What happens if we look at something very ordinary for a very long time?  A crack in the ceiling, that pile of rocks, the empty lot around the corner…  These are the starting points for Zoe Benbow’s and Catherine Hughes’ works.  With Hughes, the scenes are coolly, analytically replicated but reduced to a small scale; it’s as if that neighbourhood storefront has been telescoped to a portable size.  With Benbow, it’s as if the viewing glass is reversed and the minute becomes magnified, painted to a large scale until the smallest crack on a pebble becomes a ground-shaking fissure, and the palette is expanded to an emotional intensity.  The ordinary is no longer ordinary through the variety of ways of seeing.

The title of our show is borrowed from Marcel Duchamp, it is a “readymade” in the same way that the artists take their observed realities as their “readymades”.  Yet their way of looking, their research and process are individual, and the resultant works are not ready made.  If we also follow the title’s instructions when looking at the work, what do we end up seeing?