Surface Tension: Selome Muleta & Youssra Raouchi

We are pleased to present a joint exhibition of Selome Muleta and Youssra Raouchi. Together, the artists explore the bodies and spaces we inhabit. They take on what it means to feel at home, the ways in which we curate our interior worlds, and the mythical and ephemeral nature of our identities. Rooms and planes expose the contradictions between closed spaces and open spaces, often becoming dreamlike landscapes rather than fixed enclosures. 

Nature features heavily in both artists’ work, wild yet domestic, foregrounding the interrelations between the human and the ecological, and rejecting binaries of the man-made interior and the unkempt exterior. In Selome’s work, nature holds a nurturing power, presenting opportunities for release and rejuvenation.

Animals wander in and out of both artists' paintings. Selome’s cats, who are also her real life companions, open up the domestic space to include elements of the natural world. Youssra’s depictions of animals are more tense and foreboding, often separated into different realms as mirrors for the human.

Both Selome and Youssra revel in the discomfort of contorted bodies, which are posed reclining on chairs and curled in bathtubs, their positioning reminders of the awkwardness of our own embodied state. Bodies overlap with bodies, which in turn fold and disappear into their surroundings. Both well-versed in fine art, Selome and Youssra play with form to create new worlds. Selome uses colour and transparency to meld the foreground with the background depicting the ways in which we are embodied in our surroundings. Similarly, Youssra disturbs perceptions of distance to blur the boundaries between the interior and the exterior. Space and body bleed into one another. Rich, intimate, and vulnerable, the works are visual incantations for self reflection: they invite new ways of looking at ourselves when we are alone.