It was a packed house at the opening of URBAN BARRIER last week – Exhibition runs until Sun 23rd Dec
BEN OAKLEY GALLERY & NO FORMAT Proudly Present
‘URBAN BARRIER’
A Dynamic Assembly of carefully selected UK Outsider & Sub-Urban protaginists. Over 35 Top Notch artists in this must see Group Show of 2012
Exhibition Run: 7th Dec – 23rd Dec
Open Thursday to Sunday – 11.30 – 5.00pm
Including…
KAMION * STATIC * CARNE GRIFFITHS * AGENT PROVOCATEUR * MARK POWELL* LISA LAN * RYCA* PAM GLEW * RAY RICHARDSON * DAVID BRAY* GUY DENNING * BEN OAKLEY * ROWAN NEWTON * FRAN WILLIAMS * JO PEEL * ROUVE BAPTISTE * GONNY VAN HULST * YVONNE WAYLING * GARY ALFORD * EVERETT JAIME * JIM VISION * GUY McKINLEY * SHE ONE * JAW * BRUSK * ASBO LUV * TOTAL THRIVE * BARRY BISH * RUGMAN * MARK PERRONET * PAUL MARKS * LEWIS BANNISTER * SWIN * J.YUEN LING CHIU * JONATHON PURDAY* Mr TRAZO.TIM FOWLER + MORE….
Visit: noformat.co.uk
The UK’s largest single site affordable space project studio for artists and crafts and designer makers opens its doors to the public this November.
This November London’s burgeoning art community will open its doors to the public, enabling art lovers and anyone with a passion for crafts and design to experience the works of over 200 SFSA members.
The biannual Open Studio at Second Floor Studios & Arts (SFSA) is an integral part of their yearly programming and commitments to community engagement, giving Londoners the chance to meet its community of more than 200 professional arts and crafts practitioners in their creative spaces; to discuss, view and buy their work. The Open Studio will be open to the public on Thursday 15th (5pm – 9pm), Saturday 17th and Sunday 18th (11am – 6pm) November
A stone’s throw from the Thames Barrier, SFSA is an affordable studio provision and creative space championing the practice of art, crafts and design in London. It is an arts community in the truest sense. Four years into a five year plan, once complete SFSA will provide affordable arts space, studios and facilities for more than 300 artists. The development currently houses more than 200 artists and crafts makers from the fields of painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, digital design, animation, illustration, fashion and jewellery design, mosaic, glass-making, cabinet-making and interactive sound installation.
The Thames Barrier Print Studio (TBPS) at SFSA, one of London’s most spacious professionally equipped open access fine art printmaking studios, will be open with a series of print technique demonstrations throughout the weekend. TBPS will also be celebrating the art of print at its very, very best with its inaugural exhibition of studio members works in the no format gallery on site entitled ‘Freedom Of The Press’
SFSA’s recently open river fronted arts café CANTEEN will be serving scrumptious homemade food and beverages throughout the Open Studios weekend.
Second Floor Studios & Arts Open Studios – November 2012
Thursday 15th (5pm – 9pm), Saturday 17th and Sunday 18th (11am – 6pm) Location –
Second Floor Studios & Arts, Mellish Industrial Estate, Harrington Way (off Warspite Rd), Woolwich, London SE18 5NR
About the Studios
All studios are self-contained with good natural light and range from 150-1500sqft, and start at £154 pcm. SFSA contributes to the Affordable Studios sector and is a member of the National Federation of Artists’ Studio Providers.
SFSA website:
no format gallery:
Sally McKay: Multisensory experience and artistic images of the moving human figure
no format gallery
Sally McKay: Multisensory experience and artistic images of the moving human figure
Opening – Thursday 13th September (5pm – 9pm) Until Sun 23th September – no format gallery open Thursday to Sunday 11am – 6pm
The response of painters to the challenge posed by photography is evident in the changes which occurred from the late 19th Century onwards in the way paintings were used to record recognisably human figures. Photographs of apparently moving human figures became source material for artists like Edgar Degas who used them to endow the human figures in their figurative objective artworks with naturalistic forms and apparent movements. Dissatisfaction with the attempts of photographers like Eadweard Muybridge to adequately record the trajectories of moving figures led Étienne Jules Marey to invent different types of chronophotographic camera for this purpose. Chronophotographic attempts to visualise previously invisible phenomena led early 20th Century visual artists like the Italian Futurists to base their attempt to use artworks to achieve the same goal both on Henri Bergson’s ‘cinematographical’ theory of visual perception and aesthetics; and on the use of synaesthetic (sensory perceptual) analogies and pseudo-synaesthetic (extra-perceptual linguistic metaphorical) analogies between sensible forms in different modes of perception to record their multisensory perceptions in visual artworks. Like these Italian Futurist artists, Sally McKay seeks to immerse spectators in the multisensory perceptions of moving human figures recorded in her visual artworks.
