August 2016

Matt’s Gallery welcomes new Deputy Director Soraya Rodriguez

Soraya Rodriguez has been appointed as the new Deputy Director of Matt’s Gallery, “I’m thrilled to be joining Matt’s Gallery at such an exciting time and looking forward to building on its unique legacy.” She joins us having founded and directed Zoo Art Fair from 2004 – 2009 and previously held positions at Max Wigram Gallery as Director of Exhibitions and at Chisenhale as Gallery Manager. She leads the diploma of Professional Studies at Central St Martins and has been lecturing for six years on curating at the RCA and Wimbledon College. Soraya studied sculpture at the RCA. On the appointment, Robin Klassnik has said “We have made an inspired choice.”

Matt’s Gallery’s new space in Bermondsey

Matt’s Gallery, Decima street, exterior view, 2016

Matt’s Gallery’s new space on Decima Street in Bermondsey opens with Leah Capaldi’s major solo show Lay Down on Saturday 29th October 2016. The exhibition marks a new era in Matt’s Gallery’s 36 year history, as the gallery moves south of the river to continue its programme.

The full address for the space is 65 Decima Street, London, SE1 4QR

Forthcoming Exhibitions & Events

Leah Capaldi

Matt’s Gallery, 29 October – 11 December, 2016 

Leah Capaldi, Lay Down, 2016. Image courtesy of the artist

Lay Down is the first major solo show by artist Leah Capaldi, the exhibition opens Matt’s Gallery’s new space in Bermondsey with a private view on Saturday 29th October from 3- 7pm. Lay Down is an entirely new work by Capaldi, a site-specific installation inspired by her time in the deserts of the American West. Here, Capaldi met a Utah cowboy and his horse, a film exploring their relationship and the vast, performative landscape that surrounds them forms the core of the installation. Lay Down asks how power is constructed and understood, this question arising throughout the installation, in the iconic figure of the American cowboy, the influence of the sublime landscape and the authority of the screen.

Current

Richard Grayson, Possessions_inc. Continues 1st August 2016 with Episode 3

Possessions_inc is a new video and web project by Matt’s Gallery and Richard Grayson. Episode 3 is now available to watch.

Over 2016 and 2017 Matt’s Gallery will be posting monthly instalments of the video project Possessions_inc. Part series, part blog, part essay, part talking head, Possessions_inc. is an expanding exploration of: ideas of value, ways we invest in objects, the Bilderberg owl, animatronics, the mystery of Rennes Le Chateau, codes, fakes, oligarchs, the missing head of Philip K Dick, treasure hunting, M.R. James, the V.I.P. Lounge, drug smuggling, computer animation, animism, Pygmalion and the insurance industry.

To subscribe please sign up to the Matt’s Gallery mailing list

To watch the episodes click here

Blackrock Residency Programme,  Patrick Goddard, Sally O’ Reilly, and Alison Turnbull, Lydney Park Estate, show opens across two weekends: 10th – 11th September, 24th – 25th September 2016

Blackrock Residency, 2016. Patrick Goddard, Location shot. Photograph by Polly Brown

Blackrock Residency, Sally O’ Reilly, Work in progress, 2016.

Blackrock Residency, Alison Turnbull, Work in progress, 2016. Photograph by Kathryn Faulkner

Artists’ News

Willie Doherty, Loose Ends, Regional Arts Centre, Letterkenny, 9 July – 24 September 2016

Willie Doherty, Loose Ends, Regional Cultural Centre, Letterkenny, 2016. Image courtesy of the artist

Loose Ends is a major new art project by world-renowned Derry/Donegal artist Willie Doherty, commissioned by Donegal County Council, which explores the legacy of the 1916 Easter Rising. The work builds on Doherty’s interest in the relationship between landscape and memory, and is shot in sites of contested history in Donegal and Dublin. The exhibition, comprising a multi-screen video installation and still photographic images, will premiere at the Regional Cultural Centre in July as part of the Earagail Arts Festival, and will then be shown at Kerlin Gallery, Dublin and Matt’s Gallery, London.

