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Ears For The Eyes

Alli Sharma / Clare Price / Jonny Briggs / EJ Major / Kevin Okafor /

Kate Lyddon / Cathy Lomax / Adam Dix / Emma Cousin / John Banting

10 February – 4 March 2017

Arty launch & evening opening: Friday 24 Feb 6-9pm

Transition Gallery, London

We think naturally of sound when considering the ear, so there's a certain wilful perversity in making it the subject of a show of paintings, drawings and photographs with no sound directly featured. It does mean, though, that the walls have ears. And it provides an opportunity for different perspectives, looking at the ear as a design, signifier, analogy or symbol, and always with the sense that there is something beyond what we see.

There’s also writing for and on the ear: the accompanying issue of ARTY magazine will feature auricular contributions from such leading poets as Claire Crowther, Julian Stannard and Tamar Yoseloff, together with artists’ writings, and curator Paul Carey-Kent’s survey of the ear in art, from Bosch to Baldesarri via Vermeer, van Gogh and plenty of less obvious choices.

We hear it will be good…

Lexigram

Samantha Donnelly

15 October – 5 November 2016

Preview Friday 14 October

Gallery open Fridays & Saturdays 12-6pm

The photogram is traditionally an experimental darkroom process where household objects are arranged on photosensitised paper and exposed to light. Lexigram is an exhibition composed of a series of over 40 ‘digital photograms’. Rather than being exposed by light, they use technology - digital cameras, scanners, photocopiers and printers - to ‘expose’ already flat representations and ‘develop’ the results within the confines of a frame. This creates a concrete trace of a performed moment, or sequence of moments, which coalesce, or jar, in the layers of each image. Often these suggest a quotation, appropriation or repetition of part of a previous image, which build together to form a visual dictionary of possible structures, one though which is limited in its scope.

The source footage, which forms the basis of the work as a whole, includes the re-staging of editorial magazine photoshoots and conventions of product photography. These are then layered through documentation, re-documentation, scanning and photocopying with images of liquids, evaporation and dilution. The work as a whole consists of a wrapping up of substances, forms, materials and conventions; and an unwrapping of packaging, surfaces and cosmetic textures.

Thus, the resulting arrangement comprises a series of symbols that stand in for language; a set of repeated, edited motifs representing substances that appear to be displayed for consumption, but also bring into focus the apparatus of production.

WHAM

Prints and works on paper

Louisa Chambers / Grant Foster / Georgia Hayes / Paul Housley / Marie Jacotey / Cathy Lomax / Ryan Mosley / Alli Sharma / Rose Wylie                     

22 - 25 September 2016

Transition at The Manchester Contemporary 

Private View (by invitation) - Thursday 22 September 2016 16.30 - 17.30 Opening Night - Thursday 22 September 2016 17.30 - 21.00 Public Days , Friday 23 September 2016, 11.00 - 18.00 Saturday 24 September 2016, 10.00 - 18.00 Sunday 25 September 2016, 10.00 - 17.00

Isolation Chamber Vacation

Kirsty Buchanan / Juno Calypso / Hannah Ford / Nicola Frimpong / Katerina Jebb

Curated by Sarah Cleaver

2 September – 1 October 2016

Gallery Open: Friday - Sunday, 12-6pm

Preview: Thursday 1 September 6-9pm

With its horror-filled connotations of madness and perversity on the one hand, and its elevated status as a tool for creative genius on the other, the concept of solitude has long fascinated society in general and the creative community in particular. ‘One can never be alone enough to write,’ noted Susan Sontag (paraphrasing Kafka) in her diary. Great minds from French artist and dedicated diarist Eugène Delacroix and scientist and philosopher Blaise Pascal to Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky have extolled the benefits of learning to enjoy your own company. In 1929 Virginia Woolf argued for the necessity of both a literal and figural space for women writers within a literary tradition dominated by men. Contrastingly, the fear of isolation and ‘ending up alone’, played on in films from The Shining (1980)to Bridget Jones’ Diary (2001), contributes to a growing movement of monophobia resulting in a need for constant connectivity. The School of Life now teaches a course on How to be Alone, exploring both the anxiety surrounding and rewards resulting from a more solitary life.

Isolation Chamber Vacation is an exhibition of artist’s responses to the subject of ‘aloneness’ and exploration of cultural representations of solitude. The work of five artists; Juno Calypso, Hannah Ford, Kirsty Buchanan, Nicola Frimpong and Katerina Jebb, will be shown alongside contexualising objects and ephemera from curator Sarah’s research into the theme. These objects include artists’ books, as well as letters, back-issues of magazines and a library of ‘recommended reading’.

