Brigitte Polemis | Just a Number
13 Jun - 29 Jun 2013
 
Urban spaces inhabited by faceless men in suits arranged in rows, circular formations, spirals, or overlapping layers as repeated motifs: these are the key features in the new group of works presented by Brigitte Polemis under the title “Just a Number”. Yet, although specified by their general title as works commenting on the dehumanisation of man in western industrialised societies, they seem however to strangely defy their ‘inhuman’ message, engaging the viewer in what one increasingly understands to be the imagery of the poetics of a world where man and machine have long been reconciled.

Artists John Lawrence and Roy Voss have conceived the exhibition ‘For What It Is’ for ANDOR. Developed through collaborative processes, the exhibition features new works by both artists including sculptural installations and gallery texts informed and influenced by ANDOR‘s invitation, and by the specific architecture of the gallery spaces.
 
John Lawrence lives and works in London. He graduated from the Royal Academy Schools in 2010. Selected recent exhibitions include Original Carbon Copy, FOLD Gallery, London, and SCREENING, Standpoint Gallery, London. In 2012 Lawrence also curated the video exhibition AFTER/HOURS/DROP/BOX at ANDOR.
 
Roy Voss lives and works in London and is represented by Matt’s Gallery, London. Recent exhibitions include Cast Matt‘s Gallery & Dilston Grove, London; The London Open, Whitechapel Gallery; Switch at Baltic 39, Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
 
The exhibition ’For What It Is' is kindly supported by Arts Council England as part of a series of gallery projects supporting artistic collaboration and the production of new artwork at ANDOR.

“Global STYLE Battles” WITH DANIELE TAMAGNI
 
PRIVATE VIEW THURSDAY 23rd of May
6:30 - 9:00PM
 
24th of May – 22nd of June
 
A handsome Congolese man in a Pepto-Bismol pink suit strides towards the camera, fat cigar clenched casually between his teeth. His red bowler hat sits in stark contrast to the fades beige of the buildings behind him, and the dusty asphalt beneath his feet, yet sits in perfect harmony with his brightly polished red shoes. Elsewhere, two Bolivian women in long flowing skirts of blue and green are caught mid-fight, as one launches a side kick at the other in a makeshift boxing ring in an old, faded courtyard, their long traditional, black braids dishevelled, lace petticoats flying, as crowds cheer them on.
 
These are just two of a diverse series of works exploring music and fashion and marking a mid-career retrospective of the works of Italian photographer Daniele Tamagni, spanning works from 2007 to date. Running from 24 May–22 June 2013 at ArtEco Gallery, in ‘Global Style Battles’, we enter the colourful and achingly hip world that includes ‘The Flying Cholitas’, ‘Playboys of Bacongo’, ‘Havana Glam’, ‘Afrometal’ and the original Django, spanning African hell riders and duelling Bolivian women.
 
How then, does an Italian street photographer end up in locations as exotic as Africa and Cuba? “I am interested in urban style worldwide,” explains Tamagni. “Not just in exotic locales, but also within my own country. However, I try to avoid the label ‘exoticism and ethnographic pictures’.” Enthralled by the light and colours of the South, Tamagni’s projects have taken him to cities such as Brazzaville, Gaborone, Johannesburg, Dakar, Havana and La Paz. “Moreover, I have a lot of African and Caribbean friends,” he explains. “Although I am Italian, I have always been open-minded about learning about and understanding different cultures. The last few years in particular have influenced my style and subject choices, producing portfolios which might generate a critical reflection on the identity of these people who consider elegance their main reason for existence inside a social reality so very different and so distant from that of our own.” Tamagni’s iconic photographs are a mixture of the staged and the in situ, depending on what occurs within a specific moment. The costumes and dress, however, are all real, although Tamagni smiles and says “if they appear to be constructed, then that is good, for I want to leave the viewer questioning what they see.”
 