The early 20th Century eurythmic dance theorists Emile Jaques-Dalcroze and Jean d’Udine argued that seeing ‘morphocinetic’ arabesque lines caused a spectator’s ‘muscular sense’ to arouse resonations in different modes of this spectator’s perception. This muscular sense governed the synaesthetic ‘art of gesture’ used by visual artists to orchestrate and identify the physiological rhythms of their bodies with the physical rhythms of music, painting and sculpture; and in particular by dancers to visibly express their invisible ideas, emotions and feelings. A spectator’s endowment of morphocinetic arabesque lines with a muscular sense also aroused this spectator’s visual perception of such ‘muscular’ lines as a ‘living symphony’ of human movement. Dalcroze and Udine’s ideas inspired the semi-abstract paintings of moving human figures by artists like Frantisek Kupka and Francis Picabia. McKay’s envisaging of her multisensory perceptions of moving human figures as lines, colours and shadows in her artworks relies both on visual memory-images abstracted from her visual sensations, and on body memory-images abstracted from muscular sensations of her body movements. McKay uses such body memory-images to coordinate her multisensory perceptual making of artworks during collaborative events where moving human figures may experience a loss both of personal subjectivity, and of the distinction of their bodies from the ‘living’ atmospheres of light and sound in which they are immersed.
Text: Stephen Baycroft Copyright 2012
Tania López-Winkler – HILANDA – Opens at no format tonight (Thursday 19th July)
Tania López-Winkler
HILANDA C:/YoPhoiniX/to_be_expired/Personal_Geographies/Hilanda.exe
Artist YoPhoiniX (aka Tania López-Winkler) Curated by Elena Aparicio Mainar Opening – Thursday 19th July (5pm – 9pm) – Until Sun 29th July
Hilanda is a Spatial Private Detective. She looks for clues embedded in the fleeting aesthetic experiences of city life. Hilanda’s work involves strolling about and getting lost in the city’s maze. If she was in Paris she would be a flaneuse, but since she operates in London she is a detective. When in rapture and delirium instead of playing the violin she spins filaments and threads.
At night, Hilanda spins the city’s fabric along with dreams into clues. These clues often unravel, detect or trace back the outlines of personal stories and culprits.
Visit: http://www.noformat.co.uk/#/tania-lopez-winkler/4565452437
The Foreigners’ Collective – no format residency, 9th – 15th July 2012
The Foreigners’ Collective have been invited to create a dance performance in the no format space using their unique cross cultural collaborations. The collective will also be holding open rehearsals so that the members of SFSA and TBPS can also engage with their artistic process.
The Foreigners’ Collective will be in residency from the 9th July and performances will take place the weekend of the 14th and 15th of July.
The Foreigners’ Collective
From a small group of independent strangers in a strange land bearing the common denominators of dancing, creating and co-existing, The Foreigners’ Collective was born. In addition to their art, this international group realized a deep notion of fraternity from their shared investigation and experience of what it means to be a ‘foreigner’ and has strengthened their bond and confirmed their desire to reconvene in order to create.
Resting on the surface is the actuality of being an alien; an outsider in a country, culture, or society that you do not identify with. Yet no less can one be a foreigner not geographically, but philosophically when deviating from the norms of which one is expected to abide by. Foreigners may wander physically or emotionally; sometimes aimlessly, yet other times seeking to join or form an alliance. The Foreigners’ Collective is an alliance; a dynamic amalgam seeking to collaborate with foreigners and encourage diverse cultural exchange.