Willie Doherty, Loose Ends, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin,  3 September – 19th October, 2016

Willie Doherty, Loose ends, 2016, Two screen video installation, 18 minute duration. Image courtesy the artist

Kerlin Gallery also hosts Willie Doherty’s Loose Ends, a historic new body of work comprised of a two-screen video installation and accompanying photographic diptychs. The exhibition opens with a reception in the company of the artist on Friday 2 September. Loose Ends turns our attention to the passage of time and its powerful, corrosive effect on our hopes, beliefs and sense of identity. Across two screens, Doherty uses the camera and spoken word to focus on the details and textures of two very different locations. Both associated with the 1916 Easter Rising – a key event in the history of Irish independence, the sites are examined in detail through the use of a slow, almost trance-like, zoom. Doherty’s lens absorbs the material evidence of each location today, 100 years after the events of 1916, asking whether a residual response to these events continues to be played out, or how the voices and actions of one generation and the ‘vapours of the past’ resonate in the unconscious of another.

Nathaniel Mellors, iwillmedievalfutureyou#4, Museet for Samtidskunst, Roskilde, Denmark, 21 May – 14 August 2016

Nathaniel Mellors, Reliquary Reliquary (Degenerate Cycle), Sculpture, 2016. Image courtesy of the artist

Nathaniel Mellors exhibits work in group show iwillmedievalfutureyou#4 at the Museet for Samtidskunst in Roskilde, Denmark. The exhibition presents several futuristic stories infused by a sense of timelessness by artists using different mediums. The artists’ show absurd and dystopian representations of the time we are living in. Through their works the exhibition will attempt to mirror the primitive in our present and possible future. Mellors presents the complete set of 5 Ourhouse episodes: Ourhouse Episode -1, ‘Time’  (2015-16), Ourhouse Episode 1,  ‘Games’ (2010), Ourhouse Episode 2, ‘Class’ (2010), Ourhouse Episode 3, ‘The Cure of Folly’ (2011) and Ourhouse Episode 4, ‘Internal Problems’ (2010)  alongside the sculpture,  Reliquary Reliquary (Degenerate Cycle) (2016) and a set of new paintings made across 2015 – 2016 with Chris Bloor entitled New Dinosaur Paintings (2015-16).

Hayley Newman, Liberties, Collyer Bristow Gallery, Cornwall, 2 July – 21 October 2016

Hayley Newman, Domestique, 2010-13. Image courtesy of the artist

Hayley Newman exhibits work in Liberties at the Collyer Bristow Gallery, Cornwall. Works by over 20 women artists will reflect the changes in art practice within the context of sexual and gender equality since the introduction of the Sex Discrimination Act (1975) in the UK. Some artists confront issues that galvanised the change in law whilst others carved their own place in a complex and male dominated art world. From the radical movements of the 1960s and 70s, the politics of the 80s, the boom of lad culture in the 1990s to the current fourth wave of feminism, encouraged largely through and because of social media, all of the artists’ question equality and identity in very different ways. The exhibition presents a snapshot of the evolving conversations that continue to contribute to the mapping of a woman’s place in British society.  Body, femininity, sex, motherhood, economic and political status are explored through film, photography, sculpture, performance and painting.

Hayley Newman is awarded a DACS Art360 award for 2016/17

Hayley Newman, The Daily Hayley, Matt’s Gallery, 2001. Image courtesy of the artist

Hayley Newman has been selected by the DACS foundation to receive an Art360 award. The award offers support to develop and sustain the archives of 100 leading modern and contemporary British artists. The story of the project will be shared through the Art360 website and will include unique materials that are unearthed in the process such as selected documentation, drawings and images of their artworks as well as interviews and ephemera from the artists career.

Jennet Thomas, ‘Unspeakable Freedom > Tastes like Chicken’, Block 336, Brixton, 25 September – 21 October 2016

Jennet Thomas, Animal Condensed/Animal Expanded, Video still, 2016. Image courtesy of the artist

Jennet Thomas’ solo show at Block 336, ‘Unspeakable Freedom > Tastes like Chicken’, will feature the full scale installation of the epic  ‘Unspeakable Freedom Device’, originally commissioned by Grundy Gallery, (click to see the trailer here https://vimeo.com/122742554)  and also part one of a brand new video work, ‘Animal Condensed/Animal Expanded’. Themes include; The Live Authenticity Fetish,  A cargo cult for Margaret Thatcher, A pilgrimage and a broken Oracle, collapsing signs and imploding meanings, if you see something unusual report it…

Alison Turnbull, Art Seen Projects in Nicosia, Cyprus, 23 September – 4 November, 2016

Alison Turnbull, Eye Test, Acrylic, silverpoint and enamel on canvas, 2016. Image courtesy of the artist

Alison Turnbull has a solo exhibition at Art Seen Projects. Alison Turnbull transforms readymade information – plans, diagrams, blueprints, charts – into abstract paintings. The found source material is re-imagined and made vivid through colour and through the intensity of the worked picture surface. She is presently working on paintings that derive from a composite astronomical image created by data from the Hubble Space Telescope. Works on paper include editioned prints and an ongoing series of drawings – the Drawing Tables – made on stationery and printed papers of all kinds, displayed horizontally in long vitrines. She has also realised several major architectural commissions in London and elsewhere, using a wide range of materials.