With a background in art history, Tamagni is influenced by photographers such as Cartier Bresson and Alex Webb, who “prefer to capture and freeze the instant magic moment in aesthetically beautiful pictures.” In this vein, the Italian photographer seeks to explore the street style of subcultures in contemporary society, presenting them in different contexts, rather akin to Malick Sidibè or James Barnor, who documented street life in African communities in the 1960s and 70s.
 
While some works feature effortless chic, others (such as a group of young Smaartez from South African wearing pith helmets and short pants) hark to Colonialist images of the continent, steeped in irony and a keen questioning of the stereotypical imagery of culture and locations. “I’ve always been interested in the relationship between Africa, its colonial past, and its relationship to the West,” Tamagni admits. “There are always reminders – these icons are so strong that the urban landscape might even remind one of Berlin, yet is actually Johannesburg.”
 
Other highlights include ‘Gentlemen of Bacongo’, one of Tamagni’s most iconic and best-known projects. Set in Congo’s Brazzaville, the series explores the social and urban context of ‘Sapeurs’ – which the photographer considers “a revolutionary movement, because dressing up is a way to escape and forget poverty. Sapeurs in most cases are humble people and have come from low classes and have a dream to escape from Africa and have a better life.” These are juxtaposed by the Sapeurs of ‘Afrometal’. In their black leather pants and studded belts, boots and cowboy hats, they could not be further removed from the brightly coloured suits of their counterparts in Brazzaville, yet, for all their heavy metal references, these Botswana meatheads share with other Sapeurs around the country a passion to express themselves. While their clothes may have originated in the West, each iconic style has been re-adapted with African iconography.
 
There is much to see and explore in the works of Tamagni, and he currently seeks to expand his portfolio to re-explore his roots in Italy as well as return to the Soweto neighbourhood in South Africa’s Johannesburg. “I find that area so inspiring, I need to go back and finish a project,” he says. “Similarly, I would also like to document street life in South Italy, in Naples or Palermo. Coming from Milan, I’ve always had a passion for the former, and the latter has the special Mediterranean light; the people remind also to some extend of those in Havana.” Currently focusing on research and exploring other street-style related issues, Tamagni is also working on a book project; ‘Global Street Battles’ will feature all his works to date in different chapters organised by the specific subcultures related to them.
 
‘Global STYLE Battles’ runs from 24th May–22nd June 2013 at ArtEco Gallery, London, UK.
 
Information for journalists:
 
About Daniele Tamagni
Daniele Tamagni is a freelance photographer from Italy. In 2007 he won the Canon Young Photographer Award with a project on Congolese ‘Dandys’; Sapeurs of Brazzaville. This was followed by the publication of a book in 2009 entitled, Gentlemen of Bacongo. This book went on to influence designer Paul Smith, who wrote the preface, and who found inspiration in Tamagni’s works for his S/S 2010 collection. In 2010, Tamagni won the ICP INFINITY AWARD in the fashion category. He then travelled to Bolivia for a project on women wrestlers, winning the World Press Photo in Arts & Entertainment category in 2011. Currently, Afrometals is shortlisted for the Sony World professional Award in the art and culture category. Between 2001 and 2012 Tamagni has continued to explore street style trends and the aesthetics of transformation in cities that include Havana, Dakar, Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur, with the aim to publish a book on global street life that will include all these projects. Tamagni is an art historian who digs into marginal street cultures, seeking to connect with drop outs, lost kids and the poor in a search for identity and respect. And he finds them all over the world. www.photodantam.com
 
About ArtEco Gallery
ArtEco Gallery is the conceptual brainchild of Kristin Hjellegjerde, serving as a creative outlet following the success of her art blog of the same name, established in 2010. After moving from New York to London, Hjellegjerde decided to establish the gallery in south west London in order to offer a fresh outlook for Contemporary art in this part of the city. Based in Old York Road, the gallery seeks to showcase both emerging and established Contemporary artists from a range of backgrounds in an intimate and personal environment. Previous exhibitions include the inaugural After Munch, as well as Manmadegod. For more information, visit www.artecogallery.com
 
For further information and high-resolution images, please contact Kristin Hjellegjerde on khjellegjerde@mac.com

Bodil Furu’s (NO) accomplished screen works reflect on the social and environmental dynamics that shape change.The work draws on closely documented encounters with people living in vastly different situations – as far apart as an excessively polluted and overpopulated city in Peoples Republic of China and the remote region of northern Norway where an island might have a population of one.

