Into the Fold Rose Eken, Simon Haddock & Stuart Chubb, Daisy Richardson 18 April - 17 May 2008
Standpoint Gallery is pleased to present the second exhibition in a series of exhibitions inviting artists to make new sculptural and site-specific work for Standpoint in 2008 The works in Into the Fold all deal with transitions between two and three dimensions - at least one, often multiple, in each art object. Working in the spirit of transformation and emergence, these artists approach material as a direct tool of thinking. To cut, to stick, to fold, to scratch into or draw upon, these impulses are inherent in the beauty of paper, and in all ‘worlds’ we can turn from surface (illusional) to form (corporeal) and back again using a combination of magic, mechanics and masking tape.
Describing the beginnings of their activity as enacting “the spirit of a train crash impacting into a white cube”, Simon Haddock and Stuart Chubb collaborate under the name of We’re In Construction! to make Daedalus, a labyrinth of visual desire created from the inverted leftovers of a gallery refit. Both artists have earned their living by constructing the sets for the blockbuster shows in major galleries. Comparing the directed narrative experience of the paying public with the visual surprise and chaos of behind the scenes, Haddock and Chubb question the relative artistic value of the two - “and behind? There is a myriad of unexpectedness. Pyres of piled detritus, polythene lakes, the mapping of inadvertent marks and arrangements. The eye roams in a search for meaning, trying to condense a pictorial logic that purposefully evades completion.”
Crossing 2008 Using plasterboard as a three-dimensional collage material, their origami environments teeter on the brink of intelligibility, enlivened by scratchings, drawings and rubbings. In creating a new order, these marks act as testament to the transformative potential of visual thinking and activity - circumnavigating and re-visioning the the ubiquitous incarceration of employment.
In Rose Eken’s sculptures, installations and animations, the passion and paraphernalia of the pop fanzine erupts into three dimensions, sound and motion. Her reconstructions of classic pop videos (eg Kim’s Café, 2007 based on the seminal Aha video for Take on Me, which was in 1985 the most expensive pop video ever made) use crudely constructed model sets made of cardboard and masking tape, which are animated using her drawings and paintings, with a combination of moving camera work and stop frame animation.
Marianne 2007 Eken embraces fan culture - the engine of the pop world - where idealism and ridiculousness is tinged with the beautiful tragedy of unrequited love. Failure is inherent in her performances, and brings poignancy to these spaces that the viewer inhabits with her, in reverie, and because these are ‘public memories’. In becoming her hero/ines through drawing projects, performances, and her 4 man band (all members being herself), Eken - in all her nerdiness - remains the epitome of cool.
Daisy Richardson rose quickly to prominence through her cut paper animation ‘Sublime Climes’ which won the Jerwood Drawing Student Prize in 2007. Elegant and resonant, it uses collaged imagery from books, newspapers and magazines that rise up and organise themselves into three dimensions to create a beautiful visual narrative, referencing evolution, the self destructive short sight of humanity, and the resilience of the planet. She is making a new animation for this exhibition, which will again use a combination of found imagery and stop-frame animation.
Sublime Climes 2007 (video still)
Time Saved 2008 Another new piece, Time Saved 2008, deals with notions of duration, speed and slowness, both in art and in life. Starting with an intricate but immediate ‘blind’ abstract drawing, Richardson then painstakingly cuts out all the white space to leave the pencil line. The resultant fine mesh or lacework is a remarkably lovely sculptural object that asserts both extremes of its production - the marks were obviously made quickly and retain the resulting freshness, but we are only too aware that the cut process must have taken months of obsessive and painstaking labour. She intends also to remind us of “the way in which the most flippant of actions can have long lasting effects”. You have been warned!
Contact Fiona MacDonald, Curator - 0207 739 4921 / standpointgallery@btconnect.com
Standpoint Gallery, 45 Coronet Street, London N1 6HD Tube: Old Street, Exit 2 (Northern Line – Bank Branch) Buses: 55, 67, 149, 242, 243 |
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