Press Release
Blow My Skirt Up
Works by 12 contemporary artists
Blow my skirt up is immediate, temporal. The expression informs directly and by default. The shadow of Marilyn in her white dress hovers. She's sexy – let's celebrate. Perhaps there is something alluring about the shadow of masculinity falling across feminism now.'
Jo Melvin, foreword 'Blow My Skirt Up'
In contemporary London vernacular, 'Blow my skirt up' identifies the temporary and the joyful. The work on show is an outburst of twelve artists, who all live or work in the city, but who are also all migrants to the metropolis. As well as disparate biographies the artists have vastly differing interests and ways of working. The show defies any attempt to be shoehorned into a theme or defined by the 'collective' of participants. As Melvin notes, the artists 'become like an open discussion where what happens occurs without first seeking to establish an arbitrary connectivity before the event.'
Here slippage and disjuncture are celebrated. Shoko Maeda's landscape-portrait photographs contrast with the personal imagery of Gisele Nzolameso. Judith Waring's work investigates the personal adversity of a long-distance swim. The abstract painter Annelie Fawke shows work alongside an enigmatic series of expressionist paintings by Sophy Smith. The third painter, Bernice Wilson, exhibits both photographs and canvases. Large neo-minimalist cardboard structures by Susan Forsyth are on show with Sue-Jin Lee's stacked Rubik's Cubes, half hidden inside the gallery wall space. Donna Marris's wall-based installations occupy a space between both painting and sculpture. Kwang Sung Hong's elegant collages on paper operate adjacent to Diana Rodriguez's ephemeral text-rich work. The ultimate conceptual disappearing act occurs in the work of Danielle Sachar who, in adopting the role of installer of other artists’ work, creates a practice that is at once both highly visible and unseen.
In her closing remarks Melvin quotes the feminist theorist Lucy Lippard who exhorts us to 'pay attention to the art rather than to the superficial framework'.
We can hear Marilyn's skirt begin to lift in ghostly agreement.
For more information and all sales enquiries please contact
Danielle Sachar (daniellesachar@hotmail.co.uk 07748 963 100)
