Transition Gallery

See the pictures behind Transition Gallery's shows www.transitiongallery.co.uk

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SPEEDWAY

7 April – 13 May 2017

Preview and Garageland Launch Thursday 6 April – 6-9pm

Ghost Cinema: Saturday 13 May

Gallery open Friday – Sunday 12-6pm

Closed Easter weekend 14-16 April

Regent Studios was designed for the Greater London Council in 1965 by Yorke, Rosenberg & Mardell to meet the needs of small-scale light industries in the East End. By the 1990s British manufacturing was on its uppers and the concrete framed block had become a desolate high rise. But fortunes change rapidly in the city and this well-considered building has in recent years carved out a contemporary place for itself as a creative hub occupied by architects, artists and designers.

But pre 1965 there is a hidden story of place. The plot where Regent Studios now stands, was post-war waste ground, the terraced houses that once occupied it bombed, flattened and slum-cleared. This unloved negative space was, however, in the eyes of the local youths, ripe with possibilities and here in the triangle formed by Andrews Road, Sheep Lane and Ada Street a track was stamped out, bikes were stripped down and cycle speedway began. In its heyday this make-do-and-mend track attracted audiences of up to several hundred to see local team the Warwick Lions compete in the East London Cycle Speedway League.

Inspired by this psychogeographic poetry of place, Transition Gallery, a Regent Studio resident since 2006, has commissioned a group of artists to make contemporary responses, to long forgotten histories. Speedway the resulting exhibition is a circulatory meshing of a sense of community, historical layering, philosophical ruminations on time, archaeology, leisure and present day artistic ingenuity.

Luci Eyers’ animation relates to a neighbouring building with a history as varied as Regent Studios: Firmback Works, which is currently a car pound, but was earlier a Magdalen Home - a British Penitent Female Refuge aiming to ‘restore guilty females to the paths of virtue’. In 1875 it became an Industrial School for Girls. A report from 1896 explains ‘that although situated in a crowded neighbourhood it was exceptionally well off for light and air…The playground was ample and well fitted with swings.’ Eyers’ visually pared down animation is of a girl swinging, her simplicity quite different to Fragonard’s famously frilly The Swing. Political positions have become more polarized again and Eyers hopes to reflect this by evoking ‘different moods in the to-ing and fro-ing: one open and dynamic; and the other retreating and withdrawn.’

Filmmaker Andrew Kotting, in an ironic response, re-vists his film Klipperty Klopp, made 33 years ago, of a artist repeatedly and energetically running around a field in Gloucestershire pretending to be a horse. He describes the work as a ‘post-punk piece of pagan happening – part Benny Hill part Joseph Beuys’. In the re-make Kotting’s protagonist this time is a woman moving very slowly within the landscape. Married up shot for shot with the original super 8 footage, Kotting changing the ‘he’ to ‘she’ likes to see the work as an artefact dug up and represented in the gallery space.

James Roseveare is excavating the topography of the area around the gallery. The resulting minerals and debris will be reconfigured into three concrete sculptural forms. Stella for Foreign Bodies plays with scale, form and materials and aims to merge everyday and complex meaning whilst evoking thoughts on physical terrain, memorials, excavation and artefacts. As the artist explains ‘the work encourages the viewer to reflect upon the quandary between things times-gone and things times-now’

Alongside the physical works, writer in residence Helena Haimes will be writing about the ideas around the show. Her text Must we make our own fun? influenced by speedway's ad-hocness, will look at the nature of contemporary leisure in a rapidly changing city, and will be published in a new issue of Garageland magazine which will accompany and extend the themes of the exhibition.

The Speedway Sunday talks with local historians and the Speedway artists will take place every week throughout the exhibition and will be free to attend. The exhibition ends on Saturday 13 May with Ghost Cinema, a day of screenings, talks and performances by artists and academics, inspired by a long-gone neighbourhood cinema in Hackney.