Chelsea Futurespace proudly presents Four Decades an exhibition of prints by Sir Peter Blake, selected by the artist. Blake’s work takes its influence from the realms of pop culture, literature, music and contemporary art. The suites of prints in the exhibition include his series of Appropriated Alphabets, Alice in Wonderland, The Butterfly Man (Homage to Damien Hirst) and Homage to Schwitters. Other highlights include prints from the Found Art series, screenprints from collage and portraits of musicians including Chuck Berry, Brian Wilson, Ian Dury, The Everly Brothers and The Clash. The show covers the diversity and dexterity of Blake’s practice as an artist working in print across the last four decades.
Sir Peter Blake is renowned for his influence on Pop Art and culture and is frequently referred to as the ‘Godfather of British Pop Art’. He has worked with bands and musicians including The Beatles, Oasis and Paul Weller, designing the iconic cover for The Beatles’ ‘Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’. Blake’s work transcends the divisions between high art and pop culture, with visual influences from artists such as Kurt Schwitters to music icon Frank Sinatra.
An internationally acclaimed artist, Sir Peter Blake (born 1932) studied at Gravesend Technical College before attending the Royal College of Art. He subsequently taught there and at other institutions including St Martin’s College. A major retrospective of his work Now We Are 64 took place at the National Gallery in 1996 and at Tate Liverpool in 2007. Sir Peter Blake was knighted in 2002, for services to art.
Exhibition in association with CCA Galleries and Paul Stolper Gallery.

The Faggionato Gallery is delighted to announce their forthcoming solo exhibition of the Japanese artist Yoshihiro Suda. The exhibition, Suda Yoshihiro, showcases his hyper-realistic wooden sculptures of plants and flowers.
 
The nature of the environment or gallery space is central to Suda’s creativity. For Suda, the sculptures are ‘interventions’; subtle additions to an existing space or display. Each sculpture is only half of the work of art – the other half is their installation. The element of surprise is core to Suda’s work. In October 2000, he installed interventions at the Buddha’s Smile exhibition at the Okura Museum of Art in Tokyo. The sculptures were placed into the display cases, causing visitors to take second glances. Similarly, upon entering this exhibition, visitors will initially question whether or not they have overlooked something. The startling realism of each sculpture demands closer inspection, even though the viewer is already aware that in the gallery environment it is unlikely that there are real plants growing out of the walls. This merging of the boundaries between reality and illusion creates a surreal sense of the ordinary becoming the uncanny.
 
Suda developed his interest in carving plants as an undergraduate at Tama Art University in Tokyo in the early 1990s. This was a time when contemporary art was primarily conceptual and the notion that art coud be decorative or aesthetically pleasing was largely ignored. Suda felt troubled by this and wished to create works of art that were unique and yet did not require any knowledge of contemporary art theory. Indeed, Suda’s self-taught sculptural techniques blend traditional carving practices with modern concepts relating to the role of art in daily life. He is influenced by the idea of continuing in the tradition of Japanese Old Master sculptors, while his decision to elevate and display such mundane objects as plants and weeds challenges our preconceived notions of what is a ‘work of art’. These sculptures revive traditional notions of beauty and craftsmanship in art, inviting the viewer to observe more closely the seemingly insignificant ornamentation that can be found in the everyday.
 
