Through a choreographed investigation of display, Spoils and Relics questions methods and traditions of producing and exhibiting artworks. All three artists engage in a constant process of de-constructing and re-constructing imagery. Motifs from earlier works often appear recycled as everything, including the artists’ own practice, becomes potential source material. The rejected or negative space generated from one work can become the found material for the next. The image as a narrative container is abstracted by the varying personal and conceptual syntaxes of each artist.

Henning Bohl’s large canvas hangs at a right angle to the wall rather than directly on it as a conventional painting would. In doing so, it acts like a makeshift room divider causing the observer to physically navigate the space around it. The composition of the ‘painting’ is formed by commercially produced coloured paper that reveals its own sculptural materiality by the way Bohl applies it to the canvas, in parts curling and folding away from the picture plane. The fragmented imagery that this composition draws from was originally taken from images of Japanese theatrical Kabuki masks. When examined with this knowledge, the abstract elements echo back figurative signs. Bohl also uses the negative residues of cut out paper forms, and in doing so develops an economics of image production and activates a logic of its own process within the work. The second work is a smaller ‘portrait’ of the larger work, where the different proportions of the paper size force the picture to adapt its new dimensions. Bohl is interested in the idea of dramatizing these pieces in different formal arrangements that are engaging and performative.

Amanda Ross–Ho’s cut canvas works transform imagery through sculptural negotiations. These cut outs are made from canvas drop cloth coated in black latex. The images are translated from photographs of vintage macramé – an ancient technique resuscitated as a DIY mainstream activity in the late 1960’s and early 70’s involving making a fabric from the repeated tying of connection points or knots. The result is an interlocking system or totality that contains potential for mathematical geometric structures as well as more organic or free forms. The process finds parallels in other modes that employ direct manipulation of linear elements into legible forms such as drawing and writing. Considered formally, these works compound flatness, reversing the white and black macramé image to black and white as if in a photographic negative. They depict gravity and also speak about the painting’s gravity in relation to the wall. The removal of parts of the canvas to create voids is highlighted by the fragments that are present on a floor piece – a sewn quilt made of a canvas drop cloth used in the studio. The installation cross-pollutes sites of production and sites of presentation by integrating elements that anchor the work to these realms or introduce transparency between the context in which the work was made versus that in which it is presented.

Michael Hakimi is involved in a process of formal reduction and how this affects perception. The urban environment inspires images and forms of display. The narrative potential of basic geometric forms is explored, rotating and manipulating segments that materialize into new matter. Some works lean on the wall, some attach to it, others are freestanding, mimicking the natural composition of the city’s claimed commercial surfaces. A cut out black MDF shape stands with a two-dimensional front but its reverse reveals a theatrical support reminiscent of a cheap advertising prop. Scale is skewed so that a paper shred cut out is magnified to XXL, whereas the mock advertising board is smaller than a human figure. Simplicity of shape, line and form create a flattening effect but despite the destruction and removal of information there still remains a spray-painted halo of desirability even in the absence. The image remains symbolically loaded. The feeling is of observing the broken skyline of the city, zooming in and out between the economy of advertising, minimalist sculpture and the self-reflexive view of the artist.