More info here: http://theforeignerscollective.co/
Laurent Cahard: Poetic painting as a non-grammatical language analogous to music – ‘Synaesthesia (I): Abstract Painting as Visible Sound’ Opening at no format Thursday 31st May 2012 5pm – 9pm
Laurent Cahard: Poetic painting as a non-grammatical language analogous to music – ‘Synaesthesia (I): Abstract Painting as Visible Sound’ Opening at no format Thursday 31st May 2012 (5pm – 9pm)
The second exhibition in the cycle of exhibitions at the no format gallery on the themes of sublimity and synaesthesia is devoted to the work of the painter Laurent Cahard. The ‘germinative’ artistic process developed by Cahard involves his use of an ‘atmosphere’ of graphic ideas, emotions and feelings aroused within himself to mentally abstract a set of line and colour elements from the visible world, that he envisages as the set of configurations of elements of a ‘motif’ in a computer-generated sketch. Cahard then uses the processes of addition, removal and rotation of these elements to arrive at the final version of this sketched motif that functions as the starting point for the compositional process by which he paints a new version of this motif on the gridwork of canvas units of a painting. The elements of this painted motif have qualities of texture and colour that are absent from the sketched motif from which it is derived, thereby preventing this sketched motif from being an ‘original’ of this painted motif. The composition of the elements of a motif in a painting by Cahard is based both on pseudo-synaesthetic analogies with music, and on linguistic analogies that endow these elements with the status of a non-grammatical language analogous to music. Pseudo-synaesthetic musical analogies permit Cahard to break with the classical rules of composition associated with the making of mimetic illustrational paintings in which figurative objects occupy a pictorial space whose depth relies on artificial geometrical perspective. Like painters such as Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse, Cahard suppresses the spatial depth of artificial geometrical perspective in a painting in order to envisage a flattened tapestry-like pictorial space within which an observer can see melodic, harmonic and vibratory rhythmic tensions of motif elements. The ‘musical’ qualities of these painted elements deprives them of the representational function of mimetic illustration, while permitting such elements to possess the expressive function of linguistic signification of the motive attributes of the atmosphere of ideas, emotions and feelings used by Cahard to envisage the motif in the sketch from which this painting is derived. The theoretically unlimited nature of the germinative process by which Cahard actualises the potential variation of a motif, parallels the processes by which human potential is continually becoming actualised in contemporary human life.
Exhibition text Copyright 2012 Stephen Baycroft
Full info here: http://www.noformat.co.uk/#/laurent-cahard/4564902325
The 2012 exhibition programme for the ‘no-format’ gallery will include a series of exhibitions of visual artworks under the collective title ‘On Sublimity and Synaesthesia’. These exhibitions will explore art created in response to experience at the sublime limits of ordinary vision, and how the limits between the physical senses can be transcended by synaesthetic processes in the brain which enable non-visual data to contribute to the creation, experience and knowledge of visual artworks. Each exhibition in this series will give one in-house artist the opportunity to exhibit a selection of his/her visual artworks, and to work in conjunction with the freelance writer Stephen Baycroft (author of a biography of the artist Ken Currie entitled The Mask of Being, 2001, and currently completing a book on the relationships between the art of the Greek dramatist Aeschylus, the American poet T.S. Eliot and the Anglo-Irish painter Francis Bacon), to produce an artistic statement in which this artist places his/her work in the context of Western art history and philosophical aesthetics.
Full programme here: http://www.noformat.co.uk/#/on-sublimity-and-synaesthesia/4560456650
Descent (III) New works by Steve Dixon – Opens at no format this Thursday (26th) – (5pm – 9pm)
Descent (iii) – Steve Dixon
Third exhibition in a series exploring single figures falling through space, held in light.
Opening night – Thursday 26th April 5pm – 9pm
Exhibition open Fri 27th, Sat 28th and Sun 29th April 11am – 5pm
New Paintings and Prints
The Function of the Oblique – Opens at no format this Friday (13th!)