Born in Yamanashi, Japan, Suda lives and works in Tokyo. In 1992, he received his BA in Graphic Design and has exhibited internationally in numerous solo and group shows. Recent museum shows include the Chiba City Museum of Art in 2012, The Manghha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology, Krakow, in 2011, Asia Society Museum, New York, and the Contemporary Museum, Honolulu. In 2008 his work was included in Out of the Ordinary at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. His work has been exhibited extensively in group shows in the USA, Japan, Germany, Australia and Quebec. His work is held in numerous international public and private collections, including, The National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, Leeum Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia, The Israel Museum, National Gallery of Canada, Neues Museum Nurnburg Germany and the New Art Gallery Walsall, Birmingham.

Gasworks presents an exhibition of newly commissioned work by London-based artists and researchers Model Court, an ongoing collaboration between Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Lorenzo Pezzani and Oliver Rees.
 
Model Court investigate the spatial, aesthetic and geopolitical aspects of legal procedure. Using video, sound, drawing and installation, the group interrogates the production, dissemination and transmission of the law, addressing the many technical problems encountered in the administration of international justice today.
 
Their exhibition at Gasworks comprises a newly commissioned film and installation focusing on the recently concluded trial of François Bazaramba, a Rwandan national convicted of genocide by a small district court in the Finnish town of Porvoo. Bazaramba’s trial was particularly unique because it made use of so-called ‘telepresence’ technologies in unprecedented ways. During the course of the trial, Finnish judges and prosecutors travelled to Rwanda and Tanzania to gather testimony, eventually setting up temporary courts in the Rwandan Supreme Court and a Hilton hotel room. Meanwhile Bazaramba was held in Finland and became a Skype participant in his own trial from his Helsinki prison cell.
 
Owing to these peculiar circumstances, Bazaramba’s trial is an unparalleled case study for understanding the relationship between media technologies and the much debated principle of ‘universal jurisdiction’ – whereby states or organisations can claim criminal jurisdiction over accused subjects regardless of their nationality or where an alleged crime was committed. To what extent do emerging technologies used in these forums reorient the process of justice geographically? And how do fibre optic cables, video conferencing software such as Skype, and cameras alter the conventions of testimony?
 
Written from the perspective of an unnamed technician responsible for the audio-visual setup of Bazaramba’s trial, Model Court’s film uses a semi-fictional narrative to explore the trial’s relationship to notions of aid, neo-colonialism and the production of history. Housed within an installation that appropriates settings and the infrastructure present in the original trial, as well as in other courts of law, the film critically examines the complex and often dysfunctional, audiovisual infrastructure used to bridge the jurisdictional divide.
 
Taken together, the film, installation and an accompanying series of events aim to interrogate this extraordinary yet naïve attempt by a regional Finnish court to intervene in a genocide that took place many miles and years away. The intention is not to present a history of Rwanda or to contest the culpability of Francois Bazaramba, but rather to tell a story about the transmission of the Finnish legal space into Rwanda, thereby engaging with the cultural specificity of so-called ‘international’ justice and its vision for Africa (so far the only continent to have been investigated by the International Criminal Court).
 
The series of events accompanying the exhibition will feature invited guests, including international artists, media theorists and filmmakers, who will engage critically with the exhibition and expand upon the key issues raised by the project.

 
CHUNG HEESEUNG, JE BAAK
GROUP EXHIBITION
6 JUNE - 28 JULY 2013
 
HADA Contemporary is please to showcase photographs and video works by Chung Heeseung (b. 1974) and Je Baak (b.1978) who intensively challenge on the idea of truth, perception and identity through rejection and acceptance of failure.
 
