Lobby: Tim Bennett, Peter Joslyn, Matt Johnstone, Magali Reus and Dan Shaw-Town

Hales Gallery is pleased to present Lobby an exhibition curated by Dan  Shaw-Town and Matt Johnstone. This is the second in a series of summer shows where the gallery is handed over to independent curators, artists and in this case fine art students. Lobby includes the work of five emerging artists who have all made works specifically for the show. Tim Bennett, Peter Joslyn, Matt Johnstone, Magali Reus and Dan Shaw-Town are all studying the MFA Fine Art programme at Goldsmiths College, London.

Lobby: The anteroom, an eternal state of display, dressed for the first encounter.

The lobby is a space of transition and circulation, a temporal sanctuary to rehearse the next appointment. The edifice of waiting, people and objects made equal, all props awaiting activity. It resists clear function, becoming a place where time and reality feel displaced, waiting for us to catch up and carry on. The anti-room. The set. The threshold of responsibility.

Tim Bennett trained to be a cook and a stonemason and adheres to a particular artisan aesthetic. He maintains a protestant work ethic and lives and works in Munich and London.

In the summer of '99 Peter Joslyn moved to London and in an attempt to express what he calls his 'liberation', adorned himself with baroque tattoos and has not looked back since.

Magali Reus spent time as a child staring at the fountains of Holland's suburban shopping malls. She soon developed an acute awareness of the media landscape, with their fusions of Eniwetok, Freud and Disneyland.

Matt Johnstone travelled to London as the singer in the band Sub-cult. Although the group disbanded in 1999 he continued to develop as an artist. He started his art education in Middlesbrough, Stockton-on-Tees and arrived in London in 2003.

Dan Shaw-Town arrived in London four years ago. He has followed a well trodden route, working in numerous jobs as an invigilator in galleries all over the capital, much the same as Dan Flavin and Robert Ryman who worked at The Museum of Modern Art in New York in the late 1950's.