SITESHOW @ Little Venice is the fourth art event supported by Strideline Ltd.

For one weekend only residential properties - undergoing redevelopment - become ‘frozen’ allowing visitors to experience the meeting of two creative processes, the making of a home and the making of an art exhibition. In providing this freeze frame weekend experience SITESHOW @ Little Venice continues to challenge and question the nature of gallery exhibitions.

SITESHOW @ Little Venice is @ 9 Blomfield Road and is curated by Jung Eun Yoo, Sanja Sakic and John O’Hora.

Friday 12^th June 6:30 – 9:30

Saturday 13^th June 12:00 - 19:00

Nearest Underground: Warwick Avenue

www.siteshow.co.uk

www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=87679993251

William Bock

William Bock is a London based visual artist and theatre designer. His practice combines

painting and drawing with collaborative projects as part of the theatre collective StrangeWorks. 

William is working on documenting the myriad of stories within his own family history, through 

portraiture and the written word.  Currently his work is a reaction to these personal documents, 

attempting to find a language to express his place within the family tree.

http://thelastbock.blogspot.com

Toby Southall

Toby was born in Camden, London in 1986.  He currently lives and works in London and graduated from Central St. Martins College of Art and Design with a BA in Fine Art in 2008.  He also studied abroad at the Pratt Institute, New York in 2007.

The Code War series represent a response to the growing knife culture, gang crime and teenage casualties, which plague London streets at present.

Sanja Sakic

Sanja was born in Mostar.
That is where I have finished and
Sanja was given the Student of a Generation Award from the Gabrile Jurkic Art School in 1999.

In 2005 Sanja graduated the Art Academy SB.

Sanja moved to London in 2005 where continued her practice.

Her first solo SITESHOW exhibition was in Belgravia, London in Dec 2006.

2007:
April: Curator and Exhibitor, SITESHOW, Hammersmith
May: Solo Exhibition St James’s, Mayfair
June: Group Exhibition, I-2-U.org Gallery, Notting Hill
July: Notting Hill Visual Art Festival
Aug: Art Colony Ravno, Croatia
Nov: The Window Gallery, Charing Cross Road
Nov: Finewel Gallery, Notting Hill

2008:
Curator and Exhibitor SITESHOW, Pimlico

Sally O’Dowd - Black Gaffa Tape Experiment

A performance for the navigator, the Black Gaffa Tape Experiment is an investigation into ownership and marked territories. In a period of economic collapse and the insurgence of potential futures this performance intervention examines questions of choice and givens. Through audience participation, the viewer is encouraged to examine their position within the course-plotting of the future.

Within her practice Sally uses her body to investigate her position in the constructed human environment. Her social upbringing in rural Ireland in the 1980’s is the structural fabric from which she has developed a simple lyricism of ownership. She is interested in personal and collective histories and the navigation and ownership of place and space exploring these issues in paint, process based print and performance.  

Sally O’Dowd is an Irish-born visual artist and performer. In 2007 she received recognition as a young emerging artist from Cavan local council, Ireland and has since gone on to exhibit across Ireland and the UK. She currently lives and works in London.

Photography is just one of the means explored in Diego Lombardi's wide freedom of expression. Through his unique eye, fascinated by surrounding reality in continuous movement, originates evocative work able to capture the spectator into a game of colours and emotions that his productions inspire.
Spontaneity, the most immediate characteristic of his ability to see reality from original viewpoints, derives from his desire to express himself and to conceive photography: none of his art has been shaped by academia, everything springs and lives in the most absolute naturalism, point of force by which it's easy to be seduced.
From his most intense shots one has the impression to look through a small opening on a different world, a reality forged over such strong sensations that it would be impossible to capture in any other way.
Lombardi’s works are developed on materials - such as Plexiglas or aluminium - carefully selected by the artist, and are integral part of the large critic and public success recently obtained in his last Roman expositions at the Chiostro del Bramante: Urban Normality and Codice 02.

Ruth Harrison

Ruth Harrison is a time-traveller who plays with history, memory, sexuality and gender. In the Victorian era, she is a lady flower painter with modern ideas and a secret life. Her 19th Century botanical illustrations reveal themselves, on closer inspection, as something quite different. Ruth’s practice encompasses drawing, collage, photography, found objects and the artist herself. She lives mainly in 21st Century London.

www.ruthharrison.co.uk

Robin Gardiner - EXCHANGE & PRESENCE

In this performance piece I create a series of alternative “portraits” of people who will visit the building during SITESHOW3. I give a foot massage to an individual and in return they let me take and  display  a cast of their feet after the massage. 