As photography has often been quoted for its instantaneity capturing the frozen moment of reality, Chung Heeseung questions its unstable identity as a medium by acknowledging its limits to representation. Diverse objects displayed in unconventional manners at the centre of the images with dedicated vacant surrounding of the natural light provide sense of placid solemnity. Still-life (2009 – 2012) is a body of independent works in which the artist explores the elements of chance and spontaneity within her practice on the contrary to other series that are often exceedingly prudent construction of the initial conceptual framework. Nonetheless, it continuous to narrate key aspects of her practice such as photographic presentation of liminality and duration as shown in other series as Reading. If Reading focused on capturing the physical remnants of the subtle emotional and psychological changes generated by the instability of the actors during their reading, Still-Life is the extension of this investigation as she photographs the unidentifiable state of the objects amid continuous transformative state in being. Her interest lies on the quality of latency in liminal state of being capturing the photographic image of ‘duration’ where there in no distinction between sleeping and awaking, floating and falling, and surface and inner space.
 
Je Baak’s artistic practice pivots around the deconstruction of illusions such as subject of value in reality which humans are engaged in blindfolded. Encompassing diverse medias, he efforts to visually encapsulate the concept such as ‘selflessness’ and ‘emptiness’ from Buddhist philosophy through continuous process of inquisition. In A Towel (2008) and His Silence 1, 2, 3 (2010), he challenges the function and the meaning of the language and its limitation in relation to the understanding of self and the world. In His Silence, he assiduously deconstructs the language of Barack Obama, Dalai Lama and Slavoj Zizek that is unequivocal means to transfer and communicate ideas as politics, religion and philosophy to disillusion the purpose, the value and the weightiness of the meaning that we endow to words. By deleting contextualised words, he reverts each interview into a long silence exclusively with breaths, painstaking thoughts, and pauses in between to suggest possibilities of communication beyond words freeing ourselves from linguistic limitations. In A Towel (2008) Baak serenely displays his childhood photographs in several sequences examining the relationship between objects, language and self. By deleting himself from the images of his past and displaying the remainder, he comments on the identity that exists through the relationship of possession. As seen in His Silence, the artist aims to detach and transcend from the attachment - the illusion of the meaning and the relationship visualised through language - achieving the selfless state of being.
 
**
Chung Heeseung (b.1974) received BA and MA in photography at London College of Communication, London. She has exhibited extensively in Korea and UK such as ArtSonje Center Seoul, Songeun Art Space, Doosan Gallery Seoul and New York, National Museum of Singapore, Espacio Menosuno Madrid, South Hill Park Bracknell among others. She was awarded with 2012 Daum Art Prize Korea, 2011 Songeun Art Award Korea, 2008 Critical Mass Top 50 by Photolucida USA and shortlisted for Photo Espana 2008 Descubrimientos PHE Spain and Nikon Discovery Awards 2007 UK.
 
Je Baak (b.1978) received MA in Communication Art & Design at Royal College of Art London and BFA in Visual Communication from Seoul National University. He exhibited internationally such as National Museum of Contemporary Art Seoul, Saatchi Gallery London, Busan Museum of Art, British Film Institute London, Asia House London, Arti et Amicitae Amsterdam, Gallery Hyundai Seoul, Gallery Jungmiso Seoul among others. He was awarded with The Grand Prize by Joongang Fine Arts Prize 2010, Chris Ganrham Memorial Award by Royal College of Art 2010 and shortlisted for Mangroup Photography Awards.

The works of these artists is a daring rendition of abstractions in space. They manipulate their medium and encompass selected angles, frames, and junctions to offer a new perspective that is visually clean and concise, but technically complicated. The combination of these pieces in one show allows for a dynamic, precise experience.
 
O’Mahony uses a variety of mediums exploring the ways in which people engage with their surroundings. Her pieces are a practice in finding and capturing those moments of clarity and beauty amid urban disorders, confined spaces, and mundane routines. O’Mahony questions how visual art relates to everyday life and confronts its ability to function as both a form of escapism and realization.
 
Salcedo’s minimal palette is concerned with the wider concepts of personal and collective memory and identity. These series employ an almost silent rhetoric, combined in multiple manners to formulate what he calls “bodies of associations.” For him, these intimate associations and junctions between the planes that the artist perceives and images of the world are a threshold between the observer and the painter.
 
