Portable Keyhole
Faith Hughes
Michael Sandford
Curated by Jean Watt
September 3 - October 3
2025
In collaboration with A Place to Rest
Faith Hughes
Michael Sandford
Curated by Jean Watt
September 3 - October 3
2025
In collaboration with A Place to Rest
Flexitron is pleased to present Portable Keyhole, a duo show of work by Faith Hughes and Michael Sandford, curated by Jean Watt. This exhibition is in collaboration with A Place to Rest.
In Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) L.B. Jefferies watches his neighbours across a New York apartment courtyard using a telephoto camera lens. Framed through their windows, the residents play the piano, are carried over the threshold, dance around their bedroom, weep at the dining table, with Jeff bearing witness to the daily intimacies of domestic life. The lens offers a proximity to their lives from a safe distance, an observation tool Jeff’s nurse Stella refers to as his ‘portable keyhole’.
Both artists in this exhibition have developed methods of accessing intimacy from afar and reproducing its imagery. For Faith Hughes, subject matter is extracted from stills and videos found through hours of internet trawling. Removed from context, archival television footage or home movies could be either intimate or sterile: bodies seen through car windows, figures in shadow on their front porch, legs and hands that could be kneeling, praying, kissing. Michael Sandford’s drawings detail viewpoints witnessed through hacked surveillance cameras of public space: indeterminable scenes of complex interiors, shimmery waters, dark and rippling landscapes. Guiding the works of both artists is an attempt to capture a feeling experienced elsewhere, a vulnerability which has been coopted for their own. These processes are as much a research task as they are a way of producing images, the portable domain of a laptop offering immediate closeness to lives lived far away.
This focus on the act of seeing is interfered with in both bodies of work through an interplay with surface and scale. Hughes does this by working on found materials such as ceramic bathroom tile or aluminium heat sinks, a cooling component found in computers. In Concern for the present and as usual, as usual, miniature images are housed within aluminium candle holders whose softly mirrored panels create blurry, shifting surroundings to the work. Sandford’s vignettes appear in powdery chalk on vast blackboards. In Toronto, shades of purple geometric panels intersect with wiggling maze-line markings in a warped birds-eye view of a jewellery shop. The fragility of applying this medium to a surface is palpable, images threatening to be brushed away if you come too close.
Portable Keyhole reveals these shared processes of negotiating distance, both from their source material and from the images that are produced. Where Hughes draws you into a crouched, close-up proximity, Sandford insists on a step back. Between them, fleeting moments are relocated, resized, and stilled: loosened from time and place only to appear anew for us to take a look.
Exhibiion text by Jean Watt
![]()
1. Michael Sandford, Toronto, 2025, unfixed chalk, dry pastel, found blackboard, hacked surveillance camera, 200cm x 110cm
2. Faith Hughes, To keep it, not to look at it, 2025, oil on tile, 35mm slide storage case, 22.5cm x 12.5cm x 6.5cm
3. Faith Hughes, Concern for the present, 2025, oil on tile, aluminium candle holder, candle, 12.5cm x 15cm x 7cm
4. Faith Hughes, as usual, as usual, 2025, oil on tile, aluminium candle holder, candle, 12.5cm x 15cm x 7cm
5. Faith Hughes, brief encounters, 2024, watercolour on tile, glass tile, 13cm x 13cm
Biographies:
Michael Sandford
Michael Sandford (b.1998) is an interdisciplinary artist from Melbourne now based in London. His practice utilises drawing, filmmaking, and public intervention to produce formal relationships that exploit the hallucinatory consequences of contemporary cross-contaminations of virtual and physical realities.
Faith Hughes
Faith Hughes (b.1998) is a painter based in Los Angeles. Working from extensively researched found imagery Hughes’ practice is occupied with capturing the uncanny sense of a remembered world.
Jean Watt
Jean Watt (b.1998) is a curator and writer based in London. She runs the curatorial project A Place to Rest.
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
A Place to Rest (Offsite)
In conjunction with Portable Keyhole at Flexitron, works by Faith Hughes and Michael Sandford are presented on the grounds of St Silas Church Pentonville with A Place to Rest.
Michael Sandford’s Ant Farm is situated on the exterior fence of the churchyard. Occupying a space usually taken up by the church notice board, the functional ant farm becomes embedded in a lexicon of vernacular display. By inviting us to witness the intricate pathways of the insects’ miniature world, Sandford extends his ongoing exploration into alternative modes of observation.
Inside, Faith Hughes’ There we stop and Scenes in the home are displayed together on a windowsill along the right-hand wall of the nave. In contrast to the works at Flexitron, which depict intimate, sometimes unsettlingly bodily images, this pair of scenes are obscure and structural. Speaking to both the architecture of the lancet windows behind, and the surfaces they appear on, they offer a counterpoint to the gallery works.
The church setting naturally invites reflection, shaped by the ongoing function of the building as a place of worship. The works presented by A Place to Rest run parallel to this, exploring content that encourages a contemplation of the passing of time. This sensibility echoes the gestures found in Portable Keyhole at Flexitron, where a sense of duration is at the core of the exhibition. By occupying potentially overlooked areas of the church, A Place to Rest draws attention to liminal spaces, inviting a reconsideration of where and how contemporary artworks are encountered.
A Place to Rest is Jean Watt’s curatorial project which situates artworks in unusual spaces. St Silas Church is located opposite Flexitron on Penton Street.
