The Back Room is pleased to announce our upcoming exhibition, Shadows in Time, a solo exhibition by Joshua Fitton. Shadows in Time will be Joshua’s second solo exhibition with the gallery and will feature 13 new ink drawings made with pieces from broken ceramic plates. Using the existing illustrations on the plates — which are all from his own personal collection that he’s amassed over the years, having inherited his father’s interest in history and archeology — as a portal for entry, Joshua creates imaginary worlds that are inspired by his own memories and experiences.
Joshua depicts his world in shards and symbols, drawing on actual places in time that he has had formative experiences in, but also embellishing them with symbols and motifs that render them more faithfully in terms of his subjective experience of them. Hence the anachronism of architectural styles from different periods and nations sitting alongside each other in a single composition, like ruins from classical Greek structures next to stately English country houses, or the curved eaves of Chinese temples adorning a modern shophouse, or a 19th-century German castle that’s the stuff of fairytales appearing in a tropical jungle scene.
Such anachronisms prevail in fact in contemporary architecture, and perhaps arise from the same sentiment for the exotic and extravagant which generated such a craze for chinoiserie in 18th-century Europe. In Joshua’s works, this romantic tendency to borrow elements from other cultures in order to express one’s own sensibility or to tell one’s own stories is only the natural result of the modern condition, with its ease of access to foreign knowledge, experiences, and influences and fluidity of exchange across human societies. Through his work, Joshua also explores questions of storytelling and identity that perhaps trail anyone who has any serious interest in history, attempting in the process not to arrive at any hard truths but instead to make sense of one’s own life and times, as faithfully as one is able to.
This exhibition is made possible with the support of PNB Merdeka Ventures and Think City.
Opening reception: Saturday, 29 June at 6:30pm
Exhibition dates: 29 June – 28 July 2024
About the Artist
Joshua Fitton (b. 1987, Bath, England) is a visual artist and fashion designer. He received his MA in Architecture from the University of Lincoln in 2012, following which he pursued a brief career in architecture before founding a menswear atelier called Atelier Fitton, which he continues to operate in The Zhongshan Building, Kuala Lumpur. As an artist, he is known for his work with ceramics, having spent some time in 2019 learning from a raku specialist, and showing a hundred pieces of ceramic eggs for his debut solo exhibition, What Dreams May Come, at The Back Room, Kuala Lumpur, in 2022. In 2023, he was awarded the Tiger Uncage Fund to create a large sculpture crafted out of broken porcelain pieces that was later exhibited at APW Bangsar, Kuala Lumpur. In 2024, he was a participating artist in the second edition of 1000 Tiny Artworks by Artists of SEA at The Back Room, Kuala Lumpur. Shadows in Time is his second solo exhibition to date.
Installation shots