 

I use cling-film and sellotape to make the cast,  the idea of binding and wrapping a body to preserve or recreate the essence or portrait of the person goes back to Egyptian art and the mummification process.  The fact that the final “work” has touched the person, possibly has their DNA on it, is important.

 

As I create the casts I suspend them from the ceiling and gradually a series of foot portraits is built up in the space. The suspended casts are so light that the air in the space and the presence of passers-by can cause them to move. It also creates a dance between the subject of the exchange  and the visitors. Each responds to the presence of the other.

 

There is also sound piece connected to this work called “Thank You” which layers the voices of those who have previously taken part in “Presence” and my voice to create a rhythmic and dynamic sound- world based on the phrase  “Thank You”.  I also propose to record my subjects saying thank you during SITESHOW3 so that this work will continue to evolve.

 

The visitors can choose to listen to  “Thank You” at the same time as viewing the massage process and the foot casts.

Rania Bellou

AUDIO_VISUAL INSTALLATION 

DIMENSIONS 50CM X 65 CM

7 MIN DURATION

2008

WOODEN FRAME, BACK PROJECTION ON DOUBLE SIDED MIRROR AND SPOT LIGHTS

The constructed room is for me a space with distances and directions involved, and as long as my body as a viewer and creator threads run out towards it, since there would be no space if I had no body. To live a space could be an action of placing yourself for a moment in an imaginary situation, to find satisfaction in changing one’s “setting”. But it’s really difficult to enter into a fictitious situation without converting it into a real one. Controlled by these ideas, I am trying to create a space which encloses -and does not encircles- spectators in the showroom, it makes them feel that they are merging into their senses, in an experiment of interaction between them and the artwork, between reality and illusion, between real and fictitious. 

Mary Hadhad

‘Making Do With Symmetry’ is the third bulletin from a series of four by Mary Hadhad.

Four being a cultural choice of our ancestors to express certain geometric truths. 

Four square as in a cube. Four seasons as in the year. Our ancestors used to say; the four corners of the earth!

Yet ‘Making do with Symmetry’ suggests that in making do we still desire something more. 

While in making do, in putting up with and settling for what we have, we remain in ready to consider the new. Aren’t we humans something special?

As with Mary Hadhad’s two previous pieces ‘Making do with Symmetry’ also provides us with a bulletin, this one being ‘All that you know has escaped from your body’

Mary Hadhad’s sperm angles may have wings but they are of the earth. We should remember that this is a man defined earth expressed through words that escaped from man’s body. Generations and centuries of stories. It makes you wonder – doesn’t it? 

In ‘Making do with Symmetry’ everything has been named through language. 

Everything that man knows has come from man. Has escaped from his body.

Mary Hadhad’s sperm angle tells us that it is man that created God. 

It was man who created the word. The word that described the world and God with it!

The first bulletin read ‘I’ll Always Be True’.

The second: ‘None of them were lying….. They were just believing what they were told’.

The fourth is on its way. 

Enjoy.

Marianna Pulford & Rugina Mukid

Marianna Pulford and Rugina Mukid graduated from Central Saint Martins in 2008 where they formed the collaborative duo ‘(Un)tied’. 

“The nature of collaboration is central to our practice, where performing a spontaneous movement depends on trust, negotiation, and intuition. This continuous collaboration seeks to question and challenge the limitations of what constitutes a drawing, painting, or sculpture in the realm of performative art, but does not seek to refine the blurred boundaries between each medium.”      

                         

Live performance

Marianna’s and Rugina’s recent performance involve brightly coloured thread sewn between parts of their bodies, which, through our movement, transforms into infinite shapes and abstractions.  Dressed in black, the artists imitate the mundane architectural features that there woolen sculptures utilised, acting as blank canvases to the thread. Each performance is led by intuition, as movements do not follow a set of rules; instead each artist converses sometimes in unison, sometimes in canon. 

Both artists are concerned with the idea of art outside the gallery context, and feel that the building site is an interesting place as it is now in the middle of a process, where it is no longer a conventionally inhabited space and not yet a ‘complete’ building for permanent use. 

Margaret Duston -Ordinary Things I-III and Untitled Cabinet

These pieces came about through research exploring 19^th Century Palaeontology and methods of presentation at the Natural History Museum in London.

Ordinary Things are a series of three large-scale studies of chicken wishbones.  I was interested in how the microscopic examination of something so small and insignificant elevates the status of the object.  

They are presented as something of great importance like major palaeontology specimens, mimicking 19^th century watercolour illustrations and rubberstamped by as if by a museum archivist, generating an aura of institutional approval.

