Shed-and-a-Half Gallery

Ilse Mikula & Clinton de Menezes

2010-06-07T01:44:00.000-07:00

ILSE MIKULA & CLINTON DE MENEZES

Passage

11th June - 2nd July 2010

Shed and a Half Gallery re-opens after 6 month break for it's 21st show.

You are invited to the opening preview of Ilse Mikula & Clinton De Menezes's show 'Passage' to celebrate the re-opening of the gallery (closed for 6 months due to moving house and all that kurfuffle!). This should be a fantastic show and has added weight as both artists hail from South Africa - now that we are in the beginning throws of World Cup season, this seems topically apt.

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‘Passage’ explores the nature of an intimacy found in forgotten spaces, inspired by visits & documentation of derelict allotment sheds in London.

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Ilse Mikula:

'Attempting to find what links us to a place and a sense of belonging, occupies a lot of my work. When we are in a place, we are concerned with its materiality and spatial limitations, in a sense it’s contained. When we leave, we are left with memories, photos, reflections of it which becomes our link. This inherently is an abstract link. The result is that absence becomes the place. I first explored this concept through the displacement of a laundrette as a 3D photographic representation in a lightbox and placed on the banks of the river Thames. These small laundrette lightboxes removed from their original form & functionality seemed to occupy in essence more of what they actually were, being vessels for people’s thoughts, experiences and so on. I further developed this through my work “Departure” which was inspired by a chance meeting with 89 year old retired shepherd, Stanley Akrigg. Visits to his dry stone walls on a farm in Northumberland, was a way for me to explore the nature of what links one to a particular place. Stanley Akrigg completed nearly 8 miles of dry stone wall which besides dividing and containing, can be interpreted as an archive of his time there. Each stone is a layer, part of a sedimentary process, a process I somehow became part of by adding another layer which was my experience and interpreting of Stanley’s walls. “Departure” relocated Stanley’s wall within the Chelsea degree Show space, accompanied by him talking about his time spent there, we are left with this evocation of place.'

Clinton de Menezes:

'My practice is based on concepts of space and the processes of regeneration and degeneration.
Presented in a variety of media and explored through an emotive use of materials my works are often born out of physically demanding work processes that are integral to their reading. Burnt, buried, scratched, punctured, drawn over, covered up and painted into. These working processes are key to my practice that I have come to view as “processes of sedimentation and excavation that reference cycles of the natural world and the compounded history of culture”. Through these processes my work accumulates a visual density and physical materiality which are equal to the content itself, which ranges over sources as diverse as landscape and its representation, utopia/dystopia, mythology, patterns of migration, alchemy, conquest, apocalypse and identity.'

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Please save the date and pass on to anyone who might be interested. Hopefully the weather will be gorgeous and we can all enjoy the work sipping wine and beer (provided) on a sunny rooftop!

New Year Break

2009-12-10T08:12:00.000-08:00

The gallery will be taking a Christmas and New Year break allowing for the frost and cold to thaw, before showing again from March onward. Please check back for details.

Closing Party for Carolyn Lefley

2009-12-07T04:49:00.000-08:00

There will be a closing party For CAROLYN LEFLEY on Saturday 12th December from 2-5pm.

This will be the last chance to see "Fictional Space", meet Carolyn and have a glass of mulled wine.

Please contact: vita@vitagottlieb.com or 07980 856844

All other times by appointment only.

Please see www.carolynlefley.co.uk

Carolyn Lefley

2009-11-25T16:24:00.000-08:00

CAROLYN LEFLEY
Fictional Space

20th November - 15th December 2009

This show is in association with Photomonth 2009, the annual east London photography festival, and Troika Editions.

Shed-and-a-Half Gallery presents a solo show of new work by Carolyn Lefley, Fictional Space; an exhibition of photographs that depict a world that floats between reality and fantasy, between believable spaces and sites of make-believe. In Lefley’s photographs the interior space of the home is imbued with the otherworldly realms of childhood stories: Narnia, the Wild Wood, Wonderland and Lilliput.

In the larger shed, photographs from the series, Within, set within the make-believe world of the doll’s house, in which spaces can be permeated with both playfulness and melancholy. The doll’s house has captured Lefley’s imagination from an early age since watching the film The Incredible Shrinking Man as a child, where the film’s diminutive hero is relegated to the doll’s house only to be attacked by a ferocious pet cat. A doll’s house is a dream home in miniature, a place for childhood imaginings and adult escapism. Within explores the tension between fantasy (the miniature) and reality (the gigantic). From within each room, through the recurring windows, we gaze out to the larger reality of Lefley’s own home. The commonplace domestic details are transformed into strange and uncanny vistas. In the half-light within, forgotten toys and Narnian furniture lay abandoned, waiting to be played with once more, igniting the spark of a forgotten longing.

In the small shed Lefley reveals her new work in progress, Realm. Could a fairy or supernatural realm run parallel to reality? Authors such as C S Lewis and George MacDonald were fascinated by this and used the home as a portal into a mythical realm. The realm of Narnia is entered through a wardrobe and the layers of fur coats inside which become trees.

'The next moment she found that what was rubbing against her face and hands was no longer soft fur but something hard and rough and even prickly. "Why, it is just like branches of trees!" exclaimed Lucy. And then she saw that there was a light ahead of her; not a few inches away where the back of the wardrobe ought to have been, but a long way off. Something cold and soft was falling on her. A moment later she found that she was standing in the middle of a wood at night-time with snow under her feet and snowflakes falling through the air.

Lucy felt a little frightened, but she felt very inquisitive and excited as well. She looked back over her shoulder and there, between the dark tree-trunks, she could still see the open doorway of the wardrobe and even catch a glimpse of the empty room from which she had set out.[1]'

In Realm Lefley has created digitally altered photographs, where the familiar place of the home becomes a portal into mythical realm.

[1] C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950)

Carolyn Lefley – Artist’s Statement

“It was one of these mysterious fairy calls from out the void that suddenly reached Mole in the darkness, making him tingle through and through with its very familiar appeal, even while yet he could not clearly remember what it was…Home! That was what they meant, those caressing appeals, those soft touches wafted through the air, those invisible little hands pulling and tugging, all one way.”[1]

The commonplace domestic details are transformed into strange and uncanny vistas: the staircase becomes a giant’s causeway; the dreary nets become a night sky. In the half-light within, forgotten toys and Narnian furniture lay abandoned, waiting to be played with once more, igniting the spark of a forgotten longing.

