Two Weeks, Ten Artists, One Objective: Artist of the Day 2011, Flowers Gallery, Cork Street, London.

Pioneered by Angela Flowers in 1983 Artist of the Day is an annual event whereby ten selectors choose an artist to each hold a one day solo exhibition over the course of two weeks. Running from the 27 June – 9 July, this year’s selectors include Julian Opie, Tim Head, Alison Wilding and Chantal Joffe. Each of the ten chosen artists will show at Flowers Cork Street for one day during the course of the two weeks. On Saturday 2nd and 9th July there will be a group exhibition of artists who exhibited during the week. We’ve handpicked our favourites below.

Srinivas Kuruganti
Selected by Lynette Yiadom-Baokye, Kuruganti (b.1967) documents the daily lives of manual labourers, from the ship-breaking yards of Bombay to the coal mining villages of Dhanbad. His projects have included photographing those living with industrial pollution, their ancestral lands destroyed through mining and since 2001 he has worked with Freedom Foundation HIV/Aids clinics to document the spread of the disease through the populations in Hyderabad and Bangalore.

Rebecca Griffiths
Selected by Alison Wilding, Griffiths (b.1984) studied Fine Art at University College Falmouth and will graduate this year from the Royal College of Art. Her work focuses on the everyday packaging we use such as shampoo bottles and fast food trays. Taking such objects as a starting point, her recent series of work enlarges and magnifies ubiquitous design details, painstakingly rendering them in a uniform sheet material. The forms and surface details of these sculptures refer to those inherent in plastic objects that have been industrially produced through vacuum forming or injection moulding.

An Gee Chan
Selected by Adam Dant, Chan will complete an MA in Fine Art Printmaking from the Royal College of Art this year. Her polished and accomplished, yet garish and brightly coloured prints feature the grotesque and comical imagery of dreams and imaging mythological characters. This highly narrative work is influences by her Hong Kong background, stories of the press and dreams which she expresses in books, prints, murals and installations.

Flowers Cork Street is open daily from 10 - 7.

flowersgalleries.com

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We hope you enjoying reading the Aesthetica Blog, if you want to explore more of the best in contemporary arts and culture you should read us in print too. In the spirit of celebration, Issue 41 includes a piece on Guggenheimn Bilbao where the Luminous Interval features internationally acclaimed artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Kiki Smith and Damien Hirst, ArtAngel's new commission at MIF, Bruce Nauman's retrospective at The Kunsthalle Mannheim and Cory Arcangel's Pro Tools at the Whitney in NYC. You can buy it today by calling +44(0)1904 479 168. Even better, subscribe to Aesthetica and save 20%. Go on, enjoy!

Image:
Courtesy the artist and Flowers Cork Street

Fundamental Stages of Being: Presence, Absence, Kingsland Road Studio, London.

Review by Alex Tieghi-Walker

Tucked underneath an ordinary yellow-bricked housing development, like so many now trailing the canal in East London, is a rather extraordinary space - in another life it was probably an underground car park, but today the Kingsland Road Studio has been furnished with whitewashed beach huts and from 10 – 13 June, Presence Absence, the first exhibition here with energetic works by four young London artists. The Kingsland Studio is the offspring of a small collective of photographers and designers who, as well as stashing themselves away in a hardback-lined corner of the blanched space, provide a place for creative peoples to create and present their art. Zachary Eastwood-Bloom, James Irwin, Brendan Olley and Alida Sayer are the lucky quartet chosen to inaugurate the studio, of which one half is taken up by pleasantly calming typographical and geometric installations and the rest of the space housing the more disruptive tendencies of the artists.

With absence and presence expressing fundamental stages of being, the title suggests something either very, very literal, or, as it turns out, a much more complex exploration of the everyday and the intangible. Visitors are wowed on entry by James Irwin’s large light installation, a simple starburst of fluorescent tubes, which, on closer inspection and a little fiddle with switches on a podium, allow the viewer to illuminate different bulbs to form letters of the alphabet. Another of Irwin’s works on the opposite wall mirrors this phosphorescent display; this time the flick of a switch alternates lights from spelling ON to reading OFF. Simple, but providing endless fun for those confident enough to approach the switch.

And while these pieces may physically dominate the space and heighten one’s attentiveness, they are simply a primer for works by the other three artists. Zachary Eastwood-Bloom has engineered shape landscapes using technology; they exist purely as virtual plains until they are translated into real, tangible objects. An antique table is partly chiselled down, the dining surface taking on the form of a shallow geometrical mountain range. These landscapes reappear in We Control the Horizontal and the Vertical where layers of Perspex sheets have been cut to another of his digital designs.

Swapping geometric panoramas for typography, Alida Sayer manipulates text by cutting, printing and projecting to explore the way the viewer looks at 3D objects. The largest installation at the Kingsland Studios and Alida’s first large-scale work, There Is No Beginning, which she describes as three dimensional stilled animations, shows letters and words trembling inside a large frame where the letters have been cut on to acetate many, many layers deep. Exploring the idea of the unknown and confusing perceptions, Brendan Olley is the only one of the group to take on the moving image. In a short performance piece, Brendan plays a piano to an isolated mountain in the Russian Artic. The sound does not, and probably never will make it to the mountain. It’s one of those silencing videos and a calmer contrast to Irwin’s more obvious communication through his light sculptures.

