16/7/2007
Multiple Discipline
Union, London
A group show in which gallery artists present new and existing work. The exhibition is based on formal selection criteria, showing artists working in the fields of photography, sculpture, video, painting, performance, and drawing. Works by: Rut Blees Luxemburg, Rory Macbeth, Damon Packard, Derek Root, Matthew Stone, Rose Wylie.
Rut Blees Luxemburg, Rory Macbeth, Damon Packard, Derek Root, Matthew Stone, Rose Wylie
Union is pleased to present Multiple Discipline, a group show in which gallery artists present new and existing work. The exhibition is based on formal selection criteria, showing artists working in the fields of photography, sculpture, video, painting, performance, and drawing.
Rut Blees Luxemburg presents photographs from her latest series Piccadilly’s Peccadilloes, commissioned by Platform for Art. These new works extend Blees Luxemburg’s interest in the ambitions and elaborations of the modern project in Britain, seeking moments where palimpsest layers of history are revealed in architectural form. Her work was recently shown in The View from Here: Acquisitions Since 2000, Tate Modern, London and Les Peintres De La Vie Moderne Photographique, Pompidou Centre, Paris. Blees Luxemburg is born in Germany, 1967. She lives and works in London.
Rory Macbeth’s practice probes the gap between ideals or utopias and their realisation, between what is presented to us and what we actually get. In one of his recent sculptures, a marble and jesmonite arm emerges from the wall and points into the gallery space recalling Michelangelos fresco, more recently appropriated as a Nokia logo, only without the second outstretched arm to meet at the fingertip. Is the viewer being asked to respond and complete the circuit of communication, to fill the absence suggested by the work? Recent Group exhibitions include East International, Norwich and Ego-mania, Galleria Civica de Modena, Italy. Macbeth is born in Scotland, 1965. He lives and works in London.
Damon Packard will show his new film Space Disco One, in which he portrays a late seventies utopia of rollerblades and glittering spaceships that gives way to an bleak Orwellian future where pop culture and dietary habits are in terminal decline. He has been described as a “director-star-prankster”. By mercilessly reworking existing footage into his own unsettling and darkly comic vision, Packard jolts the viewer into a state of edgy engagement with his wilfully subversive worldview.
Recent screenings include Romantic Detachment, PS1, New York and The Thinking, Sketch Gallery, London. Packard was born in Ohio, 1967. He lives and works in Los Angeles.
Derek Root’s small canvases oscillate between abstract painting, portraiture and landscape. His work draws from seemingly disparate photographs taken from the media, using images that are selected not by content or meaning but by their abstract qualities. In his own words the artist is “exploring formal possibilities in an effort to trigger an unexpected pictorial suggestion and open meaning”. Detached from their literal content and emptied of a concrete narrative, the images are elusive and awaken the potency of the viewer’s perception.
Recent solo exhibitions include Union Projects, London and Hymns, Scrims and Accompaniments, Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver. Root lives and works in Vancouver, where he was born in 1960.
In a two-part performance titled Future Re-enactment for the Unwittingly Involved Matthew Stone presents a collaborative performance, inviting participants to join a ritualistic channelling of "freewheeling creative energies and infinite potentialities" of this metafiction. Along with an as yet secret performance at an undisclosed location, the work will be culminated on Wed 18th July at Union Teesdale Street, 94 Teesdale Street, London E2 6PU, 6-9pm. Stone’s approach is typically multi-faceted, performances will be documented and shown as part of the main Union show, in this way sustaining the life span of the work and altering the form of its presentation.
His first solo exhibition FutureHindsight took place at Union in 2007. Recent group exhibitions include Dazed & Confused v Andy Warhol, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art. He lives and works in London, where he was born in 1983.
Rose Wylie’s deceptively simple and dryly witty work draws on a profuse range of references, from ancient Egypt to popular icons, the Bluewater shopping centre, and Thierry Henri’s legs. Her drawings can be described as repeated, fragmentary narratives that are posited and then apparently discarded as new surface layers are added leaving her characters isolated, flattened and stripped of context. In Wylie’s own words she describes her work as being “free from imposed drawing conventions, known solutions and from an accepted artistic look.” Upon closer inspection the depth of imagery with its different styles and textures makes the experience increasingly complex both materially and stylistically. Recently Wylie’s work was selected for inclusion in East International 2007, Norwich and Jerwood Drawing Prize 2003, London. She lives and works in Kent, where she was born in 1934.
Private view 17/07/07 6-9pm
Union
57 Ewer Street - London