In my new work Realm I have created digitally altered photographs, where the familiar place of the home becomes a portal into mythical realm.
[1] Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

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Carolyn Lefley is a photographic artist based in London. Solo exhibitions have included ‘Belonging’ at House Gallery, London 2008 and Drukarnia, Poland, part of Photomonth in Krakow 2008. Carolyn has also taken part in group shows, most recently this year at The Foundry, Norwich Arts Centre and Viewfinder Photography Gallery, London and previously at Dray Walk Gallery, London 2006 and Waterman's Art Centre, London 2005. Her work has featured in Flash Forward 2007, with an introduction by Susan Bright, published by the Magenta Foundation, Canada, by whom she was also awarded the Selected Winner (UK) in the Emerging Photographers category. In 2008 she was awarded a bursary from the National Media Museum to develop her photographic practice. Carolyn studied Fine Art at Coventry University and returned to London to complete her MA in Photography at TVU. She currently teaches photography at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge.

Her website is at http://www.carolynlefley.co.uk/

Alessandra Rebagliati

2009-10-20T13:23:00.001-07:00

ALESSANDRA REBAGLIATI

The Game and The Illusion

17th October - 4th November 2009

This show presents Alessandra Rebagliati’s new video work and large size photgraphic prints.

'The project was developed after a visit to Lima, Peru where she spent several days in the southern district of Punta Hermosa, 45 km from the capital. She encountered a group of school children during their daily outdoor activity and with permission from their tutor, was able to photograph and register their actions during the half hour they spend daily in contact with nature in the most spontaneous way.'

'Paradise can be found around the corner or thousands of kilometres away. In the developed world people are more often able to travel. Yet in Punta Hermosa, dressed uniformly in red, these children enjoy by their own right of birth such a desired location without a grasp on their future, displaying the innocent reflection of their pure souls.'

Rabagliati says about her printed images: ‘By obscuring the brilliant reality in which the situation occurs I am trying to point out how blind we sometimes choose to be towards the future’s generations well being, by not taking into account how the selfish decisions we are making today will affect and blur or obscure their chance of a better future’

Born in Lima, 1972, Alessandra is a Peruvian artist living and working in Brussels and London. During the past years she has participated in several group exhibitions in

London, Madrid, Berlin, Hamburg, San Francisco. She is part of the Vern Group since 2003 with whom she has shown at Walker Point Center for the Arts in Milwaukee, 55 Mercer Gallery, NYC in 2006. She graduated in 2006 from her MA Fine Art degree at Central St. Martins College of Art and Design, London, UK.

In 2008 she had her first solo show in Galeria Vertice, Lima Peru, where she presented a series of prints, a video and an installation.

E-mail: art@alereba.com

Website: www.alereba.com

Lisa Snook

2009-09-24T08:36:00.000-07:00

LISA SNOOK

Fairy Tales

24th September - 11th October 2009

‘We need to know who we were in order to surmise what we might become.’

- Angela Carter

‘’Fairy tales have been with us for thousands of years. The telling of these tales was an oral tradition and their narratives were traditionally disseminated through the female voice. The stories were without known originators and were a source of perennially refreshed entertainment for the poor.

When fairy tales first began to be collected, the same tale was often re-told again and again. Each time the tale adapts accordingly to its countries heritage and to its social, political and psychological climate.

Fairy Tales is an installation in two parts; in the smaller space ivy and forest debris fill the interior, in a reversal of the forest-ensnared castle of Sleeping Beauty, where, in this psychological drama, the forest grows from inside out. Laid out upon this is an old Victorian nightdress which has been embroidered with the words ‘It worried her that the sound and movement of the trees meant more than the evening news.’ The narrative here is a conduit of thought in a buried childhood memory, re-visited, re-told and expressed as a visual reality.

Inside the second space are three stories.Two are by the artist and one is by a writer in response to the artist’s requested proposition, ‘tell me a fairy tale’.

The solitary way in which the stories are heard reflects the autonomous milieu in which we live our lives today. But the effect is one that is tinged with intimacy.

I love the collective quality of this kind of story telling; it can draw from memory, myth, or experience. It often tells tales on the wrong-doers and vindicates the mistreated. The employment of fantasy and enchantment serves the teller well in being able to draw the listener into the seductive quality of what is, fairy tale.”

-Lisa Snook

Guy Shoham

2009-06-07T13:50:00.000-07:00

GUY SHOHAM

Evanesced

9th June - 8th July 2009

The Peeled Stickers is a series of paintings presented as two installations, evoking memory and loss, a comment on perception and deception. The shiny, veneered surface of the works imitates wood-effect laminate and along with the seemingly real handles and peeled-off stickers, Shoham has created perfect objets trompe l’oeil, completing wonderful works of deception. As Baudriallard writes ‘The objects of trompe l’oeil have something of the same fantastic vivacity as the child’s discovery of his own image, an unmediated hallucination anterior to the perceptual order’.[1] Shoham’s intent is to return the viewer to a moment in time, a flashback of a child gleefully attaching stickers to bedroom furniture; and later, returning to peel, pick, scratch the unwanted remains with dermatillomaniacal compulsion. The passage of time turns the once coveted stickers into sunburnt skin, or a scab that one guiltily and secretly peels off.

The canvases are the same size as the drawers and doors they represent. They become ‘doubles’, paralleling the real objects. ‘It is the appearance of the double, in the guise of trivial objects that creates the effect of seduction’[2]. The installations seduce and confuse, enticing the spectator into a morass of make-believe. This imaginary world created by the children we once were, projecting our past needs and desires, thoughts and deeds, kindness and cruelty onto the surface of the furniture. The stickers are marks of ownership and signs of individuality, showing the process of getting rid of the old and the unloved, trying to clear a space for new images.

The ‘damage’ to the furniture also seems like a juvenile act of rebellion against the conventional aesthetic and established values. However, the desire to assert one’s individuality and rejection of the old often happens by following current trends and fashions. So perversely, it is an act of conforming at the same time. By using mass-produced stickers it echoes the desire to belong and to fit in. It is a “ready-made identity”.

