What Remains

Jonathan Callan’s work ranges across a diverse set of mediums, methods and materials. It is linked by a preoccupation with the limitations of language. Callan often works with texts, books, maps, and photographs. Much of this information is sourced and filtered from secondhand books. He regards his own culture as one that is predominately literary and has had an almost lifelong concern in trying to reconcile his own deep interest in materiality with that pervasive literary history.

The work is often playful, dark, and self consciously renders and re-presents much of what might be considered abstract- thought, meaning, understanding- in very physical terms. Texts and images are abraded, removed, reconstituted and at times almost obliterated. The work can be both small and intimate and also expansive, sculptural installations that occupy whole spaces.

Jonathan Callan’s (°1961, lives and works in London) work is included in major museum collections including: The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The British Museum, London; The Henry Moore Institute, Leeds; South London Gallery, London; Whitworth Gallery, Manchester; The Britisch Council; The Ferens Art Gallery, Hull; The High Museum Atlanta, US; The West Collection, Pennsylvania, US; The Leopold Hörsch Museum Düren, Germany; Princeton University Art Museum, New York; Progressive Art Collection Ohio, US, JP Morgan Chase Bank, New York.

In Susanne Wellm’s practice historical, self-biographical and tactile dimensions are closely intertwined. For more than 20 years, she has collected existing photographic material and this comprehensive and personal archive is the departure and reference for her works. Based on a conceptual approach, Wellm combines existing motives with own photographs to spur new narratives investigating the quest to create meaning between ourselves and our surroundings.

Often multi-layered, blurring the boundaries of fact and fiction, her works poetically elude a specific reading. Wellm’s works are all unique and the result of both digital and analogue processes. In recent years she has introduced the sensuous qualities of textiles by either weaving or surface threading the works. These applications not only embrace the heritage women’s traditional handcraft but break new ground in our perception of photography.

Susanne Wellm (°1965, lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark) is a 1995 graduate of The Royal Danish Academy of Architecture, Design and Conservation, and has since exhibited widely, nationally and internationally. Her works are represented in several significant collections, among them The Danish Arts Foundation, Denmark; New Carlsberg Foundation, Denmark; The Royal Library’s National Photo Collection, Denmark; The Museum of Photography, Brandts,  Odense, Denmark; Vejle Art Museum, Denmark; Portland Art Museum; Portland, Oregon, USA; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, USA; Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts, Japan.