Exhibition Announcement

Steve Taylor

In a series of paintings on show at the SAID Business School, an Oxfordshire artist Barbara Gorayska attempts to reawaken the moral consciousness of viewers. The series of paintings comprising the exhibition is entitled “Moral Playground”. Each of Gorayska’s oil on canvas paintings provides an assembly of multivalent images inviting the viewer to feel, question and be questioned.

Gorayska looks for moral factors that might lie behind events related in literature, art-history, current events, scientific and technological innovation or religion. The paintings are her response to the dilemmas these moral factors raise. However, her statements are not explicit or judgmental. Rather, the images portrayed are suggestively subtle and at times even playful.

As Gorayska says, “I want viewers to peel back multiple layers of meaning in my enigmatic paintings – and in so doing, perhaps become more aware of the contemporary morality underlying our modern, fast-paced and often self gratifying lives.”

Following the exhibition a private viewing will be held on Friday 27 April at which The Revd. David Neaum, Associate Priest at the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin will give an introductory talk under the title of ‘Questioning the Forum: Art and Ethical Reflection.’

Barbara Gorayska is Artist in Residence for the Oxford based research project: ‘A Framework for Responsible Research and Innovation in ICT’ funded by EPSRC and is a member of the Oxford Art Society.

Realities we create are interplay of borderlines; Categories we use to shape these realities are fluid and ill-defined. Likeness turns into difference, difference into likeness. Identities are short-lived, often illusory and we are so constantly faced with the necessity to refine them.