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Derek Horton is an artist, writer and curator who recently worked with Mark Devereux Projects to select the artists in Looking at the Reflection of Reality, the second annual associates exhibition. He tells us more about the selection process.

Along with Kitty Anderson, Mark Devereux and Stuart Tulloch I was delighted to have the opportunity to select the artists in Looking at the Reflection of Reality. The things that interest me the most (in the world in general and art in particular) have always been things that evade categories, that resist easy classification, that undermine expectations. Really good artworks almost always do all of those things. The measure of quality, for me, is always to do with an artist’s capacity to work inventively across, through and beyond the conventions of a discipline or the limitations of a medium.

Good art also generates ideas, provokes reflection or speculation, and invites dialogue. It is no coincidence that the work we eventually selected for Looking at the Reflection of Reality, from a large number of submissions, is the work that prompted the most discussion amongst the panel of selectors. The outcome is a diverse exhibition of works united by their capacity for inventiveness and freedom from formal limitation.

Mary Wintour – The eagerness of objects

Mary Wintour fuses painting with collaged photographs in works that create ambiguous shifts within interior spaces that have an artifice reminiscent of a film or stage set. Using very different methods, Laura Napier also works with architectural spaces, using photography, installation and performance to create imagined realities and fictional histories.

Laura Napier – Heintzman Solicitors (Interior-Window)

Aylwin Greenwood-Lambert interrogates the relationship of material objects and graphic symbols, overlaying the randomness of internet searches with the specificity of language and testing the space between the printed image and the video screen. Evi Grigoropoulou’s exploration of the tradition of trompe-l’oeil also exploits the intersecting possibilities of replication and representation.

Rob Davies uses painting to subvert genre, mapping out a territory in which the Romantic landscape, Western movie clichés and gestural expressionism collide. Working with pop culture sources in a very different way, Marco Giordano collects amateur drawings, ‘fan art’, that, veiled, dissolved, obscured, are transformed into delicate and subtly (re)aestheticized surfaces.

Joe Hancock has worked with a scripted text to create an audio installation in the context of a sculptural intervention in the architectural space of the exhibition, emphasizing its physical location and dimensions but in so doing also potentially narrowing the gap between the viewer and the work, both his and that of the other six artists in the show.

Looking at the Reflection of Reality runs in Manchester’s Federation House until 13 December. Read more about it on Central Station in this featured event.

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