 

Melanie Jackson, The Politics of Food: Markets and Movements, Delfina Foundation, September 7 – 11, 2016

Melanie Jackson, Beef, 2016. Image courtesy of the artist

Melanie Jackson and Esther Leslie have been commissioned by Delfina Foundation to devise a Performance Lecture Unreliable Matriarchs based on their collaborative writing for Delfina Foundation’s programme The Politics of Food: Markets and Movements which explores complex and urgent issues including agricultural labour and seasonal migration; developments in biotechnological food sciences; food sovereignty and heritage; and how food features in radical collective political movements as well as the increase of individual consumer choice and its impact on the wider global food economy. The lecture will be a meditation on bodies, milk, prescient geometries and furious abstractions.  They explore Milk’s ability to act as a spectrometer – an apparatus that can reveal to us the defining characteristics of an epoch.

Melanie Jackson, Back-to-front-space, Primary Nottingham, August 2016

Melanie Jackson, Gag, 2016. Image courtesy of the artist

Graham Fagen, A Drama in Time, Edinburgh Festival, 28 July – 28 August

Graham Fagen, Roselle, working drawing for A Drama in Time, 2016. Image courtesy of the artist

Graham Fagen’s new work for Edinburgh draws on histories that have shaped the city’s forms and ideas – and presents a narrative in neon illuminating a journey of a life, and questioning what lies beyond. From the shadows below the rail bridge – where New Street meets Calton Road – the steps of Jacob’s Ladder offer an ascent from earth to the after-life, or a steep shortcut from the ‘Old’ to the New Town. The ‘ladder’ leads up into the Enlightenment monuments of Burns and Calton Hill with panoramic views towards the sea, where in 1786 Robert Burns booked a passage on a ship called The Roselle from the port of Leith to Kingston and Savanah-La-Mar, Jamaica – intending to work as an overseer of slaves on a sugar plantation. Pioneering environmentalist and city planner Patrick Geddes (1854—1932) worked to improve the living conditions of the citizens of the Old Town. He aimed to achieve such improvement by bringing nature and humanity together, suggesting that ‘a city is more than a place in space, it is a drama in time’.

Graham Fagen, The Scottish Endarkment: Art and Unreason 1945 to the Present, Dovecot Studios, 13 May – 29 August 2016

Graham Fagen, Plans and Records, Silkscreen print, 2016. Image courtesy the artist

This thematic exhibition, curated by Bill Hare and Andrew Patrizio of The University of Edinburgh, in collaboration with Dovecot, provides a radically new and fascinating presentation of the shared concerns which have obsessed many of the most important Scottish artists since the end of World War Two. The Scottish Endarkenment explores a wide range of disturbing and provocative topics, from ever-escalating international conflict, social inequality and unrest, gender identity and sexual prejudice – all fired by the dialectical struggles within the Scottish psyche between good and evil, Self and the Other. All these subjects are imaginatively treated within a variety of different interpretations and mediums – from the out-and-out horrific to the darkly satirical. Included amongst the forty or so exhibits are works by major Scottish artists including David Shrigley, Joyce Cairns and Steven Campbell.

Graham Fagen, Radio Relay, Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast, 18 June – 13 August 2016

Graham Fagen, War/Garden (after Tubby), 2007. Image courtesy of the artist

Radio Relay will share the magic of radio with new audiences from Northern Ireland and beyond.  Graham Fagen and a team of contemporary artists, selected by Golden Thread Gallery, will explore these historic moments and their links to the development of radio. A nationwide arts and participatory programme featuring artists including Paddy Bloomer, Colm Clarke, Gareth Moore, Sara Morrison, Mhairi Sutherland and Philip Hession will teach you such skills as how to build your own lo-fi radio transmitter, connecting your “ghost voice” with voices from the past. Then, on an action-packed midsummer weekend connecting sites such as Grey Point Fort, Giant’s Ring and the Black Mountain, a flock of silver kites will recreate early experiments in radio antennae, while a swarm of battery operated radios will create an amazing artwork made of sound.

Roy Voss, Native, Durden and Ray, Los Angeles, California, 10 September – 25 October

Roy Voss, Move, Collage, 2016. Image courtesy of the artist

Roy Voss will participate in the group exhibition Native at Durden and Ray in Los Angeles, California. Voss will exhibit alongside Kio Griffith, David Leapman, Tom Dunn, Richard Kirwan and Mandy Ure.

