Art Platform Los Angeles: 2015

27 - 30 Sep 2012

Neil Haddon redeploys imagery derived from local print media to produce paintings that convey the emotional complexities and difficulties of migrants as they search for meaningful narratives in a new place. By collaging pictures together, Haddon locates underlying visual structures and using these cues, empties the images of plausible content. This process presents melodramatic departures, the ensuing shapes and figures divorced from the original narratives.

Experience as a migrant can include dislocation, dissonance and a lack of deep connection to a new land. These problems are often difficult to represent in visual language, but by avoiding details and particulars, Haddon’s paintings propose an approach to representation that perpetuates a state of re-reading, promoting new visually aggrandised stories that remain open to interpretation.