Four artists couldn’t have combined so effortlessly: their medium and method all very individual yet somehow united in their geometry and the idea of tampering with the norm. The preoccupation with technology, communication, perception and memory is evident, and one supposes that the exhibition naming alludes to the way that the artists seem to really explore the simplicity of the everyday and the ways to reveal its possible forms.

True to its nomenclature, however, the exhibition takes these notions of time and memory a little too far by showing only for a fleeting 3-day period: present one weekend and absent the next. No doubt the Kingsland Studios will find plenty more promising tenants in the months to come, this has been an excellent taster of what is to come.

Next up at Kingsland Road Studio is a group exhibiton of photographic and video work from 2 - 7 October.

kingslandroadstudio.com

Aesthetica Magazine
We hope you enjoying reading the Aesthetica Blog, if you want to explore more of the best in contemporary arts and culture you should read us in print too. In the spirit of celebration, Issue 41 includes a piece on Guggenheimn Bilbao where the Luminous Interval features internationally acclaimed artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Kiki Smith and Damien Hirst, ArtAngel's new commission at MIF, Bruce Nauman's retrospective at The Kunsthalle Mannheim and Cory Arcangel's Pro Tools at the Whitney in NYC. You can buy it today by calling +44(0)1904 479 168. Even better, subscribe to Aesthetica and save 20%. Go on, enjoy!

Image:
Presence-Absence installation shot, photo © Philip Sayer

Pablo Bronstein: Sketches for Regency Living, ICA, London.

Review by Paul Hardman

Bronstein is the first artist to have had the opportunity to use all of the ICA's available spaces for a solo exhibition. The three main gallery areas, along with corridors and stairwells, have provided him with a puzzle that suits his own work particularly well, since the subject of much of his work is the vocabulary of Regency period design and architecture, and building that houses the ICA, Nash House, is itself a grand example of this genre. This connection between the artists work and the architecture creates a relationship that is at times ironic, charming and occasionally confusing. But it a connection that I am sure delighted the artist, and this delight shines through in the parts of the exhibition that work most successfully.

In the first lower gallery an enormous painting fills the whole of the far wall, depicting a huge regency period building and courtyard, the building has features very similar to The Mall, just outside, but this is an invented building, and this area of the gallery is in a modern white box style room, with no trace of the outer form. So Bronstein has set up a strangely artificial construct to begin with: an imagined Regency building, in a non period space, in a real Regency building. This painting functions as a stage set for a performer, who stalks around the room on her toes in long stylised strides, pausing occasionally to strike poses. She wears a yellow and black outfit designed by Mary Katranzou, which references period dress but is something quite clearly contemporary, so the effect is not of a simulation of an aspect of a previous era, but of taking apart and examining piece by piece the grammar of a language that can no longer be understood.

This kind of slow methodical examination continues with a set of drawings that are mounted on the walls at the base of the stairs and continue upwards through several stories to the top of the building. This series called Designs for the Ornamentation of Middle Class Homes (2011), is meticulously executed, as are the rest of the drawings in the exhibition, and seems to follow an internal set of rules that cause it to expand apparently towards infinity as it spirals upwards. Each drawing depicts the facade of the front of a house with empty spaces for windows and the door, above which is a small decorative panel. As one moves along the row of drawings the decoration changes, from laurel leaves, to a statue of a nymph, to a scroll motif and so on. But at some point one realises that some of the window spaces now have a curved top edge, then more windows appear, then the decorative area moves, and then it becomes apparent that the drawings are increasing in size to accommodate taller buildings. This slow process of expansion continues right the way up in a slow, slightly maddening way. Again Bronstein seems to be working through the vocabulary of the style in a way that undermines the possibility of meaning.

Some of the other drawings in the exhibition have something of M.C. Escher about them, not that they are actually 'impossible', but that they have something deliberately wrong about them. In once case, a large monolithic block of a building is shown from an elevated angle so that the roof can be seen, but the internal courtyard is shaped in a tight triangle, positioned off centre. It is a shape that would clearly never be made, but drawn in the correct projection and perspective Bronstein makes it look like a completely straight faced proposition. In drawings of this sort Bronstein's dry delivery and flawless technical skill are combined to perfect effect.

The exhibition can seem slightly austere, and a little difficult to engage with at first. For example, a large cabinet against is displayed upstairs with little explanation, and seems like an empty gesture. But in fact this is one of Bronstein's metamorphic pieces of furniture, and at certain parts of the day it is demonstrated how the object transform into other things. As one start, to get into Bronstein's way of looking at things, the lighter side to his work begins to emerge, and his subject begins to open up. One thing the show does do is make London look different when you leave the gallery, the architecture of the city now feels more like something to be questioned and deciphered rather than a simple backdrop for daily life.

Pablo Bronstein: Sketches for Regency Living continues until 25 September 2011

ica.org.uk

Aesthetica Magazine
We hope you enjoying reading the Aesthetica Blog, if you want to explore more of the best in contemporary arts and culture you should read us in print too. In the spirit of celebration, Issue 41 includes a piece on Guggenheimn Bilbao where the Luminous Interval features internationally acclaimed artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Kiki Smith and Damien Hirst, ArtAngel's new commission at MIF, Bruce Nauman's retrospective at The Kunsthalle Mannheim and Cory Arcangel's Pro Tools at the Whitney in NYC. You can buy it today by calling +44(0)1904 479 168. Even better, subscribe to Aesthetica and save 20%. Go on, enjoy!

Costumes by Mary Katrantzou
Exhibition view of Sketches for Regency Living at the Institute of Contemporary Arts from 9 June to 25 September 2011
Photos (c) Steve White