The Impossibility of True Escape

Ava Wright, Jade Smith, Malachy McCrimmon and Weronika Matyskiewicz
Dundee Rep & Scottish Dance Theatre
Curated by Lewis Cavinue and Alex Tosh 

20th Sep 2025 - 15th Nov 2025
Free to attend (during Dundee Rep Theatre opening hours)

Dundee based arts workers Lewis Cavinue and Alex Tosh, in collaboration with Dundee Rep and Scottish Dance Theatre, are excited to present a new group exhibition The Impossibility Of True Escape. This exhibition features work by four emerging artists, each with ties to Dundee; Ava Wright, Jade Smith, Malachy McCrimmon and Weronika Matyskiewicz.

Devised to coincide with Dundee Rep and Scottish Dance Theatre's production of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie. The Impossibility Of True Escape explores themes of escapism, family, and the fragile boundary between the real and the imagined. Drawing emotional and thematic inspiration from the play, Cavinue and Tosh have selected artists whose work, like memory itself, distorts, magnifies, and reveals what resists being held still.

“The scene is memory and is therefore non-realistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic licence. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart.” - Stage Direction from The Glass Menagerie

This exhibition invites visitors to explore how memory and emotion intertwine with our perceptions of escape and reality. The works on display offer a multifaceted reflection on these ideas, creating a powerful conversation between the artists’ practices and Williams' iconic work.

About the Artists

Ava Wright (She/Her)
Ava Wright is a Scottish contemporary artist whose work is deeply rooted in her hometown of Paisley, Renfrewshire. Her practice centres around social documentary photography, working exclusively with analogue cameras - a conscious choice, as she views the process of developing film as an artform in itself. Wright blends elements of photography to draw attention to intricate details and overlooked moments often missed in standalone images.

Jade Smith (She/Her)
Jade Smith’s work often begins in a personal condition, understanding her own experiences through visual image and progressing to acknowledge that these feelings are not just hers. The ultimate goal of her work is to provide comfort not just to herself, but also to others. Because of this process of realising ideas, their environment, interactions, and connections with others have a significant impact on how their work is generated. Smith's ideas have frequently been realised through moving image and projection, but she has recently blended these mediums with painting and photography. Since graduating from DJCAD, Dundee, she has been involved with a show at Salt Space Glasgow called Keeping the Baw Rolling, a show at Edinburgh Palette titled New Year, New Me, New World Order, and she’s also shown work at Art Night Dundee

Malachy McCrimmon (They/Them)
Malachy McCrimmon is a painter and collage artist exploring the complexities of the environment around us, and how quickly it transforms. Their work exists at an intersection between humour, ecology and post-internet culture, accumulating in a polarising commentary on the human relationship with the natural world. Each piece carries meaning beyond the chaotic compositions, asking the viewer to contemplate where they fit in in a fragmented world.

Weronika Matyskiewicz (She/Her)
Weronika Matyskiewicz’s practice investigates visual perception through the phenomenon of binocular rivalry; a process where each eye is presented with a different image simultaneously, typically using coloured filters and 3D glasses. Using oil paint as the primary medium, Matyskiewicz merges traditional painting with digital aesthetics and perceptual science. The illusions usually associated with screen-based media are reinterpreted on canvas, allowing the analogue and digital worlds to intersect. Central to the work are images drawn from childhood, quiet, familiar spaces remembered without people, imbued with a sense of nostalgia and absence. The resulting paintings invite viewers to engage with the shifting experience of seeing.

About the curators

Alex Tosh (He/Him) is a Dundee-based arts facilitator, ceramicist and stage manager. Alongside his work in theatre, Alex maintains a ceramics practice and produces contemporary artworks that have been included in exhibitions such as ‘Instructions Not Included’ by Original Copy Collective and Generator Projects’ annual members Show. Entering the world of curation with this exhibition ‘The Impossibility of True Escape’, Alex is pairing his work as stage manager on ‘The Glass Menagerie’ with his interest in bridging contemporary art and theatre, exploring how the two disciplines can overlap, converse, and enrich one another. 

Lewis Cavinue (He/Him) is a Dundee-based visual artist and creative practitioner. Supporting the presentation of early career artists’ work across artist-led and institutional contexts, both collaboratively and independently, he explores experimental approaches to curation. A graduate of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design (BA Fine Art) in 2024, he now serves on the committee of Generator Projects, a long-standing artist-run initiative in Dundee. Artists’ images and more information available on request