Pictures From My Heart

Emma Talbot
24 Apr – 16 May 2010
Transition
London
E8

Pictures From My Heart features a selection of extraordinary drawings made by Emma Talbot following the death of her husband, Paul. These drawings grew out of a desire not only for emotional honesty but also for a simplification of her working process (Transition)

‘I was deciding what I essentially needed to make work. I started with just a few watercolours and paper and just began to draw everything that was in my mind. I no longer cared what anyone thought.’ The result is a searingly honest series of what Talbot terms ‘psychological stories’. There is a lot of telling here and not all of it doleful. There are images of life and love, of coming home drunk and feeling bad, snippets of Pablo Neruda poetry and quotes from The Smiths…….(Transition)

Tiny monuments to memory: It would be to easy to catagorise these drawings as snap shots or even the moments in time of a life remembered, but that implies a two dimensional quality. There is so much more depth in them because each drawing reveals a glimpse (if imagined) of the preceding and following. I am witness to the artist’s hand in motion and in turn her memory and emotion.

I do not feel over whelmed by the quantity of drawings, instead I am drawn in to discover over and over again another connection to another drawing another memory rendered with a the raw movement of the hand and the clear symbiosis of the artist and the act of drawing.

The gaps got me: As possibly editorial decisions or gaps in the memory of the Artist. These gaps are a fascinating pause while viewing this collection of drawings that go to make up a life up until now. Small mysteries for me to ponder long after I have walked away from the world of these drawings.

Click HERE for an interesting interview ‘Emma Talbot talking to Alli Sharma at her studio, Walthamstow E17′

I can only apologise for the quality of my photographs. I wasn’t expecting to get to Transition on this day and didn’t have my magic camera with me.

Hand Joy

Centre For Recent Drawing
28 April – 28 May 2010
London
N1

You can see pictures from the private view HERE

Hand Joy, curated by Paul Kindersley: 22 international contemporary artists, one room, a frenzied exploration of eroticism, desire, possession, longing and the body. Ranging from the abstract to the pornographic, the sexy to the sadistic, the sublime to the rubber, drawing as a way of ownership of our unattainable fantasies.(C4RD)

Click it to make it bigger.

Featuring work by
DERYA AKAY, MAXIME ANGEL, KIRSTY BUCHANAN , MATTHEW DRAGE , CARLOS FRANKLIN, GABO GUZZO, RIEHALE, TAKAYUKI HARA, ANDREW HEWISH, ALEXANDER HIDALGO, PAUL KINDERSLEY, SULE KEMANCI, ASTRID KÖPPE, SARAH LEDERMAN, ROBERT PURNELL, ALEXANDER RATHBONE, THOM RAVNHOLDT, JAMES SPANKIE feat. Alison Mosshart, CORINNA SPENCER, MAGDALENA SURANYI, FRED VERNON, RAFAL ZAJKO

Please join us for the opening reception for this exhibition, 6 – 8pm
Wednesday 28th April 2010 or during the exhibition 29th April – 28th
May 2010.

On the 19th of May there will be a launch for the accompanying Artist book, Zine 4 Recent Drawing, in an edition of only 20, containing original artworks by some of the exhibitors- watch this space.

Centre for Recent Drawing is open during exhibitions 12 – 6pm from
Wednesday to Friday at 2 – 4 Highbury Station Road, Highbury
Islington, London.C4RD is a Registered UK Charity 1123530.

Through the artists’ images we are able to enter an impossible world of tits and cocks, in the case of Hara, or a place where a sexless and violent fusing/cleaving act of intercourse mirrors the artists’ struggle between reality and fantasy when portraying an erotic desire. A body divided shown in Spencer’s pencil drawings, demonstrating the confusion of separating the hand/eye/experience…..(C4RD)

The Library Of Babel/In And Out Of Place

25 February – 9 May 2010 (extended until 13 June) 2010
176 Zabludowicz Collection
London
NW5

With over 200 works exhibited, The Library of Babel / In and Out of Place will be the largest ever showcase of works from the Zabludowicz Collection. Anna-Catharina Gebbers invites us into a salon-style exhibition, a format which emphasises the deliberately overwhelming amount of contemporary works of art including painting, photography, sculpture and video.(176)

Inspired by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges’ short story ‘The Library of Babel’ (1941) where inhabitants of an infinite library search for the absolute interpretation of the information around them, The Library of Babel / In and Out of Place encourages the visitor to embark on a similar quest for meaning.(176)

HERE is a pod cast reading of Jorge Luis Borges ‘The Library of Babel’ (a bit odd to listen to) and a text version is HERE

Rachel Kneebone

I have found my thread of a whispered story. Its there just for me I’m almost certain.

Edgar Leciejewski

Nobuyoshi Araki
Flesh is manipulated, in flux, restrained, abused, scared and displayed: This thread reminds us of our humanity and mortality, failings and vulnerability. Sinners each and everyone one of us. There are the two worlds in which we inhabit, the real and the fantasy, they overlap all the time, so what keeps us grounded, pinned to the earth……

There’s a thread in there for everyone. Mine may have been inevitable.

Dinos Chapman

The Tamsynettes

Tamsyn Challenger
13 March-18 April
Transistion
London
E8

Tamsyn Challenger broadly concerns herself with the steady march of time upon the body; on her own, on those whom she loves, male and female, and on the desperate ravages inflicted on a woman’s form by the warping of beauty into an ideology, where the natural becomes perverse.(Transition)

As a documentarian she has borne witness to gender violence and the subsequent lives no longer in extant. Inevitably, this colours a palette and in previous work she has used organs and teeth as a visceral reminder of mortality. However, the Tamsynettes represent a piecing together of beauty. By utilising her abilities in craft practice, the handmade polished and painted wood and cloth figures that have been taken from her own measurements and matched to the colour of her blood are simultaneously deconstructing femininity whilst being beautifully constructed self- portraits.(Transition)

As I put together this post it occurs to me that there are two ways to interact with an exhibition: To simply look and digest the the art work that an Artist/currator has placed in a room for the public to view or the viewer can experience the exhibition. Obvious? yes, important? crucial.

Parts of her are everywhere: I am standing here face to face with her, life size and staring. She is confidently approaching me but at the same time vulnerable in her component parts, those parts of her that seem destined to be scattered like the ones on the floor, a foot, a breast and unknown portions of her body.

She takes three positions: to sit and stare, to lay down eyes wide open, to stand and move towards the viewer.

I am drawn to rest a while: Just vacated by the whole that is now the scattered parts on the floor or an inviting place to linger. I am struck by the loneliness of the chair and the emptiness that it may represent. The shift for us from one realm to another and the inevitable progress of time.

Time is indeed marching on. But I still see beauty in these body parts that surround me and more struck by the sadness of her lonely progression through stages of time. So much so that the empty chair feels like a release.

Don’t forget the SHOP SPACE
Nastja Rönkkö
Cake Shop

Nastja Rönkkö’s paintings, texts and performances are born from an aspiration to investigate imagery of personal desire and its relationship to the materiality of paint. The genesis of desire and its unconscious manifestations are considered through and within painterly traces, gestures and histories.(Transition)

Little gems that I know I want but cant quite grasp.

This exhibit has a week left to run
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photographic out takes HERE

Out Takes

Out take drawings from a special project I have been working on.