Archive

Stardust Boogie Woogie Version II 6-11 July, 2010

.

Installation view, Stardust Boogie Woogie, Monika Bobinska Gallery, 2010 (image courtesy of Schwartz Gallery).

.

An exhibition curated by Louise Ashcroft at Monika Bobinska Gallery, 242 Cambridge Heath Road London E2 9DA.

.

The artists have been nominated by the curator and by five experimental spaces – James Taylor, The Royal Standard, Schwartz Gallery, Supplement and The Woodmill.

Ashcroft describes the process as ‘collaboration as an anarchic struggle between imposing, perhaps contradictory visions. This method of co-authorship parallels the ways that cultures and histories develop’.

Schwartz Gallery nominates artist Mark Selby:

http://www.manifesto-art.co.uk/

.

Private View Saturday 10th July, 6-9.30 pm

Version II 6-11 July Curator: Louise Ashcroft

Open: Tue-Sun 10am-6pm (NB each day features the work in progress of a different artist or artist group)

Events: Sun 11 July 3-5pm – Discussion about alternative forms of collaboration

Artists: Charlesworth, Lewandowski & Mann; Mark Selby, Matt Ager, Thorbjorn Andersen, Patricia Lennox-Boyd, Blue Curry, The Royal Standard Collective.

Stardust Boogie Woogie is based on the concepts of collaboration explored in Surrealist games such as ‘Exquisite Corpse’ and parallel collage.

Louise Ashcroft, curator of Departure Gallery, has invited the collective Charlesworth, Lewandowski & Mann to create a framework structure onto which other artists will build from day to day to create a final collaborative sculpture.

_______________________________________________________________________________

IMPROMPTU 05.03.09 – 22.03.09

Curated by Patrick Michalopoulos

Luke Brennan, Simon Head, Rob Kesseler, Jonas Ranson, Rob Kesseler, Christina Mitrentse.

5-22 March 2009

Curated by Patrick Michalopoulos

Luke Brennan, Simon Head, Rob Kesseler, Jonas Ranson, Rob Kesseler, Christina Mitrentse.

5-22 March 2009

Schwartz Gallery introduces IMPROMPTU the first exhibition in a series of projects initiated by Schwartz Projects, a new exhibitions strategy which seeks out dynamic and more flexible models of exhibition-making in line with current debates about curatorial practice. The instigating premise for IMPROMPTU stems from a critical reaction to the first five exhibitions at Schwartz Gallery which followed more rigid exhibition-making practices. The ‘group show’ model has been re-worked by the absence of any concrete theme for IMPROMPTU, a month-long pre-exhibition period in the gallery made available to the artists to use as a studio and by the fact that the artists have largely never before met. These strategies contest a multitude of ingrained practices surrounding the organization and staging of a group show such as the relationship between the artists, the manifestation of their practice which will in this case unfold in real time in the space, the role of the project’s curator and ultimately the role of the gallery as a ‘holder’ of and ‘presentation vehicle’ for contemporary art. Notions of organisation in society, institutional control and the production and consumption of ‘culture’ are thus brought to the fore and re-evaluated. The gallery becomes a ‘lived environment’ in which artists and curator improvise their own respective practices in response to the evolving group dynamic. The practice of separating ideas and activities into distinct categories is tested in a taxonomical blurring that draws many accepted communication models into question.

A summary of the artists’ studio-time activity can be found at www.schwartzprojects.blogspot.com

The following information is meant as a guide to each artist’s respective practice and does not necessarily constitute a statement of intent for the work developed as part of IMPROMPTU: Luke Brennan’s work references the many hybridized subcultures in today’s world developed through evolving ritual. The confluence of these rituals, be they religious, superstitious or social, provoke him, his practice tracing the evolution of ceremony – the way it adopts and merges new practices, incorporates value into an object, a physical action or expresses itself in architecture. Simon Head’s practice investigates dimensional shifts that occur for example when an abstract idea is drawn in two-dimensions. This shift is thought of by Head as the action between two dimensions. The force of this movement travels both forwards and backwards, alternatively referring to each dimension at an interface of the immaterial/material. Rob Kesseler explores plants and the way in which they migrate into every aspect of our lives. His most recent work reflects current thinking that seeks to narrow the gap that has grown between the arts and sciences. The work lies somewhere between science and symbolism, in which the many complexities of representing plants are concentrated into visual statements. Christina Mitrentse’s practice exists as a type of laboratory where the notion of interpretation and cultural construction is investigated. Mitrentse employs a variety of techniques from crafted sculptures to conceptual appropriation alongside processes of observation, collection and curation. Her practice oscillates between those of curator, storyteller, collector and archeologist. David Murphy’s practice puts an emphasis on places that lack permanence, those located between a present very solid existence, and a certainty or probability that they will soon disappear.  Generally these are peripheral spaces, islands, coastal areas, floodplains – contested, edgeless territory where the elements meet and morph. Jonas Ranson’s more recent works are derived from observations and meticulous drawing of industrial and historical architectural sources. Hand drawn then manipulated and assembled with digital software, the final works represent Utopian/Dystopian structures, skeletal and cold, panopticons, architectural systems for surveillance and control.

