ROKEBY
ROKEBY is a London gallery for contemporary art, opened by Beth and Edward Greenacre in 2005. Originally located in Bloomsbury, the gallery has since moved to a new location on 5-9 Hatton Wall in Clerkenwell.
Rokeby is dedicated to exhibiting work by both emerging and more established artists from the UK and beyond. The gallery works closely with carefully selected artists, developing these relationships whilst offering a flexible system of collaboration alongside exclusive representation. Rokeby is not media specific, instead the gallery is committed to championing the work of artists whose concerns and practices are pioneering and engaging with the contemporary world as a whole. Features and reviews on the gallery and the artists have appeared in Frieze, Art Forum, Art Monthly, Art Review. and British newspapers The Independent, The Guardian, The Times, and The Financial Times amongst other magazines and newspapers.
Predominantly solo exhibitions are hosted each year alongside participation in international art fairs. However, Rokeby has introduced a series of outside curated exhibitions which launched with a group show curated by critic, J.J. Charlesworth. In 2010, the gallery will host The Zero Budget Biennial curated by Joanna Fiduccia and Chris Sharp. Rokeby exhibits work by contemporary artists including Axel Antas, Bettina Buck, Sam Dargan, Erica Eyres, Simon Keenleyside, Raul Ortega Ayala, Gideon Rubin, Michael Samuels, and WITH (withyou.co.uk).
Artists
Axel Antas
Axel Antas' practice encompasses photography, drawing, video and site-specific interventions. However, regardless of medium, recent work further develops what could be considered the artists interest in the relationship between man, nature and our surroundings, in a manner that translates and transgresses our understanding of our immediate environment.
Antas has repeatedly used the landscape in which he directly intervenes as a way of measuring and understanding mans relationship to a given space. A recurring theme within the work is the slippage between our experience of, and understanding of our immediate surroundings. The artist attempts to assimilate, connect with or emphasise the distance between the individual and our surroundings.
Throughout the artists practice in an overriding mood of meditative significance; Antas places emphasis on existential questioning and our interest in, response to and relationship to, the wider natural world. The transitory aspect of his work suggests the fragility and fleeting Nature of life, however the repetition of the artists actions throughout the work nods towards the repetitive nature of life and our continued attempt to make sense of the world.
The work of Axel Antas has been exhibited internationally, recent solo exhibitions include Invention of Solitude at HIAP Gallery, Helsinki and Structures for the Unseen at Spacex Gallery, Exeter. His work has been seen in recent group exhibitions at De Vishal exhibition centre, Haarlem and the Stedelijk Museum, Lier, Belgium, LABoral,Centro de Arte y Creación Industria, Gijon, The Drawing Room, London, Aspex Gallery, Portsmouth and Fruehsorge, Berlin. Work is held in private and public collections including Kiasma, Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Saastamoisen säätiö, Kuopio Art Museum, the Helsinki City Art Museum, The Zabludowicz Collection and The Sanders Collection.
Bettina Buck
Bettina Buck’s practice is decidedly anti-modernist working with performance, assemblage, collage and reconfigurations of existing, mundane, often found materials; often recycling industrial or industrially produced components. Materials with traces of an alternative history and existence - carpet, found posters, aged foam, latex, piping – are selected, reconfigured and combined to explore the limits of form whilst recalling a history of “eccentric” sculptures. As such we can situate Buck’s practice within a contemporary re-interpretation of sculptural techniques. Throughout the work Buck understands her chosen materials unique qualities and combines disparate components with contradictory characters – rigid materials sit next to pliable, the machine-made next to the obviously hand-crafted, tactile next to repulsive, used and degraded. Combining such polarities dislocate the everyday materials from our common understanding of them, offering new readings of seemingly familiar materials. In many instances the artist offers possible readings of her work through the titles, though they typically hint at multiple readings. Combined her materials create tension and even contradictions, oscillating between beauty and repulsion and structure and formlessness to create intimate, delicate moments of uncertainty. Buck will also disrupt the encounter the viewer has with the work, carefully unsettling the physical experience - hanging works from the ceiling or selecting work to sit uncomfortably together. The artist searches for what simultaneously attracts and alienates the viewer, for work which raises questions rather than presents answers.
Buck studied at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, completing her MA at Goldsmiths College, London in 2003. Recent exhibitions have included Reaparecidos at Museo de la Ciudad in Ecuador, curated by Cecilia Canziani and Vincent Honorè and solo exhibitions at Monitor in Rome and Mirko Mayer in Cologne.
