exhibition

On The Surface

Artists Jacqueline Ashmore, Tania Bandeira Duarte, Alex Dewert, Alan Franklin, Frances Greenough, Estelle Holland, Patrick Jeffs, Philip Lee, Lis Mann, Cally Trench, Imogen Welch

13.Dec.08 - 18.Dec.08
Fri-Sun 12 - 5.30

Curators Cally Trench

Parlour Project Space Gallery
181/185 Queens Crescent
London NW5 4DS
020 7284 3215
space@mapalim.com
http://parlourprojectspace.blogspot.com
Kentish town, Chalk Farm, Hampstead / Camden

Eleven artists explore surfaces and our human habit of making marks on them

(closed Christmas weekend)

Artists: Jacqueline Ashmore, Tânia Bandeira Duarte, Alex Dewart, Alan Franklin, Frances Anne Greenough, Estelle Holland, Patrick Jeffs, Philip Lee, Lis Mann, Cally Trench, and Imogen Welch Curator: Cally Trench

We human beings find it hard to leave surfaces alone. Over the centuries, we have painted, stitched, incised, etched, built, shaved and carved marks onto every kind of surface: textiles and building materials, manufactured objects, the earth itself, and our own skin. T his exhibition of work by eleven contemporary artists explores the covering, uncovering and discovering of marks on surfaces.

For more details about the exhibition and the artists, see www.callytrench.co.uk/surface.html

Philip Lee will perform Stable V – a live body action - during the opening event of On The Surface at The Parlour on Friday 12th December (6-9pm). He will use clay and pigments on his body to mark paper and other media; the remnants of the performance and prints become part of an installation.

Estelle Holland’s films explore the voyeuristic gaze through the making of marks on skin. For On The Surface, she takes elements of the body and uses them as canvas, subjecting them to automatic drawing.

Cally Trench observes the marks found on the surface of the earth: paths, road markings, graves, boundary fences, flower beds – and maps them on to paper or canvas. In On the Surface, she is showing a life-size, segmented Grave.

Frances Anne Greenough starts from the marks and lines on Ordnance Survey maps, and from geological and botanical information about an area, to create landscape paintings that balance between fact and fiction.

Lis Mann works with multilayered surfaces and manufactured materials; in In the Year 2424, the materials are woven to represent the garden of the future in a world where natural materials have disappeared.

Tânia Bandeira Duarte creates drawings and installations which exist between real space and illusion, questioning how we think and perceive the world. For this exhibition, she explores surface as a medium for abstraction and representation, leading the viewer to experience different levels of perception.

Imogen Welch covers objects with everyday materials. In Data Protection, an office workstation is patch-worked with the patterned paper that lines the inside of envelopes.

Alex Dewart’s paintings explore our need for order in the juxtaposition of the regular patterns of origami paper set against motifs from classic English suburbia.

Patrick Jeffs uses a high degree of contrasts and a complex variety of graphic marks to create coloured surfaces which evoke a mysterious inner world of imagined forms.

In Jacqueline Ashmore’s small monochrome paintings of everyday surfaces, the familiar becomes both solid and unstable.

Alan Franklin writes: My work arises out of a simple curiosity for the world. For me making art is just another way of exploring the ideas and complexities of the human condition. No doubt in my youth I left my initials carved on a tree or scratched on a desk. By now the wound to the tree will have healed over and the desk is perhaps buried ash in a field. It is hard to believe that any of our marks will be more enduring and yet collectively we have the power to change the entire surface of the planet.

Dates: ON THE SURFACE will be open from 12 noon to 5.30pm on the following Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays in December 2008 and January 2009: 13th and 14th December; 19th, 20th and 21st December; 2nd, 3rd and 4th January; 9th, 10th and 11th January; 16th, 17th and 18th January.