SPACE 2: JAMES BOURBON

Exhibition Dates : 18 November - 30 November 2025
Opening Reception : Wed 19 November 2025, 6:00 - 8:30 pm

Memory, Myth & Magic

James Bourbon's new collage-based paintings excavate the forgotten debris of twentieth-century mass culture. Working in stark black and white, he reconstructs fragments from old advertisements, propaganda leaflets, and discarded print material. His traditional painting techniques mirror xerox reproduction, transmuting perceived trash into new mythologies.

These works interrogate how memory functions when truth becomes malleable. What images endure while others vanish? How do personal recollections merge with collective folklore? Bourbon's reconstruction process becomes archaeological recovery, pulling meaning from materials that once passed through our hands without consideration.

In our current landscape of manufactured nostalgia and weaponised misinformation, these paintings reveal memory as distorted and unreliable. The artist doesn't simply collage fragments but rebuilds them through paint, creating new mythologies from the wreckage of old ones. What emerges is darker than nostalgia: a forensic examination of how popular culture and media programs our collective unconscious, one image at a time.