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All four artists in this exhibition present images, or traces, of the difficulty and grace of being human. And to varying degrees this human presence is offered up via absence. A street stands empty, hand-written text flitters with legibility and a portrait is rendered as insubstantial. But in each case this presence is fundamentally imbued with the long pull of years that encompasses a human life. A figure alone in a field is compelling as an image not because of the moment in question, but because of what is implied before and after: we as viewers attempt time-travel. What has happened, what change is in the offing?

There is then, another common thread – or ligament, if we are to centre on human metaphors – and it is change. Change as it relates to the human experiment is really just another word for living. But there is, here, a restlessness at play. The Effaced text of Yan Wen Chang’s paintings refers to both a “do-over” but also a tally of what (or who) has been lost along the way. And in Chad Gauthier’s still, ephemeral figures we catch the human form in a liminal state of being and unbeing — a place at the edge of self-awareness where we begin to feel, as Kubrick also wrote, the ”tremendous psychic strains within us”.

Bryan Bowie scours the Eastern US for moments that remind him, and us, of the scale of things; of just how much like dust motes we perhaps are, but of our concurrent ability to capture this sense of scale and the undeniable magicality of existence. Scott Waters, taking his cues from utopic narratives, presents moments when the world order is about to shift – a car crash, or a nocturnal journey – via a crucible through the known, and into the possible.

So, if you like, these images acknowledge the many ways in which we square our shoulders against what waits for us all, but more importantly, they celebrate the struggle and the dance, and the heart-as-muscle that inevitably beats at the centre of an art image.