Jade’s art toys with the aesthetics of voyeurism. Beginning with the intimacy of photography at home, she translates the images into laser-woodcut figures, and playfully arranges and rearranges the ‘girls’ to create an endless amount of scenarios. In this process, she has the authority to manipulate the audience’s perception, questioning who holds power within the realm of voyeurism.
 
Curated by Tara Aghdashloo
 
For press and media enquiries contact: info@tilgallery.com

Horsfield‘s Seven Panels are beautiful, intriguing images made more intense and mysterious by the very method and material they’re made of. He's a true pioneer, restlessly experimenting with new media (as some great artists do), in this case gesso coated oak panels, printed with layer upon layer of ink and coated with wax. The build up pushes the image forward so that it feels hyper present; a peony becomes intensely delicate or the dead fish intensely wet. These works link to still life paintings that have been made over the centuries, by artists such as Manet, Melendez, Dürer or Velazquez - whose paintings Horsfield, who is associated with the development of ideas of relation and slow time, has studied through a lifetime, attentive to the form, the disturbance, the vision each artist brings and their search to find a way of making an image that will be completed by every viewer who sees it over time.
 
Craigie Horsfield (*1949) has had major exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Basel (Basel, 2012), M HKA (Antwerp, 2011), Museo di Capodimonte, (Naples, 2008); Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney, 2007), Jeu de Paume (Paris, 2006), Centro de ArteModerna – Fundacao Calouste Gulbenkian (Lisbon, 2006); he participated in Documenta X and XI (Kassel, 1997, 2002) and the Whitney Biennial (New York, 2004). His work is in many public collections (including the Tate Gallery, London; Whitney Museum, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco and Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam), along with private collections worldwide. In 1996 Horsfield was nominated for theTurner Prize.

Maureen Paley is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work at the gallery by Tim Rollins and K.O.S.
 
Tim Rollins is an artist, teacher and activist who began his career as the assistant of the conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth. In 1979 he co-founded Group Material in New York. In the early 1980s, he taught students at Intermediate School 52 in the Bronx and went on to create the Art & Knowledge Workshop. His highly acclaimed collaboration with the members of K.O.S. (Kids of Survival) continues to this day. Rollins combines lessons in reading and writing with making artworks. The source material laid out and studied by the students generally relates to literary or musical classics, such as works by William Shakespeare, George Orwell, Ralph Ellison or Franz Schubert, but can also include comics or legal documents.
 
Their collaborative work takes the form of drawings, photographs, sculptural objects and paintings on canvas and paper. The backgrounds of works are often comprised of pages of books pasted into a grid. The results blend elements of Minimalism with an interest in the revival of painting that took place in the 1980s and in art that is socially and politically engaged. Rollins has said: ‘What we’re doing changes people’s conception about who can make art, how art is made, who can learn and what’s possible, because a lot of these kids had been written off by the school system. This is our revenge.’
 
Inspired by the Time Traveller in H.G. Wells‘ The Time Machine (1895) the group have endeavored to explore this idea in their exhibition and have made work based on imaginary ’visitations‘ with Shakespeare, Mendelssohn, Haydn, Darwin and Strauss.
 
Their journey begins in 1590 at the time when Shakespeare was writing A Midsummer Night’s Dream and simultaneously in 1826 when Mendelssohn at 17 years of age began work on his own score for a production of this play. In their work A Midsummer Night’s Dream (after Shakespeare, 1590-1596 and Mendelssohn 1826–1842) they invited young people to transform into the character of Puck, painting flowers and blossom over sheet music from Mendelssohn‘s score that was completed in 1842. Next they imagined the first performance of The Seven Last Words of Christ by Haydn in 1786 and created seven paintings that use black Spinel pigment that they applied onto pages from this score. They then visited Charles Darwin in 1837 as he began sketching out his idea of a ’Tree of Life‘ in one image that would be developed into his theory of evolution described in On the Origin of Species published in 1859.
 