Artworks
Michael Sandford, Ant Farm, 2025, Church notice board, garden ants, sand, loam, Dimensions Variable
Faith Hughes, There we stop, 2025, oil on tile, aluminium candle holder, Dimensions Variable
Faith Hughes, Scenes in the home, 2025, oil on aluminium heat sink, Dimensions Variable
In Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) L.B. Jefferies watches his neighbours across a New York apartment courtyard using a telephoto camera lens. Framed through their windows, the residents play the piano, are carried over the threshold, dance around their bedroom, weep at the dining table, with Jeff bearing witness to the daily intimacies of domestic life. The lens offers a proximity to their lives from a safe distance, an observation tool Jeff’s nurse Stella refers to as his ‘portable keyhole’.
Both artists in this exhibition have developed methods of accessing intimacy from afar and reproducing its imagery. For Faith Hughes, subject matter is extracted from stills and videos found through hours of internet trawling. Removed from context, archival television footage or home movies could be either intimate or sterile: bodies seen through car windows, figures in shadow on their front porch, legs and hands that could be kneeling, praying, kissing. Michael Sandford’s drawings detail viewpoints witnessed through hacked surveillance cameras of public space: indeterminable scenes of complex interiors, shimmery waters, dark and rippling landscapes. Guiding the works of both artists is an attempt to capture a feeling experienced elsewhere, a vulnerability which has been coopted for their own. These processes are as much a research task as they are a way of producing images, the portable domain of a laptop offering immediate closeness to lives lived far away.
This focus on the act of seeing is interfered with in both bodies of work through an interplay with surface and scale. Hughes does this by working on found materials such as ceramic bathroom tile or aluminium heat sinks, a cooling component found in computers. In Concern for the present and as usual, as usual, miniature images are housed within aluminium candle holders whose softly mirrored panels create blurry, shifting surroundings to the work. Sandford’s vignettes appear in powdery chalk on vast blackboards. In Toronto, shades of purple geometric panels intersect with wiggling maze-line markings in a warped birds-eye view of a jewellery shop. The fragility of applying this medium to a surface is palpable, images threatening to be brushed away if you come too close.
Portable Keyhole reveals these shared processes of negotiating distance, both from their source material and from the images that are produced. Where Hughes draws you into a crouched, close-up proximity, Sandford insists on a step back. Between them, fleeting moments are relocated, resized, and stilled: loosened from time and place only to appear anew for us to take a look.
Exhibiion text by Jean Watt
1. Michael Sandford, Toronto, 2025, unfixed chalk, dry pastel, found blackboard, hacked surveillance camera, 200cm x 110cm2. Faith Hughes, To keep it, not to look at it, 2025, oil on tile, 35mm slide storage case, 22.5cm x 12.5cm x 6.5cm
3. Faith Hughes, Concern for the present, 2025, oil on tile, aluminium candle holder, candle, 12.5cm x 15cm x 7cm
4. Faith Hughes, as usual, as usual, 2025, oil on tile, aluminium candle holder, candle, 12.5cm x 15cm x 7cm
5. Faith Hughes, brief encounters, 2024, watercolour on tile, glass tile, 13cm x 13cm
Biographies:
Michael Sandford
Michael Sandford (b.1998) is an interdisciplinary artist from Melbourne now based in London. His practice utilises drawing, filmmaking, and public intervention to produce formal relationships that exploit the hallucinatory consequences of contemporary cross-contaminations of virtual and physical realities.
Faith Hughes
Faith Hughes (b.1998) is a painter based in Los Angeles. Working from extensively researched found imagery Hughes’ practice is occupied with capturing the uncanny sense of a remembered world.
Jean Watt
Jean Watt (b.1998) is a curator and writer based in London. She runs the curatorial project A Place to Rest.
A Place to Rest (Offsite)
In conjunction with Portable Keyhole at Flexitron, works by Faith Hughes and Michael Sandford are presented on the grounds of St Silas Church Pentonville with A Place to Rest.
Michael Sandford’s Ant Farm is situated on the exterior fence of the churchyard. Occupying a space usually taken up by the church notice board, the functional ant farm becomes embedded in a lexicon of vernacular display. By inviting us to witness the intricate pathways of the insects’ miniature world, Sandford extends his ongoing exploration into alternative modes of observation.
Inside, Faith Hughes’ There we stop and Scenes in the home are displayed together on a windowsill along the right-hand wall of the nave. In contrast to the works at Flexitron, which depict intimate, sometimes unsettlingly bodily images, this pair of scenes are obscure and structural. Speaking to both the architecture of the lancet windows behind, and the surfaces they appear on, they offer a counterpoint to the gallery works.
The church setting naturally invites reflection, shaped by the ongoing function of the building as a place of worship. The works presented by A Place to Rest run parallel to this, exploring content that encourages a contemplation of the passing of time. This sensibility echoes the gestures found in Portable Keyhole at Flexitron, where a sense of duration is at the core of the exhibition. By occupying potentially overlooked areas of the church, A Place to Rest draws attention to liminal spaces, inviting a reconsideration of where and how contemporary artworks are encountered.
A Place to Rest is Jean Watt’s curatorial project which situates artworks in unusual spaces. St Silas Church is located opposite Flexitron on Penton Street.
Artworks
Michael Sandford, Ant Farm, 2025, Church notice board, garden ants, sand, loam, Dimensions Variable
Faith Hughes, There we stop, 2025, oil on tile, aluminium candle holder, Dimensions Variable
Faith Hughes, Scenes in the home, 2025, oil on aluminium heat sink, Dimensions Variable