Ironically, the assembled paintings appear as stored furniture, reaffirming the storage role of the sheds and subverting their use as galleries. These objects are stored away, unloved, scratched and disused. They record lost childhood; memories, games, sibling fights, love and hate. All these memories are fading away, peeled, neglected and useless until the viewer recharges them once again with his own thoughts, ideas and memories.

Guy Shoham graduated with an MA in 2002 from Chelsea College of Art and Design. Since then he has exhibited in various venues, including Gasworks Gallery, London; Petach-Tikva Museum, Israel; and Wings Projects Art Space, Switzerland. In May 2008 he had a solo show at Dollinger Art Project in Tel-Aviv. This is his first solo show in London. For further information on the artist's work please see www.guyshoham.tk

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[1] Bauriallard J. Seduction, Ctheory Books Montreal, 2001, p.62

[2] ibid

Jane Frost

2009-05-21T11:48:00.000-07:00

JANE FROST

Material Matters

14th May - 5th June

Fair Trade: Material Matters is an ongoing project, a combination of traditional drawn, hand-stitched work and a web-based community of artists. Launched in 2007 at the 2nd Moscow Biennale, it depicts artists self-portraits, collected, and stitched onto blankets. The Fair Trade exchange is a deliberate comment on the financial value placed on work, which is often not as beneficial to the artist. Material Matters relates to the process of Slow Making, the basis of Frost's work, exploring the process of making in the context of sustainable actions.

At the opening there will be opportunity to draw your self-portrait and be included in this international artists web site.

For more information about the work email Jane@FrostArt.co.uk

To see the online work go to http://frostart.co.uk/quilt/quilt_index.php

Bram Thomas Arnold

2009-04-22T04:16:00.000-07:00

BRAM THOMAS ARNOLD
Walking Home

UPDATE: See Bram's blog on http://bramthomasarnold.wordpress.com/

Shed and a half Gallery is proud to present the first solo show of works by 26 year old artist Bram
Thomas Arnold. The exhibition re-contextualises work shown as part of Arnold's final MA show in Dartington College of Art, Devon, and presents it alongside a performative installation of new research into his ongoing
project entitled 'Walking Home'

Bram Thomas Arnold is a Swiss born artist who’s hardly been home (not since 1987, when he got chicken pocks for a month). He grew up in Wales from 1984 and spent the previous two years traversing Europe, via Belguim, Holland and England, to Wales. He’s now going home again, he plans to walk there. Its 598 miles to St. Gallen according to google maps and Bram plans to get to the town in which he was born in time for his birthday on the 8th July. Using the project as an opportunity to explore things both personal – the recent death of his father, and general – notions of ‘home’, belonging, romanticism, relational aesthetics, the practice of walking and nostalgia.Through the project he seeks to explore artistic practice and living in the modern world, browse romanticism and Neitzsche, consume poetry and music, and hope that the past will present the future. The exhibition promises to give each individual viewer a different interpretation and experience of the same show; spaces will change over time, performances will occur and disappear, words will be thrown into open space. The closing of the show sees Arnold meticulously package every object from the sheds and address them for delivery to Switzerland, where upon his arrival the packages will be unwrapped as the opening performance of a show in the place of his birth.

For biography details or to arrange an interview please contact Vita Gottlieb at vita@shedandahalfgallery.com, or Bram directly via bramthomasarnold@gmail.com.

Craig Cooper

2009-02-16T07:56:00.001-08:00

CRAIG COOPER
The End of Shoreditch is Nigh

Private view Tuesday 17th February 6 – 9pm
Exhibition continues until 9th March

Craig Cooper:

“Shakespeare lived for several years in Shoreditch and is believed to have known the place well. At the time, the area was a haven for artists and actors, and notorious for boozing, prostitution and violence. Plays and playhouses were banned within the City, making Shoreditch, on its northern fringe, a magnet for actors and writers and base tenements and houses of unlawful and disorderly resort and the great number of dissolute, loose, and insolent people harboured in such and the like noisome and disorderly houses, as namely poor cottages, and habitations of beggars and people without trade, in stables, inns, alehouses, taverns, garden-houses converted to dwellings, ordinaries, dicing houses, bowling alleys, and brothel houses.
In 1576, on the site of the Priory, James Burbage built the first playhouse in England, known as 'The Theatre' (commemorated today by a plaque on Curtain Road, and excavated in 2008. Richard Burbage was the first Hamlet, William Somers, court jester to Henry VIII and Richard Tarleton, Queen Elizabeth’s favourite clown had Shakespeare pay homage to him by naming him as the most famous skull in history – Yorick. All are buried somewhere in the grounds of St. Leonard’s Church, Shoreditch.
I have lived in the area for 10 years in April and even from that day I heard the voices telling all that it was a full brimwise place to live, work and pursue the act of circusized debauchery a la carte, the plate on roller skates displaying a burst out of laughterised horrorshow, all short-slice and plaguesweet.
A land of Many an Era…
…and at the end of each epoch of time there would be the voice worn out, all croaked saying “Shoreditch is Dead!”
Then the scene shifters would move in and redocorate and the doors would open to shine the next light.
Marie Lloyd, the music hall queen, watched as Crown Plaza knocked down her Palace on Shoreditch High Street. She didn’t dilly dally, off went the van wiv her ‘ome packed in it, she walked behind wiv her old cock linnet.
Matt Munro, the “British Sinatra” and Barbara Windsor fled their birthplace singing and screaming “Shoreditch is Dead!”
The orphaned baby then nurtured by Damien Hirst and his YBA’s spelling it out in plain arty English that this was where it was at. The money machine that they all designed their own plastic for was now the butterflies evolving into moths eating away at the very pockets of those who desired to exist in the arena. “Shoreditch is Dead!”
Yet the most fantastic holy spirit moment was to be, choked with party fumes and jazz daz… There opened the portal to “Gary’s Place” – in my opinion, as good as Shoreditch gets. As close to the Shakespearian Shiver as one can get…
Alas… Tesco’s, Pret, Subway and Eat moved in and at the same time we felt the wrench to our hearts of the Bricklayers Arms closing, the doors sealed, only to re-open as a bus shelter.
It is in the beautiful roof garden surroundings of Vita Gottlieb’s Shed and a Half Gallery that I invite you all to the showing of a new painting and a new daedalum mirror.

