Louis Flashman

Sury Basin

London based visual creator Louis Flashman presents a focally image-based practice that seeks a refinement and contrast. Driven by repetitive themes, with a modernist base, Louis looks to the contrast of the contemporary and the past, fascinated by the links and recurrences that take place in history. How nothing is ever new in anything, particularly art. Usually focusing his work towards fashion and photography Louis’ practice carries a consistent aesthetic which crosses all he produces. Merging lines and imagery Louis shows this similarities and recurrences that cross cultures, society, periods and styles.

About work:

Born from a directive focus on food, through the supermarket, to the restrictions society is enduring to comment and assess on the topics of restrictions, access, mobility and societal reactions, Sury Basin is a visual response in the form of a video and print layout to the Covid-19 pandemic built from the lockdown views of a Sainsburys supermarket in Kingston Upon Thames. As panic buying started and soon after lockdown ensued changes in society that have not occurred in generations, if ever, have turned the world on its head, all of which visible from isolation.

With the forced slowing of life that has been imposed Louis Flashman has directed his focus to what he can see out of his window. With a nod to the panopticon in both my outward viewing of Sury Basin as the guard and what takes place there as well as the prisoner like status we are all experiencing through this lockdown and the unknowing emptiness of the horizon of this pandemic, we cannot see out of this situation much like the prisoners in the panopticon cannot see into the central tower of the prison.

The project not only sparks thought and comparison to the situation we’re in but also aims to encourage gratitude at the same time. It could certainly be worse, and it will get better.   

Sury Basin is a visual project focusing on the theme of the governmental lockdowns as a result of the current covid-19 global pandemic. The initial inspiration of the project was to document the views I have of the Sury Basin Sainsbury’s, strangely coincidentally Sury Basin is an anagram of Sainsbury. The supermarket is of key focus in relation to the exhibitions theme of food. Nationally and globally the supermarket has become the location of the best and worst we have seen as communities during this fluctuating time. At the heart of my documentation is peoples desire to acquire food and the happenings that take place when our easy access is changed and threatened.

The work consists of collage like digital imagery, that have been curated through the limited access to my scanner, a Canon G10 and my iPhone. I had started the project working with what analogue resources I had stored but the prolonging of the situation has led me to withold this for the time being as I can no longer have the images processed and scanned. With the means of image creating I have at my disposal I have created a culmination of images from printed references and original images that aspire to create a merging that draws parallels and leads to questioning of the pictures but more so of the situation we are all dealing with.

Mixing images from inside prisons, the views from my flat with its semi-panoramic panopticon like curved balcony, other similar works that I have discovered through my research, the views people enduring quarantine in other countries and conversations I have had with them the work is a culmination of images that all originate from very different situations and locations . Presenting the situation with ambitiously sobering effect.

A number of key references in this project come from a selection of projects, other artist works, publications and theories that I have applied. All of the images that from other works have been sourced from projects that have documented similar scenes and situations to the lockdown we are currently experiencing. The projects referenced are: Wolfgang Tillmans’ 14th Street (1994/95), Mohamed Bourouissa’s Temps Mort (2009) and the independent publication The Wing (2017) by V.BLOCC. The mixing of the images begs the questioning of which are the contemporary global situation, and which are from the works, some of which depict a much harsher situation than we are currently experiencing.

A partial ambition of this mixing of undefined images is to bring a sense of realisation and focus to the situation we are currently experiencing, to influence a response of gratefulness. It can always be worse.