OK, NOW THE FLOOR IS LAVA! is a group show that my friend Tyler Bright Hilton from London (originally from Toronto) has curated. He's put a lot of hard work into finding some great artists and a great space. The opening is March 10th, below is the press release...
OK, NOW THE FLOOR IS LAVA!
Club Row – Rochelle School Arnold Circus London E2 7ES 11 March – 17 March 2011 (closed Monday) Private View: Thursday 10 March 2011, 6-9pmThis exhibition collects the work of a group of artists whose practice focuses primarily on drawing. There is a shared ambition to create relevant contemporary art engaged and fuelled by a relationship with craft and narrative elements in a conceptually integrated way. Each artist is invested in creating their own environments, histories and stories, with content varying from entomological to autobiographical. Using a labour-intensive approach to craft, they aim to create a unique aesthetic married to, and further articulating, this content.
Given their developed use of rendering and immediately apparent debt to popular art forms such as classical Victorian era illustration or Marvel comic books, it can be challenging to position this type of work within a contemporary art setting. Comparisons can mistakenly be made with artists who have an interest in rendering but rely heavily on irony as a contemporising tool; or, who prize surface above innovation and believe industry can be equated with aesthetic or imaginative merit. The artists in this exhibition strive to avoid both.
The show’s title takes its name from a children’s game, where navigating through a space can only be done by moving from one piece of furniture, playground equipment, etc., to another without touching the floor, which is imagined to be lava. This simple metaphor refers to the imagined worlds represented in the work and playfully suggests the artists’ motivating impulse to progress through dangerous territory. One false move and it’s straight into twee illustration, tediously obsessive rendering, incomprehensibly idiosyncratic iconography or worst of all: thick, ironic, contemporary art discourse goo.
Including work by:
Alexander Brenchley
Nicholas Di Genova
Tyler Bright Hilton
Meaghan Hyckie
Amanda Nedham
David Price
James Pyman
Srdjan Segan
Andrew Wilson
It’s pretty easy to find:
I'll also be participating in two art fairs in New York at the beginning of the month, The Armory Show with Fredericks and Freiser Gallery, and Scope New York with Dukan et Hourdequin (who is in the process of relocating their gallery from Marseille to Paris)... If you are at the fairs, check out their booths. Both galleries show some incredible artists...
As I mentioned before, I now have two interns helping me out in the studio. They both fit in with the studio dynamic right away, and are great artists. Below are photos of them looking like they are having a really great time (although I think they were faking), and links to their respective blogs..
Lastly, my studio mate Patrick was recently featured on the BMX website The Northern Embassy. Pat's been BMXing for years, but this feature focuses on his paintings, and a large part of the images are of our studio... Oddly, there are not a lot of images of his work, but there is a photo of his newest painting, his watercolours are amazing, and he's a great guy to share a studio with...
And here's a painting of his.
Posts
