Cell Project Space

Private View Thursday 27th September 2018, 6-9pm

Extended opening hours for Frieze's East End Night on Friday 5th October 6-8pm.

Astrology and the City is a solo exhibition by London-based artist Alan Michael. The exhibition presents a new series of paintings based on street photography that look at displays of subjectivity, social value and processes of research.

The paintings are based on photographs of models hired from an agency who are documented wandering through central London. It uses formats borrowed from classical street-photography and fashion editorials as both reference point and cliché. The arbitrary appearance of visual material within these genres functions like a psychoanalytic session of a city; disclosing its unconscious material. The process of research, display and exchange of source material is consciously represented back as an exercise through the series.

The situations appear plausible and imply a narrative thread but also pass as a generalised stand-in of a social scene, something akin to fashion editorials that utilise and document social environments as an established mode of image making. Servicing these generalised tropes for image production and through their rendering, the paintings prompt different ways to look at appropriation and image culture in contemporary consumer society.