In 1599 Shakespeare's Company literally upped sticks, and moved the timbers of 'The Theatre' to Southwark, at expiration of the lease, to construct The Globe. “

THE END OF SHOREDITCH IS NIGH

"To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.
Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing."

— Macbeth (Act 5, Scene 5, lines 17-28)

Harriet Poole

2008-10-10T03:06:00.000-07:00

HARRIET POOLE
What Not to Wear

23rd - 25th October

In association with Photomonth 2008, the East London photography festival.

What not to wear? explores the relationship between the redundant and the nostalgic through the dual narrative of a past-industrial site of a haberdashery factory and redundant items of clothing we no longer wear. The two sheds of the gallery are also important as both a site of secrecy, and where forgotten or discarded items end up.

This show is a three phase event. Firstly, in CLOTHING there are intimate performances for one at a time in a staged darkroom exploring photograms and clothing. The private view event, PHOTOS, is then intended as a cathartic and collective experience sharing photos of audience members wearing forgotten/embarrassing/lost items of clothing, mediated through photographic manipulation of the live projected destruction of the clothing’s image within the Shed and a half gallery rooftop environment.

The FINAL EVENT will be a short viewing of the installation relics in the half shed, as a single group that would have met off site collectively and then go to a pub nearby for an informal talk about the work and feedback.

Wednesday 22nd October
2-6.15pm one-to-ones, What not to wear- CLOTHING.
6.30-9 private view, What not to wear - PHOTOS

Saturday 25th October
12-4 one-to-ones, What not to wear- CLOTHING
4.30-6 What not to wear- FINAL EVENT. Installation viewing 4.30-5, followed by post show discussion in a nearby venue tbc.

Event details:

CLOTHING: A participatory performance for one at a time. Participants are required to bring an unwanted item of soft clothing they no longer wear to surrender- they will not get the item back.

PHOTOS- Participants are required to bring a photograph of them wearing an outfit/item of clothing they no longer wear to surrender- they will not get the photograph back. Photocopies not accepted.

FINAL EVENT: Installation viewing of the final relics of performance and post show discussion, near gallery, venue tbc

NB All events strictly by appointment only and participants must agree to bring item(s) required. Please book asap to avoid disappointment.

Booking: via email stating in the header which event(s) you are booking for to whatnotphoto@rocketmail.com. You can come to as many as you wish! Any further information please contact Harriet on 07900 563631 or email as given.

Central to the work are theories in the work of Roland Barthes and Tino Sehgal, the first for his theories of the ‘mortality’ of the paper based photograph as an ‘impossible’ record of ‘now,’ and the latter for the fleeting materiality of his art works. Poole is researching principles of non-matrixed theatre and audience participation through the subversion of time based media practices. She is also experimenting with pushing the temporal nature of performance through marrying with the temporal nature of photography, placing the process of image making intrinsically at the heart of an intimate and participatory, performative experience.

About the artist:
Poole's approach to photography is to experiment with both the low and the high tech, from pinhole photography and photograms, to holgas and film SLR, to digital SLR and live feed and pre-recorded film, and found photographs and slides. She has a wide ranging style and use of technique that fuses the photographic with the performative; her work in her MA has put the spectator as participant directly in the process of image making in a staged darkroom in gallery and non-gallery spaces.

For further information on the artist's work please see www.harrietpoole.com

Alison Ballance

2008-09-25T03:03:00.001-07:00

ALISON BALLANCE
Janus

17th September - 7th October

Janus is a collage of makeshift city plans, found images, photos, text and old stationary; separate components are united by their missing subjects and their references to time. Ruined and unfamiliar urban scenes suggest an unhopeful regeneration. They are shown alongside two words which appear definite in their want to communicate but are either hesitant or unable to do so. A photograph is pinned next to its subject matter. By showing the smaller collage in another context, this juxtaposition points to another time in which the work was shown – a point reconfirmed by the single slide shown in the adjacent smaller shed. The materials used are stationary sourced from yesterday, with a small hand-written T S Eliot quote noted down as a reminder about the role the past and the future play in the present. The piece takes its name from the two-headed god who could look both forwards and backwards in time.

Ballance prefers to represent the fragment and the suggestion rather than crude over-explanation and sees the idea of the fragment in architectural ruins, failures or incompleteness. In some corners of Janus the concrete depiction of a subject is missing drawing attention to the unrepresented. The work has a reductive grammar using materials that want to affirm their potential. Ballance works within a context of reusing and referring to a past store of cultural references. Her primary medium is collage whether this takes its form in site specific installations or time specific pieces that are held together momentarily in a photograph. She uses found objects, photography, drawing and cuttings in her work all arriving fully loaded with cultural references and she enjoys seeing the dialogue that arises within the piece.

Recent shows include ‘Dialogue Box’, Airspace Gallery, Stoke-on Trent; ‘Post it’ Another Road Side Attraction Gallery, London; ‘Allotments’ Group Show in Nottingham and Derby; ‘Red’ Site specific piece, Devon; Surface Gallery Open Show, Nottingham. Graduated in 2004 from Chelsea College of Art and Design, BA Painting.

Veronika Spierenberg

2008-07-08T13:30:00.000-07:00

VERONIKA SPIERENBERG
For Two Voices

24th July - 14th August 2008

"The human voice touches the pictures and the picture begins to move in the rhythm of the bars. Nothing is more appealing when unattractive photographs flirt with a chanteuse."

Shed and a half Gallery is pleased to present new work by Veronika Spierenburg. Spierenburg is a Dutch/Swiss artist working predominately in video and photography. Her work operates in the realm of stillness and movement, where the camera’s eye and the human eye, sound and image and the unfamiliar view converge. Spierenburg is primarily interested in how irrelevant photographs acquire a function and how sound loads pictures with emotion.

The new work in this exhibition focuses on an installation of a photographic series composed into a sound system. Stubs on a carpet, holes in a wall, raindrops on stone will be seen as pitches and function as tune. The singer Sabina Leone will interpret the photographs into sound and transform the shed into a live act at the show’s opening. After the opening the pictures and sound are separated between the sheds in order to experience how the sound recalls the images and vice versa.