Supported by Arts Council England

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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…

(image by John Banting)

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The Dark Wood at Transition Gallery, London

Amelia Barratt / Sara Berman / Laura Davis / Johnny Höglund / Dean Melbourne

Curated by Henry Hussey

14 January – 4 February 2017

Preview: Friday 13 January, 6-9pm

Gallery open Friday & Saturday 12-6pm

'Midway upon the journey of our life,' writes Dante, 'I found myself within a forest dark, for the straight forward pathway had been lost.' In this group show curator Henry Hussey draws on the sense of exile, trepidation and loss in the first Canto of the Inferno, using the idea of the dark wood to bring together a group of artists who have each inhabited such a place in their practice.

Confronting anxieties and fears, both creative and personal, works in this show disrupt, contort and conceal. Layers suffocate and protect, weigh down, yet make free. Once the straightforward pathway has been lost, possibilities are endless. Johnny Höglund's restricted and constrained human forms, informed by a period of illness, seem to offer no way in; faceless blank figures, removed from nature, offer the viewer as many potential routes as the dark wood. Laura Davis, using textures over bound forms, lends a tangible weight to our insecurities; the visible process of containment, and a straining tension, hinting at what lies beneath.

Whilst the dark wood is fraught with danger, it is also free from convention and constraint. Sara Berman has talked about her transition from designer to fine artist, and how a lack of boundaries and fear of failure can lead to creative paralysis. Depicting the body in a domestic setting, faces again obscured, her work creates a sense of unease. Nothing, even nature - planted in pots and unable to put down roots - is quite permanent. The familiar is rendered as confounding and revealing as the dark wood itself.

Questioning the ordinary leads Amelia Barratt to explore everyday preoccupations in forensic detail. Voicing concerns to alleviate their hold, spaces are transformed as she attempts to navigate her existence with instinctive, raw sketches and projections of inner turmoil.

The fairytale dark forests of Dean Melbourne's imagination, too, are a site of struggle and confrontation, of risk, and a place to explore fears and desires. On fear of the white canvas, he extolls beginning quickly, and not thinking; setting off on a path, any path perhaps, through the dark wood, where imagination can flourish in the shadows and, like Dante at the end of the Inferno, with perseverance we can find a way to 'rebehold the stars'.

image by Johnny Höglund

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Aisha Christison / Grant Foster / Kate Groobey / Alex Gibbs / Jonathan Lux / Jessie Makinson / Eleanor Moreton / Freya Douglas-Morris / Leon Pozniakow

11 November – 20 November 2016

Preview: Thursday 10 November 2016 6-9pm

Gallery open Thursday - Sunday 12-6pm

A group exhibition examining contemporary painting and its relationship with art history

I just left the hotel amnesia…

The artists involved in The Classical represent a snapshot of contemporary painting that neither adheres to nor rejects ideals of classical balance, harmony, order and symmetry. Rather, it absorbs them as part of a wider lexicon of resources to be drawn from. We live in an image-saturated culture, the art of the past mixes seamlessly with art of the present. The canon of art history can, today, be flicked through on any mobile device, assimilated, stripped for parts, reconfigured. It is neither something to be bound by nor reacted against. Sometimes we see direct quotation in the work of these artists, more often we find allusion, a fleeting reference in paint like a wink of an eye to the clued-in viewer. This is a quieter shift towards integrity over fashion, an investigation of timelessness in painting over the fleeting sparkle of marketing.

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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.

Samantha Donnelly explores the fluidity of representations, specifically the shifting relationships between the physical object and the photographic subject. Recent exhibitions include Factually Real Illusions, Chelsea College of Art, London, 2016; Semi Gloss, Semi Permeable, The Albus, Glasgow International, 2016; Rubbernecker, Ceri Hand Gallery, London, 2014; Tip of the Iceberg, Contemporary Art Society, London, 2013; A Private Affair, Harris Museum, Preston, 2012; Contour States, Cornerhouse, Manchester, 2012; The Shape We're In, 176 / Zabludowicz Collection, London, 2011 and Compendium, Vitrine Gallery, London, 2010.She has been awarded an ACME Firestation Live/Work Residency in London from 2015-2020.

