EMMA TALBOT’S c.20:21 COMMISSION CELEBRATES INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY ON PICCADILLY LIGHTS
CIRCA Piccadilly Lights www.circa.art
1-31 March 2021 CIRCA, Piccadilly Circus, W1 EMMA TALBOT’S c.20:21 COMMISSION CELEBRATES INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY ON PICCADILLY LIGHTS Emma Talbot, the London-based artist of sensuous visual poems becomes the next CIRCA artist, presenting a new body of four animated films in collaboration with Whitechapel Gallery, Collezione Maramotti and the Max Mara Art Prize for Women. Following a woman at the gateway between the old world and a new world to be made, Talbot’s Four Visions for a Hopeful Future tells the story of a protagonist in search of answers to guide both her own journey and the development of society to a spiritual and political rebirth, on the iconic Piccadilly Lights screen. Coinciding with International Women’s Day (8 March), Talbot’s animations represent our current moment as a universal space of fluid nature, punctuated with direct appeals to the viewer’s emotional reasoning, where past sadness can be transcended. Quoting Indian novelist Arundhati Roy, Talbot’s work utilizes the giant display as "a portal, a gateway between one world and the next" through which we are passing with the changing of seasons. Drawing on a history of cultural flourishing following historic pandemics, as the Black Death preceded the Renaissance, Talbot imagines a world in becoming, unshackled from the darkness of the past and limitations of societies that came before. Talbot, winner of the eighth Max Mara Art Prize for Women, has begun to focus on her solo practice only recently, following a career as an educator and academic in some of London’s most prestigious art schools. Her autobiographical work encompasses drawing, painting, animation, and sculpture. In a challenge to pessimism and cynicism, she confronts some of the world’s biggest structural problems, from gender inequality to the environmental collapse. Her winning proposal for the Max Mara Art Prize for Women, a feminist response to the apparent shame of female ageing presented in Gustav Klimt’s painting Three Ages of Woman (1905), is emblematic of her works that communicate the personal as political. Talbot uses this as the starting point for her Max Mara Art Prize project and intends to animate the figure of the older woman as someone with agency, who overcomes a series of trials similar to The Twelve Labours of Hercules. More info about the project: www.collezionemaramotti.org