Born in Switzerland in 1981, Veronika Spierenburg studied at the School of Art in Basel, Gerrit Rietveld Academy and Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design. She was nominated for the Steenbergen Stipendium 2005 in the Netherlands and received the Red Mansion Art Prize 2006 in London. Spierenburg has exhibited in Britain and internationally. She currently lives and works in Switzerland.

Lucinda Holmes

2008-06-27T04:20:00.000-07:00

LUCINDA HOLMES

Small Worlds

27th June – 17th July 2008

Working with found and discarded objects while employing simple actions such as repeated marks, layering and arranging, Lucinda Holmes has created and installed two contrasting ‘worlds’ in the interior of the shed spaces. One expansive and yet miniature world consists of found everyday objects and materials carefully arranged and ornamented, suggesting ‘other worldly’ terrains. The other, an archive of objects representing a visualisation of the artists tool box, items and objects which exists prior to their embodiment as part of these ‘worlds’. Holmes is especially interested in the transformative nature and energy of place. Holmes’ work allows you to ‘travel lightly’ to dimensions of different scale and intimacy.

The placement and choice of materials is in response to the floor of the gallery. The worlds may have hills, deserts cities or lines of telegraph poles stretching out across barren plains. As part of the process of Holmes’ work she collects, organises and photographs objects, makes drawings, which are a major source or inspiration in her work. These drawings and photographic documentation are displayed as a sort of treasure trove which visitors can look through, in the smaller gallery space.

Lucinda Holmes’ practice encompasses photography, installation and painting but the process of drawing is central to her artistic approach. She has been accepted on New York’s Drawing Center’s Viewing Programme and was an artist in residence at the C4RD in London earlier this year. Prior to completing her masters in Drawing at Wimbledon College of Art Lucinda won the Hunting Art Prizes Drawing and Print Prize in 2001.

Petra Hudcova & Ross Knipe

2008-06-01T11:55:00.000-07:00

PETRA HUDCOVA & ROSS KNIPE

1st - 24th June 2008

It’s not easy to be nowhere

‘My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tambours I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.‘

Fernando Pessoa

It’s not easy to be nowhere is a collaboration between visual artist Petra Hudcova and artist and composer Ross Knipe. They set out to combine their individual interests as well as their separate tools to create a single conversation in the spaces of the gallery. The sheds become containers for fragmented landscapes of the mind which are filled with the outcome of a series of discussions and interactions of disjointed sound and moving imagery. Their starting point was a string of contemplations on the possibilities of the contents of such spaces. They wanted the sheds to serve as a metaphor for giant psyches that are overflowing with impulses and urges.

Petra Hudcova is a visual artist working predominantly with still and moving images and installation. Her work relates to the notion of ‘a moment of the impossible’ understood as an experience of something that happens when the time-space code becomes irrelevant. She is mainly interested in the moment when time seemingly shatters or disappears and one is left experiencing a different mode to the one that is inherent to our language. She seeks to reproduce this moment which is embedded within the configuration of circumstances and doubt. Her current work derives from the interest in implementation of image drops into space creating an orchestra of passing moments. Petra graduated from Central St. Martin’s College with an MA in 2006 and is currently based in East London. She has exhibited her work in Britain and internationally.

For more information please visit www.petrahudcova.com

Ross Knipe is an artist and a composer working in TV, film and advertising. He has also been active in the underground dance scene releasing under various monikers including Pussycuts, A.R.S, Somos and Bammer, producing remixes for the likes of Moby and A Man Called Adam. Bammer also composed the soundtrack for the documenting CD Rom of "Contents: 31 Tiensevest" by artists Marysia Lewandowska and Neil Cummings.

Ross is currently studying sound arts at the University of the Arts, exploring concepts and representations of space and the musicality of environments. One of his areas of interest is looking at individual gestures and actions and their cumulative effects on specific and global environments, including the physiological, social and psychological impacts on people and communities, as well as the creative and regenerative potential of gesture in space.

Miyuki Kasahara & Calum F. Kerr

2008-05-01T05:54:00.000-07:00

MIYUKI KASAHARA & CALUM F. KERR

For Whom do you Speak?
3rd – 24th May 2008

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FOR WHOM DO YOU SPEAK?

To be creolized means a language created through mishearing or mistranslation. In this collaboration Miyuki Kasahara & Calum F. Kerr look at the fractured communication (oral and visual) between people who speak completely different languages.

Miyuki has collected over 150 images and/or text from people across the world, from USA; Canada; Japan; China; Tibet; India; and Europe (inc. UK) all from those who use non-European Languages. The languages include Chinese (Mandarin & Cantonese); Hindi; Japanese; Korean; New Zealand Maori; Persian, Taiwanese & Tibetan.

This is similar to the SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) projects, such as NASA's Voyager 1 & 2 Spacecraft that carries disks with a "message to Aliens". The contributors were asked to communicate their own "message in a bottle" to whoever might view it in the exhibition.

At the opening visitors will be able to form a new language through linking the installation (by Miyuki) to a performance (by Calum).

Viewers will be able to look at these multifarious messages through 'spy holes' in the larger shed. During the opening they will be able to write or draw interpretations of what they saw and take them to Calum in the smaller shed. Then through an agreed form (that could be drawn, a gesture or spoken) they will reach a final translation of what was seen. Throughout the lead-up Calum has not been allowed to see any of the images or text involved.

The artists are looking to share these messages sent from afar and through interpretation and translation see what new forms can be discovered.

FOR WHOM DO YOU SPEAK?

For further information on For Whom Do You Speak?
Contact the artists:
miyu_ku@yahoo.com - www.miyukikasahara.com
calumfkerr@googlemail.com - www.myspace.com/calumfkerr

Miyuki Kasahara and Calum F. Kerr Biographies:

Miyuki Kasahara’s work explores identity, personal memory, and personal mythology in others and herself. She considers how art creates interraction with people through conversation and through the gaze without conversation. ‘In his/her personal sky installation at Sevenseven Contemporary (London 2006) and at Art gallery X (Tokyo 2007), the visitor is encouraged to see a stranger’s personal memory through the stranger’s ear. When you first see his/her personal sky, you see only floating white clean spheres in the space. Then you notice that each sphere consists of an organic shape – an embedded ear. But you don’t notice immediately that each is made from a different persons ear and has a different image inside until somebody tells you. When people noticed the ears and the ear holes, they usually held the piece up to their ears as if they held a seashell. Then they asked Miyuki, “Can I listen to something from here?” Miyuki said, “No you cannot. But instead of listening, you can see an image there and imagine the story behind.” This was the starting point of interaction.’

