Haunts and Follies

Picture some bizarre, spooky, pseudo ruin, partially overgrown. It is the kind of place that if you were watching a D-grade horror movie you just know that the girl and the guy would go on to meet the unexpected. Curated by Simon Mee, the artists in this exhibition explore the historical within their art as a means of dealing with the contemporary world. They lead us away from where we think we were going, from the comfortable and familiar, to a destination that is strange but also strangely enthralling.

Penny Byrne's meticulously re-worked porcelain figurines passionately address a range of issues from the political to the environmental. Kate Rohde teases out sinister twists in a room full of brightly coloured ornate baroque forms. Sam Leach's paintings provide a narrative that could be both mad scientist and deranged modernist, as animals, birds and nature attempt to escape from the fate of geometrical transmogrification. Simon Mee takes drawing for a walk but through American gothic via French rococo, accompanied by a range of characters you think twice about sitting next to on a bus. These artists are hunting out the locked closet, the bricked up room and the funny smell coming from the blocked chimney of subconscious.