Guest Curator Kelly Rappleye Highlights The Works Of Trendafila Trendafilova, Gabriela Petkova & Daniel Meakin

About Kelly Rappleye

Kelly Rappleye is a curatorial researcher and arts writer based out of Los Angeles and Glasgow, where she is currently completing an MA in Contemporary Art Theory with Goldsmiths, University of London.

Kelly’s practice explores the intersections of urban and digital spatiality, care, and archival biopolitics. A professional background in community mental health informs her critical analysis of care, pathology and dispossession in urban life, with a focus on artistic practices of intervention.

During the pandemic, Kelly co-founded Contakt Collective to conduct practice-based research on digital publics and remote contact.

Trendafila Trendafilova

Trendafila Trendafilova. Past-future tense.

In Past-future tense (2019), Trendafila Trendafilova’s saturated, crisp pastel hues and soft, pillowy figures populate the Surrealist dreamscape of a contemporary, tech-embedded psyche.

The artist’s delicious, popsicle textures depict a lone figure in the psychic topographies of the modern-day subconscious, where the networked grid of technology is ever-present.

This work explores the psychoanalytic formulation of the self as mirrored ego and inner-child in billowing brushstrokes, calling upon Surrealist formations of Freudian and Jungian symbolism and visualising the human experience of memory. The flattened shading blocks and lines that render

Trendafilova’s child figure in a delightful, warm contrast to the summer blue horizon line behind her evoke the mastery of Georgia O’Keeffe, yet imbue the canvas with a distinctly new and fresh painterly sensibility.

Gabriela Petkova

Gabriela Petkova. In The Net 3.

Gabriela Petkova’s pictorial gaze unto the built world deciphers the infrastructure of contemporary urban life, deconstructing the apparent order of its material spatiality—a tree-lined avenue, an asphalt road, the administrative trappings and distinguishing uniforms of local authorities—into gridded, pixelated apparitions.

In The Net 3’s psychotropic, infrared hues denote the machinic eye of a scanner or x-ray apparatus. Yet, departing from many of its’ pixelated, pointillist influences, such as Chuck Close, Petkova’s ordered world seems to come apart the more you look, as her cross-stitch-like patterns are revealed to inhabit slightly skewed or curved lines, akin to netting.

This aspect evokes the hand-stitched embellishments of the human within the infrastructure, and the social possibilities between the lines.

Daniel Meakin

Daniel Meakin. Quaint Coastal Village.

The ultra-vibrant, spectacular canvas of Daniel Meakin’s painting Quaint Costal Village is filled to the brim with excess. This celebration of colour, form, fabric, and pattern constitutes a painted tapestry, drawing upon lineages of British Folk art and painting, medieval and contemporary tapestry art.

Also shining through is the expressionist cubism of Paul Klee and contemporary conceptual iterations on this form, like Italian painter Alighiero Boetti.

Meakin’s landscape inflects an unapologetic rosy, sea-soaked joy to the British townscape that is rarely seen in the British painting cannon, with an exuberance that cannot help but leave the viewer with a smile.