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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

WHAM is a forceful collision of works on paper that resound with pop aesthetic. Incorporating comic images, everyday themes and advertisements, the WHAM prints, drawings and paintings sizzle with emotional subject matter that is often undercut by detached technique. Whether parody or social commentary, the resulting combination of flippant and sincere provocation strikes a powerful impact.

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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’.

Further examination into this pertinent topic will be provided with a series of talks and film screenings, which will take place at intervals throughout the duration of the exhibition and a special issue of art fanzine Arty, guest edited by Sarah Cleaver. Films showing include Repulsion (1965), Paris, Texas (1984), Morvern Callar (2002) and In The Realms of the Unreal (2004). Speakers include film researcher Mary Wild, author and travel writer Anna Stothard, and the School of Life’s Sarah Stein Lubrano.

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Francesca Blomfield / Jennifer Campbell / Grant Foster

8 - 30 July 2016

Preview – Thursday 7 July 6-9pm

Gallery Open: Friday & Saturday 12-6pm

The cocaine boom and Miami riots of the 1980s provided the violent backdrop to the television series Miami Vice. The show broke new ground by drawing upon New Wave culture and music and cynically implying that the tally of dead criminals that each episode ended with would immediately be replenished. This violence and cynicism were juxtaposed by Miami’s pretty pastel coloured Art-deco architecture.

The exhibition, Miami Vice, beckons a new pop-culture revolution of pretty pictures and decadence. Shades of pink, blue, green, peach, fuchsia and an abundance of pastel colours could easily reflect the beachfront hotels of South Beach and in this Art-deco revival, no earth tones are allowed.

Thanks to the legacy of Miami Vice, the 1980s conjure images of pastel suits, no socks, rolled up sleeves, Ray-Ban sunglasses and the last days of technological innocence. What survives isn’t necessarily what was important at the time. Like paintings, pop-culture revolutions are unplanned. Ardent followers and painters don’t know what they were waiting for until it appears and both have a hard time articulating the reasons for their devotion.

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Image by Tisna Westerhof

Transition Gallery ShopSpace

17 - 25 June 2016 Gallery open: 17, 18, 19, 24 & 25 June, 12-6pm Preview Tuesday 14 June 6-9pm

Europa features a plethora of European themed works by a diverse group of artists. The exhibit looks at what Europe means to the artists involved in the weeks before and after the EU Referendum.  

Europa is an idea originated by Luci Eyers whose Tranzine updating the myth of Europa will be launched at the opening of the exhibition. The exhibition is staged in Transition’s ShopSpace and features paintings, sculptures, collages, pottery, badges, stickers, postcards, drawings, games, zines and pamphlets, all with a European theme. Participating artists come from the UK and all corners of Europe, including many non-British citizens now living in the UK. Each contributes a very personal look at the European idea whether political, allegorical, idealistic, practical or cynical.

The work on show (and for sale) ranges from Kirsty Harris’ in/out balloons and Henrietta Armstrong’s pottery vessel inspired by the Neolithic Beaker folk to Paul Jex’s erased polling card, Bridgette Ashton’s View Master reel of stereoscopic photographs of handmade gingerbread depicting famous landmarks of Europe, Amy Pennington’s The Biased Wheel Of Staying In The EUgame and Olha Pryymak’s paintings inspired by social media coverage of the conflict in Ukraine. Also on show are Susie Hamilton’s painted classic European fiction book covers, Jenny Campbell’s deconstructed Europa sculpture and numerous paintings, postcards and zines examining subjects such as booze cruises, twin towns, European film, a Rubens painting dedicated to European peace and archetypal European symbols.

