IRL

Timothy Taylor is delighted to present IRL (In Real Life), a group exhibition of paintings, sculptures and textile-based works. The title of the exhibition draws from a phrase popularised on the Internet in the mid-1990s, which refers to the division in social relationships between life online and offline—the ‘real one’. Yet in the context of a pandemic that profoundly reduced human contact, cyberspace has come to dominate the ways we work, socialise and connect with the world, blurring the distinction between real and virtual experiences.

IRL explores how notions of the social and sensory experience— sensuality, togetherness and physicality— have been transformed by life lived wholly through the prism of the screen. Through textured tapestries and richly surfaced paintings, ceramic sculptures and hand-painted canvas wall hangings, many of the works in IRL are characterised by heightened materiality, which feels imbued with desire for the physicality of real-world experience. Some of the artists pay homage to lost experiences: the bonds of touch, or the hedonistic pleasure of eating and drinking among friends and family; others focus on how profoundly Internet culture has reshaped our senses, transforming the way we experience social contact, and acting as a site of memory for real-world experience and physical connection.

Artists
Kesewa Aboah
Rebecca Ackroyd
William Brickel
Alma Berrow
Lily Bertrand-Webb
Sahara Longe
Lydia Pettit
Jiab Prachakul
Alexis Ralaivao
Erin M. Riley
Antonia Showering
Honor Titus