The inaugural exhibition at Ceri Hand Gallery includes eleven artists who weave contemporary and historical references, from the baroque to the renaissance - with folklore and the treacherous natural world, to reveal absurdity in our quest for stability and perfection and the fragility of sexuality, memory and subjectivity.

Photographs, sculpture, drawings, collages and paintings exhibit a range of artist's strategies for disrupting the real and reflect on contemporary consumption and desire.

Following a residency at a zoo in Buenos Aires, Acloque's recent paintings appropriate elements of the creatures she studied and lull us into a world that is simultaneously mesmerising, unstable and violent.

Eleanor Moreton's haunting Prince and Queen paintings are compelling through their dynamic brushwork and lurid colour palette, yet they remain boldly unsentimental, complicating notions of romance and sexuality.

Rebecca Stevenson's sculptures draw on the tradition of still life painting. They revel in the contradiction inherent in "nature morte", by which transient, mundane objects are immortalise and elevated by the processes of art.

Martyn Cross' series of paintings are adaptations of his own collection of 70's clothes patterns, in which he reveals the private worlds we create and provides a gateway into a parallel, extra-ordinary world.

Hayley Lock's miniature collages, including chicken-footed duchesses and owl-headed judges, draw on storytelling and childhood imaginary old paintings and courtiers, to subtly undermine social structures and stereotypes.

Petros Chrisostomou photographs miniature environments that he designs and builds. Utilising everyday materials he finds to hand, such as chewing gum, beads, balloons, flowers and Coke caps, he creates a fictional universe which reflects on class and taste.

Samantha Donnelly's work is a fusion of found materials, cast and collaged to create elegant, dynamic Baroque organisms, with drapery, dramatic curves and appendages that evoke alien landscapes.

Mimei Thompson's paintings and drawings expose the riotous natural world, through luminous paint and baroque excessive brush-marks. Dark eyes and faces disturb organic structures, unsettling our potential for a romantic relationship with nature.