Echoecho

Sim Smith is pleased to present 'Echoecho' the second solo show with the gallery by Jonathan McCree.

For the first time the artist will transform the gallery into an encounter combining wall-based sculpture and paintings with wall painting.

McCree’s earlier cardboard sculptures are referenced in sand-cast aluminium arrangements hung onto the walls, where the forms are echoed in wall painting and paintings on sheet aluminium.

The new sculptures see shapes that McCree has worked with before metamorphosed; blown up, exaggerated and transformed in almost covert fashion, into a new material. Casting cardboard into aluminium destabilises our experience and offers up a tension around truth, authenticity and value. We are fluctuating between the experience of something real and the sense of something symbolic.

The sculptures float up and down the walls of the gallery, some solitary, some inseparable, some made stronger by their multiplicity. Cobalt blue, pale pink, orange, yellow, circles, lines, some have teeth, some feel like soldiers, others like sunsets or ice-cream.

McCree works with memories and daydreams, giving way to sensations. Through his wall painting he invites us to enter another realm, allowing us to experience the tensions between surface and space, picture and sculpture, wall and floor. The result is an ambiguous encounter, which asks, can something be made more real or less real? Or indeed what is real?

McCree creates parallel realms, which generate a concurrent reality. In turn we are offered the possibility of escape into a world of our choosing. McCree has amplified drawings from his sketchbook. Drawings of memories of places, on sheets of pale pink and pale blue coloured aluminium, and again we float. We recall a tree, the feeling of grass below us, or do we? McCree uses memory as a material, creating layered realms of reflections, repercussions, traces and responses.