Slump City at Space Media... June 6th – June 26th 2009 http://www.spacestudios.org.uk/blogcategory/Forthcoming_Exhibitions/
As the consequences of the global recession begin to take effect, the regeneration of East London, the traditional home of London’s large artist community, has slowed and the promised Olympic legacy looks in doubt. It is within this context that SPACE presents Slump City an exhibition presenting the work of 3 exciting emerging artists whose visionary and haunting work combines gothic fantasy, poetic social realism and psycho- geography to imagine the urban periphery. Laura Oldfield Ford, winner of the VABT award, a recent graduate of RCA whose first show was at Marlborough Fine Art last Autumn, currently has a solo show at Hales Gallery and is about to show at Arnolfini in Bristol. For Slump City Oldfield- Ford is making a new piece, a large wall of A2 drawings which feed from her ongoing subjective exploration and psycho-geographic mapping of the neglected backwaters of East London. These relay a broken narrative centered on an East London that is being cleared and sanitised for the 2012 Olympic games. Karen Russo is known internationally for her video, drawing and sculpture and the strange and disturbing source materials which she uses to transform the everyday in to contemporary surreal and gothic imagery that explores romantic notions of the sublime. For Slump City Russo presents a filmed excursion inside an urban sewage pipe system. Viewed through a small robot camera, used to locate blockages, an ever-expanding system of sewer pipes is revealed, mapping the ‘belly’ under our city. Tessa Farmer's recent practice has been inspired by her 2007 residency at London’s Natural History Museum, playing on a strong undercurrent of horror and abjection that has always existed as a counter-narrative to the Victorian tradition of naturalism to which Tessa Farmer's work offers a redress. For Slump City she will be presenting her stuffed and reawakened ‘road kill’ arranged into fantasy scenarios where insect fairy tormentors seek revenge for all their brethren once smothered in killing jars and pinned in display case trophies. Tessa Farmer’s work was included in the 2004 edition of the 'Bloomberg New Contemporaries', where her installation 'Swarm' was spotted by Charles Saatchi and purchased for his collection. To compliment the context and content of Slump City SPACE will be conducting a tour of the artist enclave Hackney WIck, combining studio visits and tours of artist run space as part of CREATE 09- the annual arts festival hosted by the five host boroughs of the 2012 Olympic games and Hackney Wicked the artists run festival. _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list NetBehaviour@netbehaviour.org http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
