Text: Unstable Monuments 2016

Matthew Benington has been developing dialogue with the artists as a means to explore his ideas about the Monument. His Hide series consists of a bespoke architectural structure that can be both an intimate gallery space and a studio. In this manifestation Hide will be a monument to displaced people and their photographs. This is a response to a perceived lack of public monuments dedicated to remembering people who have suffered the hardship of diaspora and the loss of their home. The Hide will be lined with 25 square meters of steel etching plates. In 2013 he made studio visits to Cologne, Wuppertal, and Berlin in order to see the studios of the exhibiting German artists who had all grown up in the Ruhr, surrounded by monuments of former industry.

A ceramic mask made by Andreas Gloel brings to mind the Imperialist consumption of African art by the West, as he incorporates the presentation of the works in bolts through the ears of the design itself. Familiar objects become uncanny, when the artist employs hand-stitched shoe-making processes to create a perfectly un-wearable, circular leather object.  

The stitch is a vital tool for Leon Matis Robin Monies’ Comfort series. Made out of sewn-together props, insignia and symbolic objects, the series utilises the language of different hierarchy-based societies. These garments originally earned by labour to define rank and status.  In this new paradigm, communities and social institutions are completely mixed up, pointing to a society where an individual creates their own rules, status and value systems.

Kathryn Ferguson embraces the legacy of the Riot Grrrl movement – and its influence on modern activist groups like Pussy Riot – with a film that explores punk’s connection with protest. ‘Rear Guard’ challenges the over-sexualisation of young women in music videos. ‘Máthair’, Irish for Mother, is an exploration of the religious and cultural rituals experienced firsthand by the filmmaker. This film, prompted by and realised through a holy pilgrimage with her mother, recognises and celebrates the need to revisit the rituals of the artist’s past. ‘Máthair’ presents a hyperreal vision of Ireland conveyed through patterns of thought, memory and behaviour that map the artist’s own construction of her homeland.

Jesse Leroy Smith’s large scale triptych paintings collage cultural heroes with family ‘members’ and intimately known land with once visited or never seen places. Inviting close friends to render the under-painting that frequently re-surfaces and his children to better describe creatures or animalistic performers. The ensuing images jar and meld into what needs to be a beguiling translation of the ancestry and identity of the maker/s. 

Film-maker Roger Thorp has collaborated with Smith in film animations ‘Bardo’ and  ‘Blood to dust’ where ‘culturally over-loaded’ heads emerge and disintegrate in the painting process on copper. Thorp’s artistic practice often reflects on film scripts he has written, in this instance a road movie based on a Jean Renoir quote “the landscape that parades before us shapes us as much as our genes”. Thorp has rigorously re-edited the 7 animations of ‘blood to dust’ into a sole barrage of exquisite paint and light.      

Dick Jewell has had a fixed lens on the flux of London Club and dance culture for the last 40 years. A space where religious fervour is reached  (Rave + Breaks, 1992), difference is desired  (Skins, 1978), and culture composts to form the new (Kinky Gerlinky). The Jazz Room, shot on Super 8, 1987, was about the development of jazz dance at the Electric Ballroom, Camden. At the start of each night ‘the film so far’ was projected above the dance floor, before continuing to shoot more material to incorporate into the film. This created an interaction between the dancers and the film that informed the development of the dance style.

Joe Drakeford’s mirrored perspex architectural models feature internally projected film of reflections observed on the skin of the real architecture they refer to. The seductive distortions of the defensive design trend, one-way mirror, which coats so much of the cities buildings, can’t shake off its former function, the paranoia of the interrogation room. By denying potential visitors truthful vision the architecture declines admittance and interaction, whereas internalising views of what a tower reflects endows a building with an otherwise sorely lacking human gaze. 

Marianne Keating’s work explores different aspects of society’s private emotions. The project entitled Tell Me, began by placing a series of postcards with six different questions in various locations around London in doctors surgeries, dentists, cafes, pubs, libraries, etc. and the public were invited to respond anonymously to these postcards.  The physical engagement of the public, who are an integral part of her practice, decide to secretly divulge their inner thoughts which are then projected back in a public sphere. Her practice is heavily weighted in text and her installations incorporate animated digital projections onto architectural facades and internal experiential environments. This interaction opens a dialogue between the participant and the viewer by taking these nameless voices and projecting them back into the environment.

Sam Bassett will be using the floors, walls, corridors and pillars of the building to make an expansive painting made on site to explore the perpetual fragility of the human mind as it processes the influences, experiences and responsibilities of daily life in a society fixated on ‘growth’.

Adam Hogarth will be showing the ‘Darts project’ looking into notions of impermanence and auto-destruction contained within the domestic photograph. Printed photographic images are partly destroyed using darts and bleach to heighten its contradictory nature.

Stephen Smith’s works is made through a visual language embedded in a process of construction and subsequent deconstruction. Through this process themes, forms and motifs are built up and re-worked over time, with each iteration new works are formed in which the dialogue is in a constant state of flux. The starting point for these works has stemmed from an interwoven paradoxical collection of narratives built from conspiracy theories, bit-rot and psycho geographic post traumatic landscapes. Recent work has largely focused on painting utilising formal abstraction based on a field trip he took as Artist in residence with the Unknown Fields Division (Architectural Association, London) to Chernobyl (The lost atomic city of tomorrow) and the Russian Space Centre in Kazakhstan.