A Visual Arts exhibition featuring twenty national and international artists exploring the notion of 'double lives'. Works include installation, painting, drawing, photography, projections, video and film.

Curated by Diana Ali

www.maltcross.com

16 St. James Street, Nottingham, NG1 6FG.

A ‘double life’ conventionally is a life of two identities where one is simultaneously involved in two sets of circumstances and retains the secrecy of one from the other.

The exhibition is an exploration of the two sets exposing dichotomies of fiction and reality, mirror images and opposing forces. ‘Double lives’ cater for a parallel existence whether it portrays deceiving acts or insatiable fulfillment and can as subtle as a pen name or as exaggerated as the secret identity of a super hero; ultimately why are they adopted?

Rene Descartes and Gilbert Ryle both contest from separate perspectives that our biographies- mind and body- are divided but co-exist in parallel without being the same entity.

Artists have been invited to expose their work investigating functions of duality, such as alter egos, multiple personalities, parallel universes, secret relationships but where double lives exist, privately or publicly.

Jef Bourgeau (United States)

Stig Eklund

In his art, Jef Bourgeau explores cultural icons and trends, exquisitely veiling his own identity behind style, various media and invented doppelgangers. His refined use of light and shadow lends itself well to themes of mystery, loss and solitude. Nearly all the subjects of Jef Bourgeau's work are creations marked by projections of longing and desire. In each is his translation of and compassion for one of the most difficult and complex aspects of human reality: the constant discrepancy between our perception of and hope for truth, and our experience of it.

Jef Bourgeau (1950) lives and works in Detroit. His art has exhibited across the USA, Europe and Asia, and he is represented in important private and museum collections globally.

Stig Eklund was born in Bergen, Norway in 1976.

An undiagnosed dyslexic, Stig Eklund left secondary education at the age of sixteen. He spent his remaining teen years working at a cardboard factory in his home town. During that time, utilizing the materials at hand, he began to make and experiment with several pinhole cameras. The work from these rudimentary cameras developed into dark, moody photographs. He has remarked that he can only see "right" through a camera lens.

Eklund's mature camera style is so strong that it can even shroud a street lamp, so that, instead of light, it seemingly emits darkness and shadows. His vision drapes geometrically clashing urban beauty with the sooty persona of its denizens, succinctly captured by a Norwegian artist who spends much of the year in Detroit's glowering twilight.