About

The works that comprise Esther Janssen’s first solo exhibition with Unit London, Silence, are never populated by people. Instead, they present quietly familiar suburban neighbourhoods or vacant rural scenes, inhabited by standardised sets of houses, immaculate rows of topiary, sharply cut conifers and uniform bodies of reflective water.

By emptying these spaces of any human presence and reducing our familiar environments to these common elements, Janssen presents an apparent universal ideal. However, the perfection of these natural environments steadily becomes unsettling. On closer …