She has been involved in many group and solo exhibitions, including touring exhibitions, onetree (2001-2002), supported by North West Arts Board England, and Ikons of Identity, organised by Craftspace Touring, Touring Exhibition in England. (2001-2002).

Miyuki has also organised group exhibitions including One silver coin exhibition (2003) and Because, there is no stars in the sky (2004), Gallery eSIESTA, Tokyo.

Recent exhibitions include Trigger, Art Gallery X, sponsored by Nihombashi Takashimaya Department store, Tokyo (Solo exhibition 2007) - A piece of me, Sketch, London (2007), The London Group open exhibition 2007, London (2007) - Milky Way Project, commissioned by Shoreditch Trust, London (2007) - Miyuki Kasahara exhibition, Gallery Chimenkanoya, Tokyo (Solo exhibition 2006) - The Surgery project part1, supported by Capital Community Foundation, The Surgery, London (2006) - Clash Art 2, Sevenseven Contemporary Art, London (2006) - Art in the Gardens , sponsored by Southampton Saab, Sir Harold Hillier Gardens, Hampshire (2006, 2007, 2008) - Clone , Nog Gallery, London (2005) - Clash Art, The Foundry, London (2005) - www.miyukikasahara.com

Calum F. Kerr creates participatory artworks, situations that are altered through audience intervention and interpretation. His performances challenge participants to join in; they are often subsumed in an absurdist action or process. These include opening a Bagel Stall, being Mark E. Smith, joining a convention for Curtain Twitching voyeurs and directing Untuned Symphonies, a series of informal choral groups. Kerr's work is found between a considered systematic approach and the inevitable ascent/descent into chaos.

Recent performances & exhibitions include Suburbia, Foreign Press Association, London
(2008) -The Famous, the Infamous & the Really Quite Good, Decima Gallery,
London (2008) - Climate 4 Change, Old Mercades Showroom, London (2008) - Spectre vs. Rector, The Residence, London (2007) - and many more..., Wiebke Morgan Gallery, London (Solo Exhibition, 2007) - Punk: A directory of Modern Subversive Culture, London & Hamburg (2006) - At War with Ghosts, Space Station Sixty-Five, London (2006) - The Circus Show, Three Colts Gallery (2006) - Berliner Kunstsalon, Berlin (2005) - The Ideal, Plovdiv, Bulgaria (2004) - The Lost Adjuster, Atrium Gallery, PricewaterhouseCoopers, London (Solo Exhibition, 2004).
Performance Links & Video: www.myspace.com/calumfkerr
See also www.seeyouincourt.info

Marianna & Daniel O'Reilly

2008-02-01T03:39:00.000-08:00

MARIANNA & DANIEL O'REILLY

Ayaz’s Palace

Opening preview Friday 22nd February

23 February-16th March 2008

Ayaz said to the deputies O Renowned Officers
Is the ‘Order of the King’ more worthy or the ‘Diamond’?

Marianna and Daniel O’Reilly’s first collaborative installation exploits a devotional theory of drawing in order to create an environment-allegory for the process of ‘inspiration’ which lies at the heart of all popular mythologies of ‘the artist’; a mythology which rings true more often than not in the artistic consciousness itself. The project marries together concepts rooted in medieval thought which are seen as indispensable to contemporary notions of art production; accounts such as the art of the alchemist as Sufi metaphor, the popular accounts made of the workshops of Tintoretto and Fiorentino etc, and the monastic workshops of the icon painters. A necessary umbrella concept that ties these accounts together is the prevalent theory of Melancholy from this period and, as such, the installation is tinged with ‘tone’; a tone which sets a model for the edifice as a whole and which reads as a metaphor in the working relationship between Marianna and Daniel inasmuch as it records a dialectical process of individual aims that are subordinated for the elevation of the work as a whole.

The process of drawing stands as a common ground which exists between the individual practises of the two artists involved and thus serves as a liberating neutral point from which they are able to explore the shared interests which lie at the centre of both practises. In that drawing traditionally holds the position of preparation or study for a finished work, it is reconfigured here as a preparation with no desire for an end point; one in which the creative essence, (the relationship,) remains vital and which never achieves a fully realised, ‘finished’ state. Incorporated into the installation is the short film ‘The School of Night’ which has been specially created for this project. It comprises a series of images taken from paintings by Marianna coupled to a soundtrack by Daniel with the aim of spawning renewed energies from existent sources by means of cinematic devices such as counterpoint and the unexpected meeting. The artists have also created a pictorial diary entitled ‘The Carouser’s Notebook’ as an accompaniment to the exhibition which is available in a signed edition from the gallery.

For more information regarding the artists please visit www.mariannaanddaniel.co.uk or e-mail to either daniel_o_reilly@hotmail.com or marianna_red@hotmail.com

Closed for the winter

2008-01-17T08:35:00.000-08:00

The gallery will reopen in February after a winter break.

Jane Dorner

2007-11-21T08:30:00.000-08:00

JANE DORNER

BoneScape and GhostBlown

20 November - 15 December

In the Shed
BoneScape is a pâte de verre installation expressing the unseen fragility of the construction of the human body: the brittleness of bones and the artist's own spinal injury. It projects a series of disks – as if looking through a microscope, or at an x-ray or scan. The segments are based on what science reveals, but are expressive of feelings about this rather than any attempt to reproduce physical accuracy. Some are engraved with motifs from bone patterns. The process of making in itself uses glass in contradictory states, matching the personal process of finding stability within pain.

In the Half Shed
GhostBlown are 'deformed' vessels within which are trapped conventionally-shaped pâte de verre bowls which are picked up on a gather of hot glass. The ghost of the original remains, but is changed by the blowing and hand-shaping process.