In 1945 they meet with Richard Strauss in the final days of WWII while he was composing his elegiac and mournful Metamorphosen (in Memorium). This music created a deep desire within the group to reflect on their experiences working in the South Bronx that brought up feelings of tragedy and transformation, destruction and rebirth. They have created a meditation in this new body of work that memorializes, researches and remains hopeful by existing in past, present and future tenses.
 
’We embrace the idea of the arena of art existing in the fourth dimension of a social imagination beyond space and time, contingency and possibility.‘ Tim Rollins and K.O.S.
 
’The past is not dead. In fact, it‘s not even past.’ William Faulkner
 
Tim Rollins was born 1955 in Pittsfield/ME, USA and lives and works in New York. The current member of the K.O.S. are Angel Abreu, born in Philadelphia/PA, USA 1974; Jorge Abreu, born in New York/NY, USA 1979; Robert Branch, born in New York/NY, USA 1977; Daniel Castillo, born in New York/NY, USA 1982; Nelson Ricardo Savinon, born in New York/NY, USA 1971 and Bryce Zackery, born in Rochester/MN, USA 1984.
 
Solo Exhibitions include Tim Rollins and K.O.S. - On Transfiguration, Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel, Switzerland, 2012; Tim Rollins and K.O.S. - The Black Spot, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, UK, 2012; Tim Rollins and K.O.S. - On Transfiguration, GAMeC - Galleria d´Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo, Bergamo, Italy, 2011; What Matters, Worcester Art Museum, Worcester/MA, USA, 2010; Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol, Great Britain, 1998; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington/DC, USA, 1992; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles/CA, USA, 1990; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis/MN, USA; 1988.
 
In 2012 they contributed to the Wide Open School at the Hayward Gallery, London and they will collaborate with the School of Visual Arts and students from public schools and programmes in New York's Chelsea neighborhood to create a work for the High Line Park in New York in 2013.

Food is essential for life and energy. For millennia it has been intrinsic to human culture and our relationship with it often reveals much about our lives. Yet, food is also a conundrum. For many it is pleasure, comfort or joy but for others it is pain, anguish and hardship, being both greed and hunger.
 
Through drawing and printmaking, Mary Dalton’s work is informed and enthused by stories and personal life experiences, from teaching the homeless, working at London’s renowned Borough Market to living close by a major pheasant shooting woods. The response is often personal, sometimes political, inspiring her to produce abstract, intricate and often dark narratives. Dalton is not afraid to confront the darker side of our relationship with food letting her works throw new light onto our need for food consumption and the enigma’s it can sometimes cause.
 
Exhibiting alongside the works will be Dalton’s first book, ‘Embracing the Surplus and the Unwanted’ and several textile pieces. Typeset by the award winning Whittington Press, the book contains numerous hand printed pages and illustrations focusing on our need and waste for food. The textile pieces are an extended canvas from the printing press, a second outcome for a larger narrative. The fragility of embroidery and disembodied figures play homage to and fully encapsulates the spirit of this exhibition and encourages us to think differently about the way we use food in daily life.

Preview Friday 31st May, 6 to 9pm
 
Opening in the presence of the artist: Friday 28 June, 6 to 9pm
 
Im Wald, im Wald! da konnt ich führen
Ein freies Leben mit Geistern und Tieren;
Feen und Hochwild von stolzem Geweih,
Sie nahten sich mir ganz ohne Scheu.
 
