Miniaturesque, a major new exhibition by Slinkachu, will launch at Andipa Gallery on 12th March 2015. Shot in London during different seasons over the past year, Slinkachu’s new body of work draws upon our desire to seek out and recreate the natural world amongst the urban metropolis. His miniature people, photographed on the streets of London and then left in situ – or “abandoned” – by the artist, explore the hidden enclaves of the wild within our city. Slinkachu captures idyllic glades and green pastures, in reality weeds and moss that appear through cracks in the concrete, and comment on our modern society’s detachment from nature.
Using tropes from art and popular culture, Slinkachu’s new works employ irony, humour and a healthy dose of reality; despite their fantastical situations, the miniature figures we observe are not so dissimilar to ourselves, living in the shadows between the real and artificial.
In The Glade a tiny lady sits on a matchstick swing hung from an over-arching weed, a scene reminiscent of The Swing by Jean-Honoré Fragonard and almost, but not quite, picturesque. In Paradise, Slinkachu has one miniature figure exploring a tropical waterfall worthy of an office motivational poster, if not for the discarded Sprite bottle that causes this ‘un-natural wonder’. In The Jetty, children frolic in a lake of melting ice-lolly, bringing to mind nostalgia for those long summer days of our youth – or perhaps a scene from a film we once saw, showing what our youth should have been.
Miniaturesque will feature seventeen new images on paper and aluminium as well as new sculptural pieces, one of which is Slinkachu’s biggest yet featuring over 200 miniature figures in a recreation of The River Thames.
