Overlay investigates the increasingly liminal space between the physical and virtual worlds. As digital environments expand and interweave with contemporary society, our perception of reality becomes flattened and compressed into screens, images, and endless digital and physical media. This exhibition draws attention to what exists beneath, beyond, or between them, asking: “What do we lose when our sense of reality or experiences are only mediated through layers of representation?” “How do digital spaces affect us when they are slowly becoming our dominant environment or social landscape?” “How do we continue to be human in a chrome, steel and cyberistic world of 1s and 0s?”

Through two-dimensional media, Overlay is created through processes which are inherently tied to layering, repetition, and translation. Techniques such as printmaking, photography and digital projection become both method and metaphor— echoing the ways in which contemporary experience is built through accumulations of images, data, and impressions. Each work operates as a site of excavation, revealing juxtapositions between presence and absence, permanence and ephemerality, analogue trace and digital characteristics..
The exhibition considers how the act of layering mirrors the ways we construct and reconstruct our understanding of reality. Echoing how, an image is never singular; it is the result of successive actions, previous actions and perspective, each layer contributing to something that both conceals and reveals.

Similarly, our engagement with the world is mediated through overlapping systems: physical environments, digital interfaces, memory, and perception. Unseen Layers invites audiences to look beyond the immediate surface and consider the unseen infrastructures — social, technological, and material — that shape how reality is experienced and understood.
At the same time, the exhibition reflects on the tension between the tactile and the immaterial. As virtual spaces become more immersive and pervasive, the physical trace takes on renewed significance. These works resist the frictionless, instantaneous nature of digital imagery by reasserting slowness, texture, and materiality. Yet they also engage with digital aesthetics, incorporating glitches, pixelation, and fragmentation to acknowledge the hybrid condition of contemporary visual culture.

Overlay ultimately proposes that reality is not a fixed or singular construct, but a composite of visible and invisible dimensions. By centering materials that emphasise process, repetition, and material translation, the exhibition encourages viewers to reconsider what lies beneath the images they consume daily. It asks us to pause within the flow of mediated experience and to recognise the complexity of the worlds—both physical and virtual—that we inhabit.

In revealing these hidden layers, the exhibition opens a space for reflection: not only on what we see, but on what we fail to notice, what is obscured, and what is gradually forgotten as our realities continue to shift between the tangible and the digital.