Heinrich Heine (from Waldeinsamkeit)
 
(In the woods, in the woods! There I could lead /A free life with spirits and animals; /Fairies and deers with proud antlers /they approached me without fear)
 
The times you wish to walk out, withdraw, pull out of the game because it has become just a game. Disengage…
Suffering from a sexually transmitted disease, Heinrich Heine spends the last years of his life semi paralysed and partly blind in Paris. There he composes Waldeinsamkeit, in which he recalls a nature retreat in Helgoland shortly before his decision to divert his Romantic energies away from poetry and into the political battles of restoration Europe. Twenty years on, 1851, looking back, the incompatibility he used to make between poetry and his philosophical and political writing seems nonsensical; he now assesses, through his renewed poetic drive, that the revelry, the myths, the magical world of tales and the private realm of the imagination, are in fact an essential part in the struggle against the reactionary -religious or Jacobins- forces of his time.
 
Around the same time in Concord, USA, a man sets out to live in a forest for two years, two months and two days. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life”. In Walden or a life in the woods, this man, Henry David Thoreau argues the importance of solitude, contemplation, and closeness to nature in finding the true self and transcending “the life of quiet desperation which most men lead”.
 
The creation of public parks attempted the reciprocal taming of nature and men, offering “public walks calculated to promote the health and comfort of the inhabitants”, because “want of recreation generated incipient disease, discontent; which in its turn led to attacks upon the Government”. But from the outset, parks were used in ways which deeply disturbed some public minds. Ensuing moral panics, regulation and further, constantly shifting, uses, they remained ideal spaces of appropriation, contestation and debate; where norms of behaviour could be forged, contested or established; and where behaviour beyond the norms could retain the Romantic appeal of transgression.
 
“A Walk in the park” is a feature length work by Stefan Hoderlein filmed using a thermographic camera. This technology developed for security and military purposes is used here to capture the perimeters of a bucolic cruising ground near Düsseldorf.
 
The camera operates outside the spectrum of visible light: it maps the territory of heat. All objects emit a certain amount of infrared radiation as a function of their temperature. Trees, benches, people. The film’s thermal images are bright, intense colours, pseudo-colours. Each colour represents a different temperature: white and red, traditionally but subjectively, used for higher temperatures, to green, blue and violet for colder ones. Darkness transforms into light. For Hoderlein, directness, honesty, the celebratory and rude pride. By other means, what can’t be seen will be made to be seen.
 
The individual with intentional stance enacts a temporary walkout; performing the pragmatic in the face of impossibility, joining in an irrational illusory social loophole, celebrating the joy of this delimited pastoral precinct, where the weight of society is lifted collectively in the company of men.
The halted traveller surveying the countryside; the hermit in the undergrowth, shed of his possessions, seeking simplicity in the poverty of connections; the nature, empty screen to project our grief; the hunter in the solitude, cock as bait, catching a reflection of himself; the magical pull of some untamed wilderness, domesticated; and the moments of madness; trolls and living nightmares caught between the liminal dreamscape, fog and redemption, wanderlust in a timeless idyll; and the walker slow-pacing with affected nonchalance, measuring the territory, roaming down utopia drive; the loneliness, the eternal pain, the horror, awe; the bug chaser catching his death; desire and apprehension, the ritualistic and the kinship.

‘Photography is art without a sense of doubt. To photograph is to paint using the available light, and to try to keep alive old techniques, to produce work in very small, qualitatively valuable editions. Each print or glass plate is a unique, one-off piece…’
 
Julieta Schildknecht’s exhibition at The Piper Gallery is an installation of photographs presented in a ‘back-stage’ gallery space. Works reserved for such areas - whether at galleries or art fairs - are often rarities and are brought for viewing by special request. When thinking about this, another resonance for the artist is the work of Pina Bausch, whose dance shows, though never publicly advertised, were always sold out, their popularity spread entirely through word-of-mouth and personal text messaging between those in the metier. In this installation, some photographs are presented veiled – as hidden images, reminiscent of the way that pornography used to be hidden behind curtains, other works are to be viewed by climbing a ladder, three works can be viewed from the distance of the balcony. Origami pigeons lead the way from the front door to the exhibition entrance...
 
At a time when film manufacturers and photo labs are in decline, it is more important than ever to reassert the value of photography.