Copyright 2008-2010 Schwartz Gallery

_____________________________________________________________________________

Wonder Island 05.12.08 – 25.01.09

Curated by Patrick Michalopoulos and Emi Avora.

Phil Ashcroft, Emi Avora, Doug Burton, Amanda Couch, Ismail Erbil, Rana Hassanieh, Hannah Hewetson, Piers Jamson, Hiroe Komai, Patrick Michalopoulos, Joe Schneider.

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

Nostalgia for a utopian belief in modernism and a new order underpin Hannah Hewetson’s concerns. Moving from abstractive to geometrical forms, vertical and horizontal brushstrokes, applied in translucent layers, are set against a black matt background. Piers Jamson’s work questions perceived realities of time and place by depicting fictional interiors that reference the production design of science fiction films from the 1950’s to the 1990’s combined with the architectural detail from the late 19th century. Hiroe Komai’s working process is akin to a ‘cut-and-paste’ function on a computer. Komai picks up architectural features from both the cityscape and the domestic architectural world and alters these components through an individual and personal construction process.

Patrick Michalopoulos creates sculptures that graft architectural elements and text with process-based investigations into physicality. The role of the body as a conduit for the creation of meaning is explored in a cycle of making that gives rise to a layered sensibility of form and thought. Joe Schneider’s work invites the viewer into a strange and yet familiar realm of hybrid creatures and shifting landscapes. His work moves between fact and fiction, the particular and the abstract, the fragment and the finished work. Influences include anthropomorphism to zoomorphism via folk tales and semantics.

Copyright 2008-2010 Schwartz Gallery

_____________________________________________________________________________

Trace(s) 03.10.08 – 26.10.08

Curated by Patrick Michalopoulos.

Richard Ducker, Stewart Gough, Sophie Horton, Mark Houghton, Rachel Ichniowski, Janne Malmros, Brychan Tudor.

Trace(s), a multi-disciplinary group show that calls on artists to investigate the concept of ‘traces’ as it is evidenced in their work alongside responses to the locality and specific character of the exhibition space, an entire floor of a disused early 20th century industrial block. The gallery is located in Hackney Wick, historically a light industrial zone that presently occupies a nondescript outcrop of warehouses and derelict spaces hemmed in by the London 2012 Olympic Games site, canals and a motorway. A psycho-geographical oddity, it exists on the margins of more regulated areas of urban developments; its subversive relationship to the urbane exposes the underbelly of urban planning and development and traces the unregulated trajectory of in-between spaces.

A parallel dynamic of overlapping priorities and uses can be apprehended within the gallery space. The buildings where Schwartz Gallery is housed have been variously occupied by among others, a chemical works dating back to 1934, a Christmas cracker and a furniture manufacturer from 1941, a Burberry’s gentlemen’s weatherproof clothing manufacturer from 1962 and most recently a printing business.T he gallery space exists in its raw state much as it was when the last occupants vacated it; it carries a multitude of traces and histories within its walls. The ambiguity seen in the format of the exhibition title Trace(s) seeks to encourage a plurality and expansive set of possible avenues of investigation into the idea of ‘trace’ as a multi-faceted domain; of an active type of tracing and delineating juxtaposed with a search for and collating/collecting of traces, of a response to and a re-working of the ‘traced’. Selected artists have employed a variety of methodologies that tap into a ‘consciousness’ of the traced. By resurrecting a physicality of the traced within the gallery space connotations of history and the invisible are charged with an active trace-making and collating using light, site-specific installation, sculpture and image.

Copyright 2008-2010 Schwartz Gallery

_____________________________________________________________________________