Untitled Cabinet is a wooden index card cabinet, like those in the Earth Sciences Library at the Natural History Museum.  The drawers have been pared down to bone-like forms, which begin to resemble the subject matter once stored within – a kind of morphing of object with memory.

Maaike Anne Stevens

As a starting point for my work I use eternal, omni-present forms, that make up most of the building material on this planet: simple, flat, rectangular cells. The work resides in the theory of fractal geometry, which is grounded in self-similar forms multiplied ad infinitum. It intends to step back from the human viewpoint to a more universal approach to matters.

From this base I’d like to bring attention to the fact that many people have lost the ability to separate their observation from their preconception. I try to alter daily perspectives in such a way that the expectation of what you see is (literally) broken into pieces. 

My work blurs the edges between the depicted scene and the world in which the artwork is being displayed. Placing all these layers in the same level, drawing one world into the other, the intention is to make reality look a bit more fictional and the depicted slightly more real.

www.maaikestevens.net

info@maaikestevens.net

Kathy Taylor - Tease

Traditional ‘English’ afternoon tea has historically been associated with particular forms of, so-called, proper  behaviour rituals.  Is using a teabag in a silver teapot acceptable?  Rituals and customs may point to our class origins but these are as slippery as a teabag suspended just out of reach of a gasping teapot.

Katharine Fry - All The King’s Men

All The King’s Men is a solo performance using routine and ritual to explore ideas of perfection and control in relationships.

 

It takes as a starting point the classic physics example of entropy, of no-one ever having seen a broken teacup jump from the floor and reassemble itself whole on a table, and combines it with the human spirit of perseverance in the face of adversity, of banging your head against a brick wall. 

 

A durational piece following a marked set of rules, All The King’s Men is the latest in a series of works exploring tea, its accoutrements and associated ceremonies.

All The King’s Men Rules of Engagement

 

1.       Prepare the tea and load the tray

2.       When load becomes too hard to bear offer up the tray to the nearest wall 

3.       Regain composure and prepare to re-assemble

4.       Three tries for a fit before the piece must be glued and the next one sought

5.       Prepare the tea and load the tray

Katharine Fry’s main concerns are those of identity, history and time. Of British descent but born and raised in Belgium, Katharine found her concept of Englishness to be based on a longing and nostalgia for a time that never was.

 

In her search to find her place in time and to place herself in history, she discovers another Katharine Fry, one who lived two hundred years ago. She finds her book, full of her words, but nothing about her, so she imagines her life, her thoughts, her dreams.

 

The words embedded in the damask canvases are the product of these imaginings. They offer fragments of a narrative, details of an imagined life. A constant play between the roles of narrator, character and subject, the canvases are imbued with the quality of a relic, a diary once etched in walls.

Joanna Steele

I am concerned with elevating the everyday object; highlighting the potential for the ordinary to echo the epic. My work makes no claim to be transitory, but instead focuses on the importance of memory and imagination.

The frame is vital to imagining the otherworldly landscape, but the work never negates the poverty of the material. Whether the grid of a map, the borders of a photograph or the location of instillation; my interpretation of the environment works within these constrains.

I rethink urban sprawl, both in its original purpose and material properties. Together they create the possibility to imagine, not only when faced with the art object, but also the way we see the world when we leave the exhibition. By the suggestion of accidental pleasure, within a new structured environment, I create a distorted utopia that lends itself to failure as well as aspiration.

Harriet Poole - (in)visible exchange: One-to-one performative event and installation

Bored of the static flat photograph, I play with the participatory intimacy and true magic of the process and act of photography. I create events that share stories as a dual narrative with subverting the conventional processes of high and low tech lens and time based media practice. I combine the temporal nature of performance with the temporal nature of photography, excavating the whole process of making a performance or happening alongside the process of image making. I explore persona, presence and narrative through intimate encounters, especially responding to site in playing with the everyday social rituals and non-verbal modes of communication in pausing on a moment. I may create with participants photograms of the contents of their pocket or projections of the world outside, grabbing the developing image out of the tray or snatch the image off the wall to misbehave physically performatively into a moment sharing the small print, formalities or eccentricities in life.

I can often be found hatching bonkers projects in ways of sharing secrets generally hanging around in staged darkrooms I create inside such places as offices, closets, sheds, dens, bathrooms, living rooms, in galleries, clubs, derelict warehouses, foyers, basements, parked cars.