About the Artist
Jane Dorner came to glass three years ago. She is interested in glass as a medium for conceptual expression. Her working life has centred round writing and publishing, latterly in interactive publication where ‘glass pages’ – on computer screens and mobile phones – replace paper as the main carrier of communication. Now she feels that words are insufficient to express the richness of this culture shift, and so is exploring glass itself as a mediator of image, message and interactivity. Jane is in her second year of a part-time MA in Glass at Farnham (University College for the Creative Arts). Her business sponsor is the Copyright Licensing Agency which supports creativity through the administration of reprographic rights.
http://glasspages.blogspot.com/
www.editor.net/designer/installation.html

HA Project

2007-10-18T16:25:00.001-07:00

HA-PROJECT
http://www.ha-project.com/

In association with Photomonth 2007, the East London photography festival (www.photomonth.org), Shed-and-a-Half Gallery presents its fifth show of the year with work from Hanna Korhonen and Aidan McNeill in a show entitled HA-Project.

Exhibition open 29 October to 16 November, by appointment only.

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The HA project is an online photographic collaboration created January 2007 by Helsinki based artist Hanna Korhonen and London based artist Aidan McNeill. Once a week one uploads a photograph onto the HA project site and the other replies with an image that same week for the duration of 2007. The artists who live and travel to different parts of the world use place as a starting point to the imagery, reflecting on states of mind, ideas and thoughts of responses. As their locations change, HA stays locked in the digital expanse of the Internet.

Neither of the artists uses digital cameras but photograph with traditional methods on film, transforming the images into digital form after initial production. The two physical existences become one unphysical one, a dialogue of images on the World Wide Web viewable by an unknown and unquantifiable audience. To which new issues to the project have arisen such as the potentiality of alteration due to an unknown variability of colour and light viewable from different computer screens and personal computer settings.

During Photomonth 2007 the two artists come to London for a one-week residency shared together at Shed and a half Gallery, which will culminate in a collaborative exhibition of work produced during this intense period of work and will allow a different backdrop and audience for the HA-project. The residency will allow the artists to explore each other's systems of visual response and discuss the experience and effect of working remotely with one another.

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Aidan McNeill (Canada), based in London, UK. McNeills' practice concerns itself with collective experience; what it is to be human in a landscape of technological dominance.Whilst concentrating on an internal and subjective response, represented by the individual in her photographic and video works, McNeill looks to sites that demand an engagement with the camera from those that visit. The work questions how environmental platforms and resulting objects (the photograph) are related to phenomenological concerns of identity and our own cultural visibility.

Hanna Korhonen (Finland), based in Helsinki, Finland . Korhonen creates visual narratives that examine personal emotions; alienation, displacement, longing and love. Her work is built in a manner of an analysis – she collects information, both thoughts and photographs, producing them then into a series of images that reflect the contemplative process. Korhonen uses light and colour as her tools with and around which she builds the images, visualising her subject matters and giving new possibilities to ordinary scenes. Bending the basic elements of her craft she aims to capture the temperature and intensity of emotions.

http://www.hannak.co.uk/

Lee Clough

2007-09-20T10:04:00.000-07:00

LEE CLOUGH

afterimages

Saturday 29th September to Thursday 11th October 2007

Images from the train window come and go as we speed through the landscape, just as quickly as the thoughts we have about them…

Time, memory and place are recurring themes in Clough’s work, addressing inaccuracies of perception and thought. Afterimages is a mini sequel to Not Quite Here, a collaboration with Akiko Usami and Zoë Allen exploring place, actual and illusionary, exhibited at the Seven Seven Gallery, London.

This two-part installation is based on drawings made on frequent train journeys throughout Germany, France and the Czech Republic. The moving frame of a train window is used to draw landscapes in continuous motion. The pencil races in a momentary response to images that can never be completed, recording the corresponding states of mind of the artist.

A shed and a ‘half’ shed, with their tight, enclosed spaces and temporary nature have a little in common with the cabin of a train. They house a transient reality that hovers in the instant between that just past and that about to arrive. In one of the spaces llandscape sketches appear as a slideshow. Each square of light is briefly caught in time, mimicking the steady blink of the mind’s eye. Thus, this drawing installation exists as afterimages. Just as a lane curving out of sight lingers for a few seconds in your memory, or sunlight flashing through passing trees is suspended on your retina, time once moving is now briefly suspended.

About the artist:
Lee Clough graduated from Wimbledon School of Art, London and currently lives and works in Berlin. Her exhibitions to date include Not Quite Here, Seven Seven Gallery, London. Her drawings will bepublished in Bordercrossing, issue 3, the Berlin based literary magazine.

Sophie Nathan

2007-09-01T10:15:00.000-07:00

SOPHIE NATHAN
Liminal

Wednesday 12th - Monday 24th September

Liminal looks at the transformative spaces present in our daily lives. Drawing on her theatre design background, this site-specific work turns the audience into participant and asks them to enter into her liminal world. With its mix of cardboard cut-out, photo collage and drawing, Sophie Nathan’s sculptures play with notions of the 2D and 3D, the real and imagined, illusion and truth.

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Between life and death is the liminal.

I am always trying to notice the liminal space that exists everywhere; the space of transition from one state to another, from place to non-place, from existence to non existence, from the physical to the non-physical world.

Liminal as a threshold, as a non-place.

By its very nature, liminal space is fluid, ambiguous, open, and indeterminate. By trying to represent this space, I am attempting to make solid {and therefore recognisable} that which is not. This is my attempt to take something back from the liminal.

Illusions of liminal space; allusion to liminality.

My work is a narrative of the impossible. I desire to create these spaces and make them a physical reality, but simultaneously I realise this can never be. By definition, the space I long to create is one of transition. I can not make the liminal immutable, it loses all meaning once done so.

Reality of the symbolic.

My work is an inquiry into the notion that the liminal is merely symbolic and has no physical reality; that space is defined through our own frames of reference. But there are inherent properties to spaces too. Sometimes my work is a representation of a transitional state; at other times it is that point of transition; it is a virtual/physical space of action/ dislocated action.

Ritual of the liminal.

We attempt to structure the liminal through ritual, which gives the experience a place to exist. My work is an ongoing investigation into the production and reproduction of the liminal, mapping patterns and rhythms. It is an image of the fragile space between life and death.

