Into the Fold 18 April - 17 May 2008 Rose Eken, Simon Haddock & Stuart Chubb, Daisy Richardson
Standpoint Gallery is delighted to present the second in a series of exhibitions inviting artists to make new sculptural and site-specific work for Standpoint in 2008
Into the Fold deals with transitions between two and three dimensions. Working in the spirit of transformation and emergence, these artists approach material as a direct tool of thinking. To cut, stick, fold, scratch or draw upon, these impulses are inherent in the beauty of paper, and in all �worlds� we can turn from surface (illusional) to form (corporeal) and back again using a combination of magic, mechanics and masking tape.
Describing their activity as enacting �the spirit of a train crash impacting into a white cube�, Simon Haddock & Stuart Chubb collaborate under the name of We�re In Construction! to make Daedalus, a labyrinth of visual desire created from the inverted leftovers of a fictional gallery refit. Both artists have earned their living by constructing the sets for blockbuster shows in major galleries. Comparing the directed narrative experience of the paying public with the visual surprise and chaos of behind the scenes, Haddock & Chubb question the relative artistic value of the two - �and behind? There is a myriad of unexpectedness. Pyres of piled detritus, polythene lakes, the mapping of inadvertent marks and arrangements. The eye roams in a search for meaning, trying to condense a pictorial logic that purposefully evades completion.�
Using plasterboard as a three-dimensional collage material, their origami environments teeter on the brink of intelligibility, enlivened by scratchings, drawings and rubbings. Alternately playful and desperate, these marks act as testament to the relentless creative urges humans are subject to under duress - the ubiquitous incarceration of employment - as well as the potential to transform and redeem the banal.
In Rose Eken�s sculptures, installations and animations, the passion and paraphernalia of the pop fanzine erupts into three dimensions, sound and motion. Her reconstructions of classic pop videos (eg Kim�s Caf� 2007, based on the seminal Aha video for Take on Me, which was, in 1985, the most expensive pop video ever made) use crudely constructed model sets made of cardboard and masking tape, which are animated using her drawings and paintings, with a combination of moving camera work and stop frame animation.
Rose embraces fan culture - the engine of the pop world - where idealism and ridiculousness is tinged with the beautiful tragedy of unrequited love. Failure is inherent in her performances, and brings poignancy to these spaces that the viewer inhabits with her, in reverie, and because these are �public memories�. In becoming her hero/ines through drawing projects, performances, and her 4 man band (all members being herself), Eken - in all her nerdiness - remains the epitome of cool.
Daisy Richardson rose quickly to prominence through her cut paper animation �Sublime Climes� which won the Jerwood Drawing Student Prize in 2007. Elegant and resonant, it uses collaged imagery from books, newspapers and magazines that rise up and organise themselves into three dimensions to create a beautiful visual narrative; referencing evolution, the self-destructive short sight of humanity, and the resilience of the planet. Richardson is making a new animation for this exhibition, which will again use a combination of found imagery and stop-frame animation.
Another new piece, Time Saved 2007-8, deals with notions of duration, speed and slowness, both in art and in life. Starting with an intricate but immediate �blind� abstract drawing, Richardson then painstakingly cuts out all the white space to leave the pencil line. The resultant fine mesh or lacework is a remarkably lovely sculptural object that asserts both extremes of its production - the marks were obviously made quickly and retain the resulting freshness, but we are only too aware that the cut process must have taken months of obsessive and painstaking labour. She intends also to remind us of �the way in which the most flippant of actions can have long lasting effects�. You have been warned!
