ELLIOT JEFFRIES / JOHN TIMBERLAKE

ELLIOT JEFFRIES / JOHN TIMBERLAKE /// DUO SHOW 1

20th May - 13th June 2026

Private View: Wednesday 20th May, from 6pm 

EUCA Annex is delighted to present work by Elliot Jeffries and John Timberlake in the first of a series of two person shows.

This exhibition introduces new work from two artists whose practices meet around ideas of mirroring, displacement, artificiality and the uncanny. Each practice speaks from a commitment to very different media, processes, spatial concerns and subject matter, and yet in both there is a clarity of purpose and sparseness of material which reveals a shared sensibility rooted in exploring the affective and conceptual possibilities inherent in discrete acts of representation.

Elliot Jeffries presents objects caught between internal and external worlds; between the personal and the generic. Stacks of unworn band t-shirts, scanned and reproduced in a crisp PLA, are wedged sideways into a pair of upended steel shelves. The ghosts of band logos shimmer on the marble-like surface and offer haunting traces of an allegiance privately felt and owned rather than publicly demonstrated. Weird replicas of discarded socks litter the floor round about, extending a spatial and temporal fiction that seems at odds with its own machinic construction. Elsewhere, another shelving unit encloses a Mac mini, amplified to reveal its own electromagnetic activity as it processes an unseen image: remnants of family life captured through the window of an abandoned home.

The introspective unhomeliness of Jeffries’ work is in tense dialogue with the uncanniness of immensity evoked by John Timberlake's landscape paintings. In both of the diptychs presented here, what appears to be an infinite array of manicured cypress trees extends across seemingly endless moorland. The ‘all overness’ of this motif uproots the key element of Arnold Böcklin's Isle of the Dead (1880); a painting whose reproduction graced the walls of Freud’s office and famously haunted his dreams. In Timberlake’s images moorland (a product itself of human deforestation) inverts the repressive cliffs of Böcklin's painting, and enacts one of a series of denatured displacements in the texturally seductive artifice of the work. These are paintings in which there is no single figure-ground relation, but neither is there a conventional abstract field: the 'all overness' which came to define modernist painting is here implied within the illusionistic space of the picture rather than enacted on the canvas surface.

Curated by Ben Fitton & TC McCormack

Artist Talk: discussion & Q&A with the artists: Saturday 13th June, 2-4pm

About the Duo Show series 

This curatorial programme invites a creative dialogue between pairs of artists, an evolving process of overlapping exhibitions will see EUCA Annex’s Britannia Row space transformed. 

The programme's ambitious sequential structure reimagines the conditions of display and how practice is performed in exhibitionary contexts, with others (co-exhibitors), and through material encounters; objects, structure and technology. The series will include a wide range of artists with different practices and approaches to the production and display of art, each pairing will both encounter and leave traces of their presence as the chain of exhibitions extends throughout 2026

About EUCA Annex

Euca Annex is a site for contemporary art production and cross-disciplinary research, it provides a platform to foster dialogues between emerging and established artists, to offer more agile and commutable forms of address, through public discourse and site sensitive dissemination. EUCA Annex recently moved from a purpose built space to a new home in Britannia Row, Islington. EA is in partnership with The Florence Trust.

About the Artists

Elliot Jeffries was born in London in 1998. He studied Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts and is currently at the Royal Academy Schools. Using installation and images, Jeffries deals with a sense of contemporary foreboding, investigating uneasy relationships between machines, objects and ideas. Previous exhibitions include group shows at greengrassi (2022) and Lungley Gallery (2022), and a solo exhibition at Coups Contemporary in 2023. He participated in the CSAV Artist’s Laboratory at the Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Lake Como in 2024.

John Timberlake was born in Lancashire in 1967. He studied Fine Art at Brighton Polytechnic, the Whitney Museum of American Art Studio Program, New York, and Goldsmiths, London. Focused on conceptions of landscape as a construct of time as well as space and location, Timberlake works principally with painting, photography and drawing. His work is held in a number of public and private collections in Britain, Europe and the US, including the Imperial War Museum, London, the Barts and Royal London Hospital NHS Trust, and the West Collection, Oaks, Pennsylvania.

Supported by The Florence Trust, UAL and ADMRC Research Centre (SHU)

—————————————————————————————————————————————

EUCA Annex - Britannia Row, 35a Britannia Row, London N1 8QH    Thursday to Saturday 12-6pm or by appointment / info@eucaannex.com / www.eucaannex.com / @euca.annex