Recent work includes the following: (in)visible exchange, EEC 2008 at QMUL, The Darkroom, Duckie at Royal Vauxhall Tavern, (in)visible exchange, Approaches to What? at The Nunnery, shed, at Wimbledon College of Art MA show, (in)visible exchange, Kiss Me Miss at Rag Factory, den Not a F******* Art Show, Trinity Buoy Wharf.

(in)visible exchange will also be part of SPRINT festival at Camden People’s Theatre, June 2009.

http://www.harrietpoole.com/
www.harrietpoole.blogspot.com

Emma Woollrad

Emma Woollard was born and lives in London.
She has exhibited extensively in the UK and Greece.
Emma predominately works with oil on canvas and is currently exploring other media.
Her Speciality in portraiture.
Until now Emma has been working by commission for private clients.

Carol Mancke

After more than twenty years in architectural practice, Carol Mancke started her collaborative art and architecture practice, Machina Loci, in 2004. She has degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of California and recently completed a BA in Fine Art at Central St Martins College of Art and Design. She is a Senior Lecturer in Architecture and Urban Design at Kingston University.

Carol’s recent intervention, Palimpsest Public House at the Barbican, was featured in Open House London 2008. In 2006, she was commissioned to design Shedding House in collaboration with a group of artists from Nihon University. This work featured in the Echigo Tsumari Art Triennial in Japan in 2006.

Other exhibitions:
Echigo Tsumari Art Triennial, Niigata Japan 2009
A Cup of Tea Solves Everything, London. 2009
Alternative Narratives, London, 2007
Stocktaking, artist curated event, London, 2006
Vision 05: Art by Architects, London, 2005
Inspired By Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2004Urban Tea, installation and event, Yokohama Japan, 2003

Anna Maria Kardos

My practice is manifested in site-specific interventions at places operated by institutions. Aimed at localities we collectively inhabit, my work negotiates and reveals, activates and re-stimulates awareness for our immediate surroundings. Both, having lived in a very regulated societal system and worked in highly corporate environment makes me particularly aware and responsive to such context.

My work reflects on mechanisms of power that underlie the institutionalised everyday – authority, discipline and hierarchies that are embedded throughout. By subtle altering ambient factors such as floors or walls I heighten perception for how institutional environments impact our behaviour and routines. Likewise altered or animated interior such as chairs and tables reflect on the individual and the interpersonal, on seriality and the need to conform. Even though my work is concerned with significant collective issues, it calls on a playful-humorous tone. It encourages to improvise within what surrounds us institutionally every day.

Every work asks for a new composite of skills, materials and self-imposed rules. Whether extending and twisting a building’s own language or by letting interior resemble human qualities – each time it results in a one-off response. Some interventions reside as photographs. Some need the encounter in situ to connect to another layer: the viewer’s experience.

Oliver Hymans

Oliver Hymans is a theatre artist, performer and a teacher.

He was awarded a First Class Honours Degree in Geography from the University of Nottingham in 2005, and a Masters degree in Scenography from Central Saint Martins in 2006.

Oliver is interested in the spaces in which performance happen, and is committed to exploring work in unusual or non-theatre spaces. He is the co-founder and artistic director of animate:SPACE, dedicated to infusing life in the forgotten spaces of the city. With the company, Oliver was recently commissioned by the Barbican, in collaboration with their blockbuster show ‘Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity until Now’, to create a new performance (‘Draw Me Baby’) in the unique space of The Window Gallery, in Central London.

Past projects include: video design on ‘The Cows Come Home’ by Zeb Fontaine (Udder Belly @ Brighton Fringe Festival 2008); production assistant on ‘The Other is You’(Brighton, Berlin, Groningen; 2007) with internationally renowned performance company Station House Opera; scenographer for ‘Palm Grove Tales’ (Kerala, India 2006); designer and director for animate:SPACE:  ‘Draw Me Baby’ (Barbican / The Window Gallery London 2007), ‘Spillage’ (Act Art 5 2006); solo performance works: ‘To Moscow’ (Camden People’s Theatre Festival of Contemporary Theatre and Nolia’s Gallery 2005/06); ‘Papa PoCo’ (Lotos Collective @ The Window Gallery, London 2006); director for ‘The Shoe Story’ (Sweet Venue @ Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2005), ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ (Lakeside Arts Centre Nottingham 2004), ‘The Side Show’ (New Theatre Nottingham 2003). 

Oliver is committed to inspiring young people to be passionate about theatre and has led several education projects with students across London. A recent project involved children from inner city London designing and installing a new public art work, commissioned by British Land, which was displayed in Euston, Central London during the summer of 2007.

 

He is currently working as a teacher in Elephant and Castle, London.