FiveMyles presents A State of Flux, a group exhibition by Karni Dorell, Tony Whitfield and Derek Haffar.

The exhibition juxtaposes the human impermanence implied in the two photographic installations on the gallery walls with the solidity of the squat and sturdy forms made from plaster casts of blank canvases. All three artists are showing new work, partly created for this exhibition.

Karni Dorell, a photographer and video artist, has collected snap shots from family and friends for several years to compile this piece that portrays a global mass of figures engaged in every day activities. Several hundred of these small cut-out images appear on the gallery wall and remind us that human beings are bent on survival; we continue our lives without interruption even though horrendous tragedies are taking place all around us.

Tony Whitfield’s large, fragmented photographs focus on a culturally diverse family, connected by blood, marriage and affection. Central to this group is a beautiful young woman in her mid-thirties, who suffers from metastatic cancer. Whitfield’s images range from the young woman’s wedding during the summer of 2008 to intimate time spent with her mother during chemotherapy in 2009.

Derek Haffar will exhibit sculptures from his latest body of work, blank canvases cast in plaster. The canvases are shaped into forms that are at once brittle and vulnerable (indicated by cracks and fractures) as well as sturdy and substantial. Their minimal, white presence presents an imperturbable element in the space filled with the human movement and gesture of the photographic works.