The Function of the Oblique – Curated by Attilia Fattori Franchini
Resistance – Sebastian Acker, Nicolas Feldmeyer, Shan Hur, Minae Kim, Jinhee Park, Tobias Zehntner
no format gallery | 14 – 22 April 2012
Private view: 13. 04. 2012 | 6 – 10 pm
Action – Sebastian Acker, Nicolas Feldmeyer, Shan Hur, Minae Kim, Jinhee Park, Tobias Zehntner
No Fixed Abode will organise a program of events, screenings and conversations
Son Gallery, Peckham | 27 April – 26 May 2012
Private view: 25. 04. 2012 | 6 – 9 pm
A project in two parts, The Function of the Oblique presents a series of artistic responses to the eponymous work of architectural theory by Paul Virilio and Claude Parent, in which they declare ‘the end of vertical and horizontal plane. The concept of the oblique was presented as a new mode of appropriating space, promoting continuous, fluid movement and forcing the body to adapt to instability. Approached from different attitudes, Resistance and Action, this two part exhibition takes place across two galleries in South East London.
Resistance is set at No Format Gallery, Woolwich, and will be informed by an understanding of the oblique as resistance to gravity and its horizontal legacy.
Action will take place at Son Gallery in Peckham and analyses physical and architectural conditions favoring fluidity, alteration and constant change.
Through a series of experimental events created by intersecting fields of architecture, broadcast, film, installation and publication, No Fixed Abode’s labour time will be the active motor of Action in order to develop forms of shared critique and reflection. No Fixed Abode is the artistic collaboration between Robert Quirk and Terry Slater.
In both Resistance and Action the artists use concepts of the oblique as a destabilising force, creating imbalance and unexpected outputs by employing a variety of media to challenge traditional conceptions of space.
Background
In 1963, Claude Parent and Paul Virilio formed the Architecture Principe group with the aim of investigating a new kind of architectural and urban order. Rejecting the two fundamental directions of Euclidean space, they proclaimed ‘the end of the vertical as the axis of elevation’ and ‘the end of the horizontal as the permanent plane’. In place of the right angle, they adopted ‘the function of the oblique,’ which they believed would have the benefit of multiplying usable space. For the Architecture Principe group, the concept of the oblique was a new mode of appropriating space, very much inspired by a Gestalt psychology of form, which promoted continuous, fluid movement and forced the body to adapt to instability.
Artists
Sebastian Acker
Sebastian Acker
b. 1981, Germany
lives and works in London
Sebastian Acker has a background in space design and installations often reflecting on the configuration of space individually and socially. Acker is currently studying an MA in Sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art. His work is informed by notions of space and materiality, and how this relates to the urban and physical world.
Nicolas Feldmeyer
Nicolas Feldmeyer
b. 1980, Switzerland
lives and works in London
Nicolas was born 1980 in Switzerland. After studying architecture in Zurich and fine art in San Francisco, he is currently doing a master at the Slade School of Fine Art. His work explores notions of space and its articulation in different media, questioning assumptions of normality and the elsewhere in his research and practice.
Shan Hur
Shan Hur
b. 1981 Korea
lives and works in London
Shan Hur is a Korean artist who lives and works in London. Hur holds an MFA in Sculpture from Slade School of Art (2010) and has exhibited extensively in the UK. Hur’s sculptural interventions disrupt the viewers perception of the white cube, directly implicating the gallery space as an active element in the artwork itself. The ideas, which inform Hur’s practice, derive from a fascination in the moment of transition when a particular space is reconfigured for a new purpose and questions our perceptions.
Minae Kim
Minae Kim
b.1981, Korea
lives and works in London
The origins of Kim’s works are based on the urban or structural environments present in our everyday life. Kim observes, reflects and reverts the physical and conceptual function of what sometimes is left out, hidden or un-noticed. The elements used in Kim works are often detourned replicas of preexistent details which call for attention and suddenly animate to become the centre of reflection. Kim installations raise questions about the nature of the spaces we inhabit and our relationship therein. Minae Kim holds an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art, 2011 and her works has been recently part of New Contemporaries ICA, 2011 and RCA Final Degree Show, 2011.
Jinhee Park
Jinhee Park
b.1979, Korea
lives and works in London
Jinhee Park holds an M.F.A from Goldsmiths College, London, 2010 and an M.F.A in Sculpture from Seoul National University, Korea, 2007. His work reflects on the time lost in familiar scenery and records the traces left (hidden) in nature of certain occurrences or events. Time and its changes are reflected in Park’s practice as a spacial visualisation characterised by interventions on common materials such as plain wood, using as a natural point of departure to record and visualise what remains.
