East End Review

Tag: Transition Gallery

Isolation Chamber Vacation, Transition Gallery, preview – Alone time

The Champagne Suite, from Juno Calypso’s series The Honeymoon. Photograph: Juno Calypso

Solitude is something humans both crave and fear – seemingly in equal measure.

Nineteenth century transcendental philosopher Henry David Thoreau spent two years alone in a lakeside cabin in Massachusetts.

Recounting his experiences in his seminal work Walden, he wrote: “I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”

Yet fear of isolation and ‘ending up alone’ created a cultural icon for our times in Bridget Jones. And once heard, who could forget the mournful croon of country singer Hank Williams as he sings: “I’m so lonesome I could cry”?

So which is it to be? This month an exhibition at Transition Gallery explores solitude in all its manifold forms: its horror-filled connotations of madness and perversity on one hand, and its elevated status as a tool for creative genius on the other.

Curator Sarah Cleaver has been researching the subject ever since watching the film Paris, Texas, immersing herself in the subject through the work of Thoreau and reclusive American writer Henry Darger, and starting a Tumblr to document her findings.

“When I first started researching I thought maybe it was going to be a book,” says the 28-year-old.

“But when I started realising the amount of visual aspects to it I realised an exhibition would work quite well.

“Paradoxically it’s a project about being alone but it works better with other people.”

Isolation Chamber Vacation features the work of five artists as well as various ephemera from Cleaver’s research such as artists’ books, letters, back issues of magazines and a ‘library’ of recommended reading.

Juno Calypso’s photographs are self-portraits in which she adopts the fictional character, Joyce. For her series The Honeymoon, the artist posed as a travel writer and spent a week alone at a couples’ only honeymoon resort in Pennsylvania, with a suitcase full of wigs and wedding lingerie.

Kirsty Buchanan will be displaying a series of drawings made in ‘private spaces’: so whilst taking a bath or in bed.

“I’ve known her for a long time, and we would talk a lot about women’s rituals and men’s fear of what women do behind closed doors, so diaries, cosmetics and that kind of thing,” Cleaver says of Buchanan.

Other artists in the exhibition include Nicola Frimpong, whose watercolours Cleaver describes as “kind of Marquis de Sade-esque orgies”, whilst filmmaker Hannah Ford will be screening a piece inspired by period dramas and the idea of the young unmarried woman who has to stay at home with her parents. Katernina Jebb will be showing a print from a series on sex dolls which touches on technology and how we use the internet.

Alongside the art, there will be film screenings of Repulsion (1965), Paris, Texas (1984), Morvern Callar (2002) and In The Realms of the Unreal (2004). There will also be talks, with speakers including Mary Wild, an expert on film and psychoanalysis who will be talking about aloneness in horror films.

Cleaver believes now is a pertinent time to be looking at solitude in greater detail, given the influential of digital technology on our lives.

“I think there is a kind of fear about how connected we all are yet how we’ve managed to isolate ourselves, the fact you can get in contact with anyone you like from your bedroom basically. I hear a lot of people talk about how technology has made them lonelier.”

She admits that she herself revels in solitude, saying: “I love to be alone.” But she warns of this attitude proving a “trick”, particularly among artists.

“I love to be alone but also think there’s a lie to solitude,” she says. “And that is, if I get rid of enough people then I’ll produce something wonderful.

“That’s as much of a trick as anything else, it’s just another method of procrastination for a lot of artists.

“You know, I could do this if I didn’t have a family, I could do this if I didn’t have a partner. So I’m into that idea too, that it’s kind of fetishized and kind of a myth that lot of creatives like to talk about.”

Isolation Chamber Vacation
2 September– 2 October
Transition Gallery
Unit 25a Regent Studios
8 Andrews Road
E8 4QN
transitiongallery.co.uk

August 25, 2016
Aviary exhibition wings its way to Transition Gallery

‘Raven Facing Right’ by Alice Sielle

You don’t have to be a twitcher to enjoy birdwatching in East London, as a new exhibition of drawings, paintings and sculptures of birds attests.

Aviary, which is at Transition gallery this month, is an exhibition of paintings, sculptures and drawings of birds by 16 artists.

“It’s not a big space, and it’s quite high up as well, so we really want to ram it so you step into something that feels animated with all these birds,” says painter Matthew Krishanu, the exhibition’s co-creator.

‘Acorn & Jay’ by Rose Wylie

Three of the artists in the exhibition (Sutapa Biswas, Aubrey Williams and Rose Wylie) have works in the Tate collection.

Krishanu will be displaying some of his own paintings of crows, and traces his interest in the birds back to his childhood growing up in Bangladesh.

“We’d often see crows around and I’d be fascinated by them, they’d be picking out bits of refuse on the side of the road and they’d be just everywhere,” he says.

For Krishanu, ‘bird art’ is very different from other types of animal portraiture.

“There’s something very domesticated about pet portraiture, whereas there’s more about the spirit of freedom when people sit down to paint birds,” he says.