----------- Sophie Nathan

George Morris

2007-07-01T08:36:00.000-07:00

Carnival Season
26th July - 24th August

Carnival Season presents manipulated video footage of an illuminated carnival procession. The carnival portrayed takes place annually at various locations around the rural south west of England during the autumn months.

One of the most significant impacts of the industrial revolution from the end of the 18th century onwards was the mass migration of the populace from rural areas to cities. This ‘Urbanisation’ left many rural populations decimated and under threat both socially and economically.

It has been suggested that one of the reasons for the emergence and growth of these carnivals was as a means of attracting visitors from surrounding towns and cities in an attempt to revitalise rural economies and also to bring ‘new blood’ into the dwindling communities.

By slowing the video of the procession to one fifth its actual speed another more sinister, lurid carnival is revealed with a heightened sense of ritual, disorientation, and unease.

Vita Gottlieb

2007-06-10T04:59:00.000-07:00

VITA GOTTLIEB

Travelling Space

The launch of Shed-and-a-Half Gallery was inaugurated with a series of photographs and writings by Vita Gottlieb relating to travel and the imagination. Travelling Space is a series of photographs and writing by Vita Gottlieb taken and inspired by big spaces. The main gallery space is concentrated predominantly on travels in Argentina (including eastern Patagonia) and Chile in January 2007, with images on the ceiling taken in Portugal, Jamaica, Cuba, Denmark and Italy.

The smaller shed houses three works, including ‘Aviation Sky,’ a photographic series shot in 2 hours by the Amstel canal, camera fixed on the streams of dissipating carbon trails carving their way through the sky, each trail, parallel, acute, obtuse and perpendicular to one another, sits heavily in the blue-grey sky, a graphic beauty aligned with a more ominous weight, topical fervour, and environmental essentiality. Each flight path in the sky, writing its way through air and cloud, a physical imprint of air traffic pollution, a cloud atlas, a map that says ‘this object flew majestically through space, but leaves a trail behind it.’

Vita Gottlieb’s work is inspired by travel, perspective, light and mobility; by big spaces and the state of reveristic contemplation which these spaces can inspire and illuminate. Long thoughts, long light and long distance. A depth of field and of thought. Indian summers, rooftop cities, rainforests, Breugel, offbeat rhythm, stalagmites and stalagtites, light and hue, sea anemones, impossible geometry, crisp glistening snow, musical emotion, circles, spirals, the Mobeius strip, orchids, magic realism, filigree spiral staircases, a perfect horizon, being on the brink of something beautiful and yet terrifying, jellyfish, Milan Kundera, the smell of warm musty rain in a hot place, earth from the air, cloud appreciation, the sea, galloping on sand dunes, quirky mad people, big cats, the collective consciousness of ants, jelly-fish, a perfect soprano, the smell of dust, jay feathers, gloopy rain pellets falling against a window pain, big-eyed lemurs, the word Madagascar, driving really fast on a long road, sleeping, dreaming, eating, delusional fever, heat which makes you mellow yet alert, Varanasi, khaki green, Max Roach, blackboard paint, MC Escher, soft clothes which fit perfectly, trying to conceptualise concept, Paul Noble’s mind, bright happy sunflowers, old maps, being fed in a plane, wading into the sea in tropical dusk, poetic reverie, the massiveness of the sun, magic hour anywhere, a sense of achievement on finishing something, Meursault, the smell of hot muddy wet verdant lushness on the sound of cracked thunderous rain, the Mayan Riviera, Ernst Haeckel, wobbling penguins, resonant sound, Canaletto, old film noir, my Mont Blanc pen, Coltrane, big blue skies, Jacques Derrida, charcoal and slate, staring at night into a darkened yet lit port, fabric buffeting in the wind, being in-between, Hitchcock films, downtown Manhattan, peach blossom, friendly people when you’re in a bad mood, Orang Utans, the concept and philosophy of paradox, Duke Ellington, occasional oblivion and occasional clarity, drawing patterns in condensation on dark windows, Amarone, etymology, wandering, wondering, hearing Russian, late night wet city streets, putting my leg out of the bed and on top of a cold duvet, the hotness and brightness of the sun, Steinbeck, silver gadgets, Yves Klein blue, challenging mis-conception, trains going overhead, iron gates, champagne by water, endless and effortless conversation, sailing, the last rays of the sun, mechanical things which clunk and whir, cobbles on foreign streets, new things, new places, new people, Italo Calvino, furry creatures, luminosity, lapis lazuli, a capella voices, riding motorbikes without a helmet, rustic luxury, mosquito nets, old railway clocks, Moleskin notebooks, cooking for hours for friends, loft rooms, roof gardens, candlelight, Georges Perec, seeing a great play, palm trees on the edge of the sea, Huguenot houses in Spitalfields, Oscar Wilde, playing Chopin, crispness, Georges Bataille, Coco de Mer, nebulae, walking in verdant forests, playing games, the smell of mud, dressing up, Georgian London, picnics by a river or lake, laughing uncontrollably, summer reggae at a barbecue, being surprised, patterns, endless space, crackling logs on open fires, mojitos, skydiving in an exotic location, Cuban salsa, shepherd’s pie, tree frogs, Green Wing, Garcia Marquez, floating on salt lakes, laughing with funny people, giant anteaters, mountains, gorges, the sound of a stylus on empty vinyl, which sounds like windscreen wipers on rain, flamenco guitar, the feel of titanium, sitting in silence, stargazer lilies, hot water bottles in bed, horse-riding in forests, long grass to almost hide in, hollow trees, Japanese lanterns, the ideology of revolution, trams, Palladian gardens, the smell of Diesel fume, sailing, horse chestnut trees, Medieval atmospheres, when music and emotion are the same, sleepy sunlight flickering slowly, the alien nature of the little fluffy cloud trail a plane makes as it glides across a sky, elephants, watching small insects scuttle, Vermeer, watching men at work, the smell of skunk, Copperplate writing, peace and quiet on water, the smell of a darkroom, men in White Tie, historical imagination, the amazing design of zips, volcanoes, Badedas, silverfish, the reflection of sun dancing water on the side of a boat, pigeons cooing, dragonflies, vibrations, weeping willow trees, imaginary realism, swinging in a hammock, too hot baths, softness, vastness, space.