like alternate realities rich in symbolism. He calls them montages. While working on his MFA at the Yale School of Art in 1976 he became fascinated by the computer and for his thesis he produced a boxed portfolio of psychologically arresting black and white portraits. His aim was to illicit an emotional response from the viewer. After his graduation, he decided to give up the idea of living in New York City as a graphic designer and move to Deer Isle Maine where he had summered with his family and where he could immerse himself in the land and sea and coastal architecture that inspires him. He made the decision to become a fine art photographer. He began to use the camera as his sketchbook. The photographic world was changing very quickly and in 1990 the introduction to Photoshop changed his life. For 40 plus years he has spent creating highly individualistic imagery by layering photographs, paintings and diverse elements resulting in an emotional reaction to the world he inhabits. We want to believe what he sees but look closely. The composite images are beautiful but unsettling. Sometimes frightening. They are dreamlike. The more we look at them the more they draw out our own emotional responses.

“ A diffuse, bleaching light illuminates Jeffery Becton’s images of rooms. They are two-dimensional dioramas, perched on the edge somewhere between land and ocean. You can almost smell the salty wind through the open doors. These are dream interiors promising peace and refuge, places out of time.”

–Deborah Weisgall, The Farthest House

JB Ephemera, 2014

At the intersection of land and sea, memory and place, is where we find synergy between Becton’s work and the artist Andrea Hamilton’s vast archive of photographic series which repeatedly consider the ocean as subject. Between Two Worlds, is an exhibition that explores the intersection between human and wild spaces, the horizons of the mind and the certitude of entropy, and celebrates the boundless: both of nature and the imagination.

AH Never Falter never Stall 2020

Please feel free visit the gallery 3 -5 pm for open studio, Monday to Friday until August 31st or else you can schedule an appointment by calling Emelie Martin at 0207 245 6664.

AH Delta Waves, 2013