Also showing from 9 - 25 January 2009 Opening night performance: Amanda Couch Although surrounded by a haphazard and transforming urban landscape, Hackney Wick provides a space or a vacuum within which artists can dream, invent and produce. For ‘Wonder Island’ artists have been asked to relate Hackney wick to the idea of a utopian island existing within dystopian surroundings and approach the theme in multiple ways. The outcome shows a plurality of responses that deal with architecture, history and storytelling; an ambiguous mix of fact and fiction. Phil Ashcroft’s work considers our changing ideology of past modernity in our present climate. Modernist ideals and architectural nuclear structures, once efficiently suited to their site and purpose, stand abandoned leaving behind a once-utopian landscape. Emi Avora creates paintings of places that provide a space for dreaming. By an intersection of the everyday and the theatrical,she positions the viewer into spaces of wonder and sometimes anxiety, aspiring to find hidden, other-worldly beauty through using the familiar. Amanda Couch’s practice straddles distinct domains: the object, process and performance. ‘At the heart, I make images which are at the same time visceral and narrative. Implicit in the work is a dialogue about being… being made, making and becoming.’ Doug Burton’s animation creates a physical force that uses time to embed the surfaces of the objects and scenes with a material presence that is in a continual state of flux. Through the transmogrification of the surface of the floor he aims to create a dizzying sense of displacement. Ismail Erbil creates fabric sculptures and interventions that straddle the architectural and the corporeal. ‘Path 1 & 2’ imply ‘unseen’ places and interweave the architecture of the space with the imaginary re-construction of place and event in the viewer’s mind. Rana Hassanieh’s site-specific installations are spontaneous architectural improvisations which act as formalizations of psychological processes of adaptation. Making use of industrial excess left in decaying spaces, she constructs makeshift webs, firmaments and shelter-like forms
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