Adaptation

at Transition Gallery, London

Gerbrand Burger  / Jackie Chettur  / Matthew Richardson

3 – 25 June 2016

Preview: Thursday 2 June 6-9pm

Gallery Open: Friday & Saturday, 12-6pm

For Adaptation Gerbrand Burger, Jackie Chettur, and Matthew Richardson explore the indeterminate time, place and space of literary fiction and how it is adapted. The artists make use of the gaps that are inherent in how and why a story is read, imagined and made visible. The narratives distilled in this exhibition are re-formed by deliberate acts of selection, deletion and creation.

Gerbrand Burger presents a series of drawings of book covers. He says ‘For me literature has been the first encounter with art, and I consider reading to be the most profound experience of imagination. The act of drawing books means spending time with them in a different way from reading them, more contemplative.’ The work in this show begins with a drawing of an old Dutch translation of The notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke. In this book Rilke lets the protagonist reflect on a little green book he has owned since childhood, and how its appearance reveals something about what’s inside. The drawing of this book echoes Rilke’s thoughts about how we experience reading, and about the importance of the materiality of the book and where it is read.

Jackie Chettur creates a terrain for Tess to wander through in Thomas Hardy's nineteenth century novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles. By applying a set of rules across the entire novel, only Tess’s forward movement through the landscape of the novel remains, together with tiny glimpses into the ongoing drama as other characters join her along the way. The artist’s scheme is illustrated by a series of extracted texts and photo etchings. Chettur has drawn on her own relationship to place, by re-visiting corresponding sites in England and Wales to find an equivalent to the movement and landscape of the novel. Tess’s journeys, through tracks, crooked lanes, roads, paths, ascents and descents now seem connected as one long and exhausting journey and this seeking out of an imagined but potentially real landscape has taken on a life of it’s own.

Aviary

an exhibition of artworks of birds.

Franki Austin / Sutapa Biswas / Adam Bottomley / Frances Cowdry / Annabel Dover / Nathan Eastwood / Jennifer Hooper / Matthew Krishanu / Mehrdad Rashidi / Alli Sharma / Alice Sielle / Susan Sluglett / Chiz Turnross / Rita White / Aubrey Williams / Rose Wylie

23 April – 21 May 2016 Preview – Friday 22 April 6-9pm Gallery Open: Fri-Sat 12-6pm

Aviary is an exhibition of paintings, sculptures and drawings of birds that together form an Aviary of artworks of birds that feel ‘alive’ (without necessarily being realistic looking). In a way the birds function as self-portraits (or familiars) for the artists: they are cultural signifiers as well as stand-ins for memories and emotional states.

The works come from a wide range of artists – canonical and outsider, contemporary and historical, and a broad sweep of nationalities and ages. Three of the artists in Aviary (Sutapa Biswas, Aubrey Williams and Rose Wylie) have works in the Tate collection.

Aubrey Williams’ Tick Bird belongs to a wider series of paintings of tropical birds – documenting the birds of Guyana (where Williams was born), the Caribbean and South America. Rose Wylie’s large drawing Acorn & Jay incorporates text, collage and paint to create a playful narrative of two halves.

Other works include Sutapa Biswas’s watercolour birds, Franki Austin’s glass work, paintings from Frances Cowdry, Nathan Eastwood, Jennifer Hooper, Matthew Krishanu, Alli Sharma and Chiz Turnross, porcelain bird sculptures by Annabel Dover, drawings and printing from Adam Bottomley, Mehrdad Rashidi, Alice Sielle and Rita White, and large scale drawing ‘scrolls’ by Susan Sluglett.

Aviary is co-curated by Matthew Krishanu and Niamh White

Matthew Krishanu is a painter based in London. He recently co-curated The London Painting Survey (2015), and has curated collaborative exhibitions for English Heritage, Iniva and RIBA.

30/30

Mike Bartlett and Enzo Marra

19 March – 16 April 2016 gallery closed 25 & 26 March

Preview: Friday 18 March 6-9pm Gallery Open: Friday & Saturday, 12-6pm

‘A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know.’  Diane Arbus.

Mike Bartlett and Enzo Marra both make paintings of galleries, paintings of people, paintings of shows and inevitably paintings of paintings.

This doubling interaction between observer, viewer and viewed becomes an ambiguous statement on the nature of the public act of looking at pictures and the private one of making them.

For 30/30 both Bartlett and Marra have travelled around London attending exhibitions and recording their observations each with their own distinctive painting styles. Marra paints in a tonal reflective manner, applying paint with textural approximations, to bring the pigment as well as the subject matter to life. Bartlett paints in a more loosely expressive style with richly coloured layers and a flatter surface.