A few shows for the weekend, with some private views and openings going on tonight
Life | East Gallery
Raising awareness and funds for world wide HIV and AIDS charity (RED) Life is the debut UK exhibition curated by Heaps Good. This is a showcase of 19 of Australia’s leading emerging and established artists.
The group of artists, including Jeremyville, We Buy Your Kids, Janathan Zwanda and more are diverse and cover a wide range of Australian visual creativity and even brings in some old faces of uniquely important aesthetics from Australia. These diverse artists have been drawn together, and the works congregate around the itself sprawling and wide ranging theme: ‘Life’. Each artist has created a red-and-other-colour screen printed poster on the theme and Print Club London are facilitating the production of artworks and co-curating the show.
Until Wednesday 6 July
Matthew Stone | Union Gallery
Artist and shaman Matthew Stone presents his second solo show at Union Gallery. The gallery hail him as photographer, sculptor, performer, curator, writer, musician, Optimist, and cultural provocateur.
The Sunday Times recently placed him at number one in the arts section of their “Power players under 30” list. He has exhibited at Tate Britain, The Baltic, The ICA & The Royal Academy. Stone’s personal philosophy of ‘Optimism as Cultural Rebellion”, is defined by Union Gallery “as an intellectual antidote to a “post-modern” nihilistic paralysis.”
For this second exhibition Rules Forever (Part II), Stone will continue honoring Plato and will present a much larger sculptural element comprising four oak structures, but instead of a large photographic nude, cut into hundreds of wooden squares that passes through the structure, as in the show before, the artist has decided to cluster the structure with photographic collages, printed directly onto birch plywood. These digitally collaged configurations of torso and limb, show bodies intertwined and connected. Unmistakable as Stone’s work, the gestures and classical poses of his languorous figures are intersected by areas of new colour, cut, if only to reconnect, along unnatural, directional and geometric bias.
Worth checking out.
Until 30th July
Union Gallery
The Cream Guillotine A Picture Show | Gordon Dawson | Five Years Gallery
The Cream Guillotine A Picture Show, an exhibition of work by Gordon Dawson opens at Five Years Gallery tonight and I for one am intrigued…
Their website offers an excerpt from a poem… mysterious, and for that reason, worth a look (if only to satisfy my curiousity!). Private view tonight from 6
Ghosts whisper on jewelled necks
frozen love entities and supervictims
slide through ferociously ornate shadows
clown surgery hysterics echo
the odour of perfumed quicklime pervades
in the palace of swords reversed
Until 17th July
http://www.fiveyears.org.uk
Frame Dragger | Space in Between
Space In Between opens with an exhibition of new work by Xavier Poultney at Lo&Behold London tonight.
For this solo exhibition, his first in London, Poultney presents a collection of ‘artifacts’ that sit awkwardly between the realms of religious relic and technological gismo: An adapted bowling ball, diagrammatic of a pulsar with a swirling nebulous surface. A mundane paperweight laser-etched with a representation of galactic core, depicting the orbits of multiple suns tracking round a black hole. A metallic sphere suspended over a parabolic mirror creating a kinetic science-fiction mecanoid/executive toy. A triptych of etched brass plaques, engraved with dots and dashes that depict unearthly events.
Poultney’s work deals with the percolation of ideas through culture and particularly those routed in scientific thinking. History, he argues, presents us with a string of shifting and developing paradigms of how we view the universe and our position in it; from Mayan sun worship to modern physics, these different explanations for reality become the way a civilisation defines itself.
FRAME-DRAGGER is an off-site exhibition by Xavier Poultney presented by Space In Between at Lo & Behold -a temporary event space on the corner of Redchurch Street and Swanfield Street, E2 7DS.
Until 10th July
http://www.spaceinbetween.co.uk/
