Chris Avis London, United Kingdom

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I am a London based artist who uses photography, digital manipulation, and sound to create images, video, and installations. Searching beneath the surface by unpacking the layers that we keep secure is a fundamental aspect of my work. Often nostalgic, sometimes beautifully melancholic, I make tender unsettling images drawn from my reflections of human behaviour.

Using multiple layers of digital manipulation on my photographs I paint with pixels to create digital prints. My moving image work takes these visuals through slow mesmeric animation to quietly unfold a narrative.

As a woman my interest in female identity has grown from studying painted expressions on mannequins, to looking into the self-esteem of older women, through to working on intimate relationships between mothers and daughters. Using memory, dream, loss, or emotion to articulate a narrative, my work often invites unsettling reactions in the viewer. Seemingly in contrast, new work on environmental threats uses the same layered approach with the viewer left with the desolate haunting beauty of destruction.

For six years, from 2013 I worked closely with the Park Theatre in London who hosted three solo exhibitions for me covering mental health, older women and relationships between mothers and daughters. During this time I also took part in two German Contemporary Art Festivals ‘Schlachten’ held near Berlin.

In 2014 I devised and directed a Barbican Guildhall Open Lab and in 2015 this work was shown at Rich Mix, London. In 2013 a Winston Churchill Travel Fellowship funded six weeks of research to explore the potential opportunities available to older artists across Europe. This involved interviews with artists, museum curators and gallery owners in Copenhagen, Amsterdam, and Berlin.