Benedict Drew and Imogen Stidworthy, British Art Show 8, Norwich University of the Arts, 24 June – 4 September 2016

Imogen Stidworthy, film still, Solzhenitsyn’s bread, saved from his last meal on Soviet soil before being deported to the West, in 1974. Image courtesy Imogen Stidworthy

Benedict Drew and Imogen Stidworthy have been selected for the British Art Show 8, widely recognised as the most ambitious and influential exhibition of contemporary British art, with artists chosen for their significant contribution over the past five years. Imogen presents the installation A Crack in the Light, 2013, which was first shown as part of the Bergen Triennale 2013, while Benedict has created new work Sequencer, 2015 specifically for the exhibition. The work will now tour to Norwich, opening on 24th June 2016.

Alison Turnbull and Lindsay Seers, Seeing Round Corners, Turner Contemporary, Margate, 21 May – 25 September 2016

Alison Turnbull, Navigating Moby Dick, Pencil and ink on paper, 2012. Image courtesy the artist

Alison Turnbull and Lindsay Seers are both exhibiting works in Seeing Round Corners at Turner Contemporary in Margate. The exhibition explores how artists have responded to the phenomenon of the circle, the disc or the sphere. Seeing Round Corners showcases more than 50 works, presenting a variety of processes and media including painting, sculpture, film and photography, alongside design objects and historical artefacts.

Mike Nelson, Cloak, Nouveau Musée National de Monaco offsite project, 2 Avenue de Grande-Bretagne, Monaco, 4 July – 15 September 2016

Mike Nelson, To the West, the mines of lapis lazuli, (northwest Pakistan). Digital photography of a back-lit black and white transparency. 1995/2016, courtesy the artist.

The Nouveau Musée National de Monaco presents an offsite project by Mike Nelson – Cloak – a site-specific intervention in the UBS building located on avenue de Grande-Bretagne in Monaco. Mike Nelson is known for his immersive installations, which often play on socio-political preconceptions and subvert the viewer’s sense of place. Informed by fiction, his practice develops parallel realities where various determinants of life and everyday existence conflate to create new understandings and question existing perspectives. For NNMN’s project at the UBS Monaco building, which is currently closed for renovation, the artist has proposed to render all that is visible within the abandoned bank ultramarine blue. This project is curated by Suad Garayeva-Maleki and Cristiano Raimondi.

Mike Nelson, Imperfect geometry for a concrete quarry, Kalkbrottet, Limhamn, Malmo, Sweden

Mike Nelson, Imperfect geometry for a concrete quarry, installation view (in progress), Kalkbrottet, Limhamn, Malmö, Sweden. Courtesy of the artist.

In autumn 2012, Mike Nelson exhibited his installation 408 tons of imperfect geometry at Malmö Konsthall. The work consisted of cast concrete blocks placed on the floor in a geometric pattern. The blocks’ weight was calculated so that it – plus the visitors – could only just be supported by the exhibition hall’s floor. These same concrete blocks have been used to create a new work for Kalkbrottet (Limhamn limestone quarry, now a municipal nature reserve within the City of Malmö, Sweden).

Imperfect geometry for a concrete quarry consists of approximately 3,500 concrete blocks laid out in their strict repetitive geometric pattern. Here, Nelson allows the suggestive and enigmatic patterns of Oriental art to encounter and tie in with Western art’s rational minimalism. The work’s placement in Kalkbrottet adds yet another dimension through its location being the very source of one of the main constituents of concrete, that of limestone. The physical nature of the work seems strangely fitting to the site, reinforcing a sense of servitude that one might feel about its very making – something echoed in the site returning to nature after its creation through man’s industry.

Imogen Stidworthy, An Introduction to Bliss for Two Voices with Chorus (2014-2016), commissioned by Concreta magazine for their 6th online platform

Teaser for Concreta print edition no.6, Spring 2016, Imogen Stidworthy 2016.

An Introduction to Bliss for Two Voices with Chorus (2014 – 2016) is a binaural sound piece by Imogen Stidworthy, commissioned by Concreta magazine for their 6th edition online platform. The work can be found here: http://www.editorialconcreta.org/bliss/index-en.html

Fiona Crisp, Negative Capability, North East Contemporary Arts Network and This Is Tomorrow, online commission

Fiona Crisp, Boulby 2013, Film still, single-channel digital video. Image courtesy of the artist