London’s leading artist community opens its doors

This May London’s burgeoning art community will open its doors to the public, enabling art lovers to get so close you could smell the paint, and feel the wood shavings. The biannual Open Studio at Second Floor Studios & Arts (SFSA) gives Londoners the chance to meet the artists and watch them work in their private studios. The community of more than 160 professional arts and crafts practitioners will open their studios to the public; inviting visitors into their creative spaces to discuss view and even buy, their work. The Open Studio will be open to the public on Thursday 17th (5pm - 9pm), Saturday 19th and Sunday 20th (11am - 6pm) May

Helen Pynor and Ray Richardson

A stone’s throw from the Thames barrier, SFSA is an affordable studio provision and creative space championing the practice of art, crafts and design in London. It is an arts community in the truest sense. A multi-million pound development, once complete SFSA will provide 160,000sqft of affordable arts space, studios and facilities for more than 300 artists. The development currently houses more than 160 artists from the fields of painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, graphic and digital design, animation, illustration, fashion and jewellery design, mosaic, glass-making, cabinet-making and interactive sound installation.

L-R Veta Gorner, Paula Ortega and Le Guo

Throughout the Open Studio No Format, London’s newest art gallery located at SFSA, will host 'Never Promised Pound Land', an exhibition of works by Ray Richardson, Cathie Pilkinton and Mark Hampson.

The Thames Barrier Print Studios at SFSA, one of London's most spacious open access fine art printmaking studios, will be open with a series of print technique demonstrations throughout the weekend. The new CANTEEN terrace arts cafe will be open for teas, coffees, homemade foods and a summer BBQ. ☐

La Société De La Petite Voix - Endings

Local photography group 'La Société De La Petite Voix' are to host a Private View of their photography exhibition 'Endings' on 1st March from 6pm-9pm and it will be open to the public thereafter.

The event is free, there is refreshments and is being held at The BAR Gallery, Willesden Green Library Centre, The High Road, London NW10 2SF. It features work by photographers Alessandro and Franciane Gaioto, David Carter, Ewa Lachowicz, Holly Jeffrey, Siegfried Bonhomme, Thais Schardong, Tully Chaudry and Yarek Baranik.

La Société De La Petite Voix meaning the society of little voices. The eclectic mix of work reflects the diversity of the ethnic backgrounds of photographers who make up the group, their nationalities being Brazilian, Polish, Anglo- Irish, Indian, French and English. The group formed more than a year ago as a collective out of a mutual desire to exhibit their work, provide affordable art to help fund future studies.

Photographer Holly Jeffrey of the group said:

"For each exhibition we choose a theme to base our work on - in this case 'Endings'. Those who have been to see our previous exhibitions always comment on how differently we interpret the theme. I think that's one of the strengths of being a collective, as people get to see a such wide range of work in one exhibition."

More information on the exhibition, the photographers and examples of the work can be viewed at www.lapetitevoix.org.uk.

Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool, Richard Mosse and Simon Norfolk

Open Eye Gallery
Liverpool

Auschwitz: Staircase in a prison block. From For Most Of It I Have No Words: Genocide Landscape Memory © Simon Norfolk, 1998Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool, is delighted to announce the UK premier of Richard Mosse’s Infra, alongside a seminal project by photographer Simon Norfolk, from 30 March to 10 June 2012. The gallery launches a new Wall Work commission by artist Emily Speed on the same date.

Main exhibition, Infra, is a striking new body of work by photographer Richard Mosse made in the Democratic Republic of Congo. This is Mosse’s first solo exhibition in the UK.

Mosse documents the landscape of an emerging conflict using a discontinued military surveillance technology - an infrared colour film called Kodak Aerochrome. Originally developed for camouflage detection, this aerial reconnaissance film registers infrared light, which is invisible to the human eye, in vivid hues of lavender, crimson and hot pink.

On his journeys in eastern Congo, Mosse photographed rebel groups constantly switching allegiances, fighting nomadically in a jungle war-zone plagued by ambushes, massacres and systematic sexual violence.

Like the novelist Joseph Conrad a century before him, Mosse attempts to depict a disorientating humanitarian disaster, too opaque for traditional methods of representation.

Running alongside this main exhibition is archive exhibition For Most Of It I Have No Words by Simon Norfolk. Originally completed in 1998, and exhibited at Open Eye the following year, this project marked a turning point in Norfolk’s practice.

The series investigates what Norfolk regards as genocidal events of the twentieth century, reflecting on the act of forgetting as physical reminders of the atrocities disappear from the landscape and away from our consciousness.

It begins in Rwanda (1994) where partially clad skeletons remain in the churches and schools where massacres have taken place.

General Février (Infra series), 2010 © Richard Mosse. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, NYMoving back through time, Norfolk draws a thread through a series of historical events: Cambodia’s Year Zero in 1975; extermination camps in Auschwitz; mass graves that resulted from man-made famine in the Ukraine; and the fields of Anatolia where Armenians were marched to their deaths in 1915.

The series concludes in Namibia where the sands of the Omaheke Desert have erased the final traces of the Herero people, killed under German colonial rule in 1904.

Open Eye curator, Karen Newman, says: “Mosse and Nolfolk’s exhibitions reject conventional formats of photo documentary and photojournalism, highlighting the reliance of memory on visual evidence, and questioning photography’s ability to represent indescribable conflict.”

The exterior wall of the gallery is the site for the second in a series of Wall Works - a new commission by Liverpool-based artist Emily Speed titled Nothing is Finished, Nothing is Perfect, Nothings Lasts.

Speed makes sculptural works that explore the temporary and transient nature of things. Through reference to architecture and the body, she investigates buildings as physical shelters and as containers for memory, bound with the history of their occupiers.

The installation at Open Eye takes the folded shape of the gallery’s façade as a starting point and adds a layer to it, transforming the appearance of the wall into a giant, creased piece of paper.

Karen Newman, curator, continues: “Although Speed is using different materials to those employed by Mosse and Norfolk, what links these artists is an investigation of what lies beneath the surface.”

Open Eye Gallery is one of the UK’s leading photography galleries and the only venue of its kind in the North West. In November 2011 the gallery relocated to a brand new purpose-built space on the Liverpool Waterfront, at the heart of the city’s new cultural quarter.

Open Eye Gallery
19 Mann Island, Liverpool Waterfront, Liverpool L3 1BP
www.openeye.org.uk