Tag: gallery
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Performance for the Anti-hero
New York-based artist Patrick Jacobs unfolds a carefully crafted stage that invite us to seek wonderment in both natural and unnatural landscapes that might easily be overlooked. Painstakingly constructed models display different species of fungi or weeds in the foreground. Each leaf and blade of grass is shaped to situate a humble scene. Jacobs imbues…
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Gordon Cheung – Unknown Knowns
Unknown Knowns is Gordon Cheung’s third exhibition at Edel Assanti, London. The exhibition’s title is drawn from Slavoj Zizek’s observation that Donald Rumsfeld’s theory of knowledge omitted a crucial fourth category: unknown knowns – the things we don’t realise we know; the unconscious beliefs and prejudices that determine our perceptions and actions. Unknown Knowns continues…
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Sparrow Come Back Home
Sparrow Come Back Home, Carmel Buckley and Mark Harris’ exhibition at the ICA, examines a reflective side of the display of archive as monument. Taking place in the Fox Reading Room, a space where archival materials are at the heart of each show, the exhibition transforms the gallery into a visual library, a silent record…
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Dead Space and Ruins
Few things capture the present like the ruins of the past. After the lofty projects of the twentieth century have crumbled or collapsed, we are left today with certain reminders: literature, memories, a socio-political legacy, and – more photogenically – the rotting ruins of sundry grand architectural schemes. The connection between architecture and utopianism has…
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Workers Hammer
The following is an edited extract from the conversation between artist John Stark and anthropologist David Graeber, author of Debt, the first 5000 years and The Utopia of Rules. The conversation was originally published in the catalogue that accompanies DoL Po, Stark’s solo show at Charlie Smith London, 20th May – 26th June 2016. …
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Revisiting Unknown Places
The art of Maria Pääkkönen concerns itself with a reciprocal relationship between drawing and place. On the one hand is the drawing of the place – that which is observed, recorded, remembered, evoked. On the other is the place of the drawing – its physical presence within the confines of the gallery. Somewhere in between…
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On a Headland of Lava Beside You
Joanna Kirk and I are both artists living in Blackheath and have become good friends over time as our children are the same age, friends and at school together. This has led to frequent conversations with us sharing books (for example Karl Ove Knausgaard’s) and views on exhibitions and artists, on newspaper articles and TV…
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Edge and Shift: Brighton Festival and HOUSE
Agnes Varda, the legendary eighty-six year-old Belgian filmmaker and artist, is putting the finishing touches to an installation. Towers of lurid plastic buckets and baskets, the pleasing wordplay of “Ping-Pong Tong Camping”, stained glass window panels of flip-flop frisbees, and the photo-puzzle of the Baccalaureate celebrations of naked boys on the beach: Varda’s new work…
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Ravilious
Fashions in art have a way of carrying all before them. They crash into the public consciousness, all splash and spectacle, and it is all too easy, in the rage to reorder and make sense of what ensues, to take epoch-making headlines for the whole story. It is under these conditions that a talent like…
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Forensics: The anatomy of crime
What kinds of death need investigation? A criminal death is one that “didn’t happen naturally”, according to a Baltimore detective in 2012 documentary, Of Dolls and Murder, on show now as part of the Wellcome Collection’s exhibition, Forensics: The anatomy of crime. Once natural causes have been eliminated, the detective continues, that is when “you…
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What Was Once the Threshing Barn
Public/private, urban/rural, commercial/not-for-profit: it’s not like the waters between the two have ever been crystal clear, but now, with the opening in Somerset of the latest outpost of contemporary art giants Hauser & Wirth (London, Zurich, New York) the silt has been stirred up and it all seems just that little bit muddier than before….