The participating artists are: Karen Apps, Henrietta Armstrong, Bridgette Ashton, Tom Banks, Madison Beach, Siobhan Belingy, Jenny Campbell, Violet Frances Cato, Annabel Dover, Luci Eyers, Carlo Formisano, Patrick Galway, Felix Gannon, Thomas Goddard, Susie Hamilton, Kirsty Harris, Stephen Harwood, Anoushka Havinden, Georgia Hayes, Ivaylo Hristov, Antonia Jackson, Paul Jex, Paul Johnson, Laura Keeble, Elizabeth Kwant, Delaine Le Bas, Alastair Levy, Em Lockren, Cathy Lomax, Evariste Maiga, Mia Maric, Alex Michon, Christina Mitrentse, Kate Murdoch, J A Nicholls, Suzanne O’Haire, Tony O’Keefe, Lucienne O’Mara, Jane Oldfield, Ross Patrick aka ASL, Alex Pearl, Amy Pennington, Olha Pryymak, Leah Rainey, Adele Reed, Matt Rowe, Anne Ryan, Alli Sharma, Alison South, Corinna Spencer, Charlotte Squire, Helen Stratford and Lawrence Bradby, Mimei Thompson, Patricia Thornton, Katherine Tulloh and Tim Barnes, Tisna Westerhof

During Europa the exhibition Adaptation will be running in the main Transition Gallery space.

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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.

Matthew Richardson shows versions of J.G. Ballard’s Concrete Islandand Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. In an attempt to construct and survive in these fictional landscapes, Matthew has found and used flotsam and jetsam and tools and technologies from both the physical world and the internet. Images of otherwise mundane objects - a tyre, some potatoes, a cigarette lighter and a few sticks of wood - slowly render the landscape of ‘the Island’ in both Ballard’s twentieth century and Defoe’s eighteenth century novels. Matthew places the viewer, as main protagonist in a new Balladian landscape, that of Google Street View, while Defoe’s story is seen through fragmented images, in what appear to be the few surviving magic lantern slides of a once complete story.

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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.

Niamh White is an independent curator based in London. She is co founder of Hospital Rooms, which commissions contemporary art for mental health hospitals, curator of the Dentons Art Prize, and curator of The Pierrot Project.

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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.

Behind the everyday ‘going to see a show’ which all artists do, these two painters have found a conceptual impetus for using this ‘going’ as the spur on for back-in-the-studio image-making

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Home Time

Alex Michon / Kate Murdoch / Alex Pearl  / Corinna Spencer

organised by Corinna Spencer

20 February – 12 March 2016

Private View: Friday 19 February 6-9pm

Gallery Open: Fri-Sat 12-6pm

In this era of generation rent, political inertia in affordable house building has caused a psychological shift in the home is where the heart is ideal. A troubling sense of unease now resides behind closed doors. Reflecting on this disorientating dislocation, by picking over treasured knick-knacks, considering family histories, looking forwards at sci-fi solutions or clinging to the wreckage of lost utopias, Home Time asks its artists to make responses to the objects which they surround themselves with.

Alex Michon uses broken glass as a metaphor for impermanence, unease and the domestic chaos caused by using her flat as both home and studio. Utilising, furniture, text and discarded dresses she proposes an elegy for the ever-declining belief in and provision of sustainable social housing.

Kate Murdoch is an artist whose work reflects a fascination with the passage of time, the permanence of objects and the fragility of existence. It is human nature to surround ourselves with objects; they provide us with a sense of self and reveal our connections to the wider world. Often loaded with meaning, objects reflect both our internal emotional world and the external image we present to others. From the mundane to the meaningful, they are steeped in social and political history and part of our identity.