Tobias Zehntner
Tobias Zehntner
b.1983, Switzerland
lives and works in London
Tobias Zehntner holds a BA from Goldsmiths College of Art, 2011. His work is concerned with science, art and architecture intended as tools to explore phenomena while elaborating a keen interest in human and mechanical movements in time and space. Zehntner has a fascination with the acts of looking and observing, which leads to minimalist studies of the poetry of the everyday. A contemplative view on mundane and urban environment often reveals an appeal to modernist aesthetics and compositions, while the focus on movement often leads to a choreographical approach to synchrony and symmetry.
no format – Gallery Programme – April to June 2012
The Function of the Oblique – Part 1
Curated and organised by Attilia Fattori Franchini in association with no format
Opening night – Friday 13th April (6pm – 10pm)
Exhibition opening days/times Sat 14th and Sun 15th April 2012 11am – 5pm and Fri 20th, Sat 21st and Sun 22nd April 11am – 5pm
Taking inspiration from Virilio’s “function of the oblique” used as a tool to appropriate space in new ways and create instability or unexpected outputs, the majority of artists invited reflect with different perspectives and operate through different practices the notion of Space in its broader sense, using it as a tool, reverting its definitions and searching new terms in its representation and conception.
Participating Artists; Shan Hur, Minae Kim, Jinhee Park, Sebastian Acker, Nicolas Feldmeyer, Rob Chavasse, Tobias Z, Phil Thomson.
____________________
Descent (iii) – Steve Dixon
Third exhibition in a series exploring single figures falling through space, held in light.
Opening night – Thursday 26th April 5pm – 9pm
Exhibition open Fri 27th (SLAM Fridays 6pm – 9pm) Sat 28th and Sun 29th April 11am – 5pm
New Paintings and Prints
____________________
NEVER PROMISED POUND LAND – Ray Richardson, Cathie Pilkington and Mark Hampson
Opening night – Thursday 3rd May 2012, 5pm – 9pm
Exhibition runs until Sunday 27th May (Open Thurs, Fri, Sat and Sun – 11am – 5pm)
Welcome to a world, but not the real world. The concept of the real world has of course, been hotly debated by a long list of Philosophers, Mathematicians, Physicists and Creative’s. Everyone from Plato, Aristotle, Wittgenstein, and Rubin to the velveteen rabbit and her fellow toy, Pinocchio have had their questions. In Never Promised pound Land we are presented with a probable and parallel world created by, the combined inventions yet distinctly different narrative based practices of, Ray Richardson, Cathie Pilkington and Mark Hampson.
____________________
Laurent Cahard – ‘Synaesthesia (I): Abstract Painting as Visible Sound’
(Part II of ‘On Sublimity and Synaesthesia’ programme – in conjunction with freelance writer Stephen Baycroft)
Opening night – Thursday 31st May 5pm – 9pm
Exhibition open Fri 1st, Sat 2nd, Sun 3rd June and Fri 8th, Sat 9th, Sun 10th June 11am – 5pm
“Laurent Cahard’s paintings belong to the tradition of modern abstract visual art which arose in Europe during the early 20th Century. Early modern abstract artists rejected the making of figurative objective paintings that mimetically illustrated the patterns of organisation of the ‘impure’ coloured shapes and forms of objects in the visible world of ordinary visual perception, in favour of making non-figurative non-objective paintings of ‘pure’ coloured shapes and forms whose visible patterns of organisation were frequently related to the invisible patterns of organisation of audible music…” – Stephen Baycroft
____________________
David Bray – “LET ME PUT MY POEMS IN YOU”
Opening night – Thursday 14th June 5pm – 9pm
Exhibition open Fri 15th, Sat 16th, Sun 17th June and Fri 22nd, Sat 23rd, Sun 24th June
“The title derives its name from a throwaway gag in the Will Ferrell movie ‘Blades of Glory’. It’s an absurd title, reflecting the ridiculous subjects of the drawings. Unfortunately in the last few years, too many of my friends have passed away – life can sometimes seem very bleak and sad. This body of work is an attempt to step away from that darkness – into a world of unbridled joy and stupidity.” – David Bray
Second Floor Studios & Arts - [SFSA] 
leave a comment