‘Tick Bird’ by Aubrey Williams

Aubrey Williams’ Tick Bird is part of a series of paintings of the tropical birds of Guyana, the Caribbean and South America. Krishanu says Williams’ work in particular shows how birds can be “signifiers of place”.

“He was born in Guyana, and when his daughter was growing up he wanted to use the paintings as instructional tools so she knew about all these birds in the Caribbean and South America. Of all the artists in the show his exploration is very culturally grounded.”

In literature, humans are regularly described as having bird-like features, and Krishanu says some artworks in Aviary function as self-portraits of the artists.

Lonely Pigeon by Nathan Eastwood

Birds that feature in the exhibition include Alice Sielle’s Raven Facing Right, jays and a ‘lonely pigeon’. Other works include Rose Wylie’s large drawing Acorn & Jay, which incorporates text, collage and paint.

There will also be watercolours by Sutapa Biswas, Franki Austin’s glasswork and porcelain bird sculptures by Annabel Dover.

Aviary is at Transition Gallery, Unit 25a Regent Studios, 8 Andrews Road, E8 4QN until 21 May.

May 10, 2016
Sex Shop exhibition to open this month

Unusual paint job: ‘Knockers’ by Tom Gallant

An eyebrow-raising exhibition of sex toys and paraphernalia made by artists and designers opens this month at Transition Gallery.

For Sex Shop, 50 artists, designers and creative types were invited to submit a prototype of a sex toy or fetish object.

The responses were as provocative as they were wide-ranging, from a video piece about the eroticisation of stilettos to a 3D representation of the internal workings of the clitoris.

The first incarnation of the exhibition was in Folkestone, where it played on the idea of the British seaside as a place for dirty weekends and secret liaisons.

In Hackney, Sex Shop will be curated in two halves though the personnel will be the same.

As well as artists, those taking part include a philosopher, a puppet maker, a graphic designer, a fashion designer and a jewellery designer.

“It’s quite a mixed bag,” says Darren Nairn, co-curator of Sex Shop. “Some people have done sculptural objects but there’s other things going on too.

Marlos tenBhomer, a footwear designer, made a video focusing on footwear and looking at film noir where women come a cropper, so women falling down stairs, or on perches and falling off.”

Other artworks include a contract, a piece formed from colour samples taken from adverts in pornographic magazines, and some scrap metal bought in China and shipped using the exact route used by sex traffickers.

Nairn’s own contribution to the exhibition is a butt plug. “The exhibition takes on any gender to some extent,” he says. “We’ve got mixtures of men and women, gay and straight going on, so there are all these different voices coming through.”

Sex Shop is at Transition Gallery,Unit 25a, Regent Studios, 8 Andrews Road, E8 4QN from 28 February – 29 March
www.transitiongallery.co.uk

February 10, 2015
Exhibition review – (detail) at Transition Gallery

Detail from Untitled work by Evi Grigoropoulou

The work of 118 international artists feature at an exhibition at Transition Gallery entitled (detail), ranging from the well established to recent graduates. But instead of showing each work in its entirety, there is instead a close-up photograph of each work. The result is overwhelming, frustrating and innovative in equal measure.

The Andrew Bracey-curated exhibition originally launched at the H-Project Space in Bangkok, with all the artworks fitting around the unique, distinctive woodwork of the Thai house.

Bracey says that he liked the idea of the space dictating the images, adding: “I hope it has a very different identity, look and focus in each gallery.” Transition Gallery is certainly a different type of space, which means the prints fill the walls as a grid, like a schizophrenic quilt of contemporary art.

Details and fragments have always interested Bracey. “Going close is vital to my painting and viewing process and I have always been interested in how different things can be noticed by not focusing on the bigger view,” he says. He cites Gerhard Richter as an influence, noting that “his paintings appear to be details of a wider view or picture” – an influence played out in this exhibition.

The panels vary wildly in style and feeling. The placement of the works was random – artists’ names were pulled out of a hat. This feeling of experimentation and spontaneity is exciting. As the viewer is confronted by so many different styles, ideas, harmonies and contradictions, visiting the space is overwhelming and interesting in equal measure.

The norm at exhibitions is for visitors to view paintings from distance and move on, so it is refreshing to see the medium in a different way. Bracey is interested in the little brushstrokes and minute details of these close-ups.

Paintings by Enzo Marro, David Dipré and Fabian Marcaccio’s show these individual brushstrokes in forensic detail. The context of the entire work is not lost; a new meaning is born. There is a beauty to these images that recalls the work of Frank Auerbach.

Not all the prints work as close-ups, but this doesn’t detract from the whole. The ideas at play and the contradictions and range of images make this exhibition worth a visit. Bracey believes the idea of focusing is vital today, as it enables new things to arise and trickle out of what already surrounds us.

(detail) is at Transition Gallery, Unit 25a Regent Studios, 8 Andrews Road, E8 4QN until 12 October.

October 7, 2014