Alex Pearl makes mini epic films, video installations, games, photographs, objects, blogs and books with his work nodding toward the structures and images of science fiction and the idea of the artist as evil-genius or crackpot-scientist. For Home Time he looks at the futurist visions of Tex Avery and Le Corbusier. Pearl is currently studying for a PhD that looks at a New Materialist take on mechanical breakdown and anthropomorphism.

Corinna Spencer’s work centres on obsessive love, death and mourning, explored through intimate portraits. For Home Time Spencer looks back at her own family, who are currently scattered over two countries, and in particular her mother. This dispersed family has led to a sense of impermanence and searching for home which feeds Spencer’s compulsion to look backwards to a deceptively simple past.

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The Names

16 January - 6 February 2016 gallery open Friday & Saturday 12-6pm

The Names is an exhibition created for Sluice that takes the artist’s signature as its theme. From Duchamp’s subversive R.Mutt to Josh Smith’s shameless painted autographs, artists have cavorted with the significance of the signature. As a rule, in the early 20th century, the signature was a vital addition to the front of an artwork, embedding the artist’s identity into the work with showy authentication. In contemporary art, however, the signature is generally discretely placed on the back of an artwork and a prominent signature has become the signifier of very bad, amateur taste.

Denying the name on the front of the work is an art world game. The value of an artwork depends upon its maker – so excluding the name means only those in the know, know for sure the veracity of the work.

In contemporary culture ‘bad taste’ can quite legitimately be resurrected and become a sign of the most adventurous tastemakers. Thus, there are now artists who knowingly embrace the potential of the signature by signing their work prominently and defiantly on the front.

The Names first appeared at Sluice Art Fair in October 2015. It will be reimagined at Transition Gallery in January 2016 with 18 additional artists.

Michael Ajerman / Phil Allen / Sarah Baker / Mike Bartlett / Sara Berman / Kirsty Buchanan / Andrew Bracey / Jenny Campbell / Brian Cheeswright / Paul Cole / Sarah Cleaver / Annabel Dover / Gordon Dalton / Sarah Doyle / Luci Eyers / Grant Foster / Archie Franks / Susie Hamilton / Russell Herron / Ed Hill / Paul Housley / Henry Hussey / Marie Jacotey / Jasper Joffe / Tash Kahn / Adam Kelly / Matthew Krishanu / Paul Kindersley / Delaine Le Bas / Damian Le Bas / Cathy Lomax / Enzo Marra / Chloe Manasseh / Alex Michon / Alex Pearl / Vera Portatadino / Michael Pybus / Harry Pye / Dallas Seitz / Alli Sharma / Corinna Spencer / Emma Talbot / Mimei Thompson / Joel Tomlin / Gavin Toye / Katherine Tulloh / Isaac Willis / Rose Wylie

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A Second Self

Moea Creugnet and Maureen Monod

Until 20 December 2015 Fridays & Saturdays 12-6pm & some special Sunday openings - see below

A Second Self is an experimental, collaborative film project by Moea Creugnet and Maureen Monod, who were brought together through a shared interest in the notion of duality. Creugnet and Monod examine the double not only as a theme, but also as a process, resulting in an extensive investigation of issues of authorship and individuality. The direction of such a creative process has led the two to reinvent themselves as a duo; at times taking on the role of sisters, at others that of a couple.

By embracing each other's vision of duality, they become both subject and object, challenging the dichotomy between fiction and reality. The film takes the form of a scenic essay where the narrative and the visual output are both deeply intertwined, following the example of the French New Wave and Beckett's absurd theatre. The lines between the authentic and the performed, between the genuine and the performed are blurred, as a third person, a third entity arises – MOMAU– a transfiguration of each character into two lookalikes, yet still similar.

Sunday 20 December 2015 Launch of Garageland 19: Self Screening of Opening Night (Cassavetes, 1977) from 2pm and Garageland editor Cathy Lomax in conversation with Alex Michon at 4.30pm. There will be a free copy of the magazine for the first 15 visitors to the event.

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Transition Gallery

Greetings From Earth

Michael O’Mahony / Katherine Tulloh / Jospeh Whitmure

12 September – 11 October 2015

Preview - Friday 11 September 6-9pm

Opening hours: Fridays and Sundays 12–6pm Sundays by appointment Late opening: Time Out First Thursday 1 October 6–9pm Extra opening hours: Art Licks Weekend Friday 2–Sunday 4 October 12–6pm

Three very different artists share a compulsion towards narrative. While involved in exploring their medium in a very material way — its formal properties and physical nature, capabilities and surfaces — the impulse to construct a fiction is given free rein, characters are conjured forth and stories are told.

Michael O’Mahony creates characters to explore his interest in people such as cult members, conspiracy theorists and UFO abductees. He uses these characters to create absurd narratives which explore some of the beliefs and deceptions of these groups. These stories are sometimes accompanied by imagery in the form of PowerPoint presentations. The images are largely pulled from the internet, relating to the narrative sometimes in a literal manner and others by a process of free association. Like a false memory or delirium, a fictional parallel world overlays and modulates the real world.

Katherine Tulloh shows part of a series of A4 oil paintings on paper. Corralling images — soldiers, lovers, nests, thickets, ghosts, owls, seas, statues — from many sources, she creates a personal, visionary mythology — faceted fragments of worn-out stories and half-remembered dreams. The painted surface is interrupted to create damaged scenes that are often distorted and obscured by arbitrary marks and stains. Taking cues from John Deakin’s street photography and Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations she offers a similar sense of layered time and contiguous existences — memories penetrate the present and eras dissolve into each other.

Jospeh Whitmure’s films are intense collisions of abstract marks and high-impact sound. Witch B1 also incorporates apparent documentary footage of a seance or black magic ritual into an immersive experience — a trip into another world, like taking a ride in Death’s car in Jean Cocteaus’s Orpheus. Graphic gestures are vibrantly animated, swarming and pulsing, and the flickering manifestation of a witch within the swirl of marks generates a claustrophobic air of fear and enchantment. Paul Klee’s idea of taking a line for a walk is pursued in extremis — taking it to a rave to be shaken and torn apart. Disorientated by sound and vision, the flashes of occult practices within the film impart a visceral sense of being spellbound.

The exhibition has been selected as part of The Art Licks Weekend, a festival that showcases the work of pioneering young artists, curators, galleries and project spaces in London. artlicks.com

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Grounded

Jennifer Campbell & Chloë Manasseh

25 July – 16 August 2015

Preview - Friday 24 July 6-9pm

Gallery Open: Friday - Saturday, 12-6pm and Sunday by appointment

Grounded: Both feet planted. Grounded: Locality. Grounded: the relationship of the viewers physical presence in the space to the work. Grounded: A teenager gets a temporary set of boundaries. Grounded: An unexpected reflection of the self- imposed limitations of the painter in the studio.

Grounded is an exhibition of new works by Chloë Manasseh and Jennifer Campbell that brings together their common concerns for travel and transformation within landscape. Traversing the boundaries of the painted image, the works sit in a restless space between the pictorial and the physical, with high regard for the manual application of paint.

Campbell’s practice acknowledges gravity as a symbol of physical presence, with the materiality of her paintings presenting a futile attempt for the image to become real. Each work embodies a temporary identity, with paint lending a flashy surface to the everyday material that she paints on.

Manasseh often omits the horizon completely, leaving the work in a vertiginous state. The upshot serves to destabilize the viewer, implying sensations of being overwhelmed and off balance.

Both artists view physical spectatorship as an activation point for their work. Manasseh plays with the ever-changing relationship between spectator and maker, resulting in a shifting connection between ideas of home, displacement, space and location, whilst Campbell’s work sits restless and eager for the gaze of the audience. Both painters temporarily embody a state of identity within their perceived landscapes, deconstructing, reducing and transforming what they visually perceive on a daily basis.