Sam Dargan
Sam Dargan paints the doomed world of jobsworth’s whose lives of monotony and abjection are grey and dismal. Transported to barren and sinister landscapes the characters are lost in scenes suggestive of abysmal teambuilding exercises gone wrong; churches burn, rivers overflow and white collars are strung up in trees in their mud splattered suits. Battling against the forces of nature and the urban streets alike the artist’s figures are somehow forlorn, the depicted adventures fragmentary, futile and incomplete. Despite the apathy and self loathing there is humour beyond the desperate situations and forlorn stances. There is always a smile on the face of the viewer; more knowing for some than others.
Erica Eyres
Erica Eyres is interested in the human condition and through her drawings and videos examines human nature, how we perceive others and how we portray ourselves to others.
In new drawings Eyres reduces romance and [...] down to something basic. Almost exclusively without clothing – the characters are drawn from 60’s and 70’s naturist source material - her figures lack identifying features and become generalizations. The new drawings suggest alternative ways of living, hinting at a utopia of sorts which questions accepted ideas surrounding monogamy and the social norms surrounding [...] and personal boundaries. As with other work the apparent banality veils a psychological complexity and cataclysmic reality.
Similarly, in her videos, Eyres often borrows from the aesthetic and artificiality of low budget television or film, but the addition of a psychological intricacy results in incongruous reactions in viewers, who express both repulsion and compassion towards the characters portrayed. In her most recent film, The Male Epidemic Eyres appropriates the genre of the ‘80’s news bulletin. All four female characters in the work – played by Eyres - epitomize stereotypes of the era, within a scenario that suggests the end of romance whilst making assumptions that the remaining female species are either [...]-obsessed, determined to fertilize themselves for the sake of humanity or prone to mass hysteria. As with all dystopian models, from Brave New World and 1984 to Margaret Atwood’s, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Male Epidemic can be read as a critique of extremes. However, Eyres' retrospective aesthetic encourages a re-interpretation of an era and a critique of the construction of a female identity.
Simon Keenleyside
Simon Keenleyside continues to examine the formal and psychological possibilities of landscape with recent paintings exploring places on the fringes of his Essex home; peripheral or marginal sites, familiar to the artist from his youth. Considerable parts of this backcountry is inhabited with remnants of former times; disused water towers, banks of crates and containers abandoned by local industries that surround the towns and bleak, abandoned buildings.
The new paintings of containers adopt a position within the genre of abstract painting and the legacy of the grid. Square containers are built upon each other, as is often seen in marginal industrial landscapes, but as with previous work Keenleyside meticulously executes the paintings in toxic colours, resulting in a formal investigation of the physical reality of structures as well as to the illusionist optics of painting. Brand new work in the exhibition includes containers emblazoned with text. Initially the text may have found its way onto the containers as graffiti or trade names but now it enunciates sanguine lyrics and lines from poetry in hard-edged letters. Such text underlines the artists close affinity to film, music and writing but also reasserts the two dimensionality of the picture surface.
A further formal device that the artist employs in the new work is the inclusion of geometrically patterned walls, which in some instances dominate the canvas, scarcely hinting at a landscape beyond. As with the grid, the prevailing motif of Modern art, these structures are used both to explore the real and what is literally and figuratively beyond and behind that reality. And as with earlier work the new canvases resonate with the shifting spaces of personal memory, which comes in part from the artist returning to the biographical sites of his childhood.
After studying for his BA at Brighton University Simon Keenleyside completed an MA in the Painting Department of the Royal College of Art. He has exhibited extensively throughout the UK and internationally in Italy, America and Denmark. In 2002 he won the BOC Emerging Artist Award and in 2004 he was the UK winner of the Lexmark European Art Prize. He has work in private and corporate collections that include The BOC Group, Comme des Garcons, Hiscox, Marsh Mclennan, Mario Testino collection and David Roberts Collection.
Raul Ortega Ayala
Raul Ortega Ayala’s art focuses on varied habitual themes, which he researches through a detailed and absorptive process for approximately a year. Once this process of exploration is over he uses the materials and experiences that he encounters to produce a group of what the artist calls, souvenirs, or components of a series. Themes such as, leisure, the office world, food and gardening have been or are being explored by the artist. One such series is the Bureaucratic Sonata, culminated in his solo exhibition at Rokeby in 2006 and more recently An Ethnography of Gardening was seen at both the Museo Experimental El Eco, Mexico City and Rokeby.
Through positioning himself as a practicing gardener within a team employed in both private and public spaces in London Ortega Ayala covertly undertook research into the world of gardening. Enabling him to take this culture as his subject he embarked upon an interdisciplinary and contextual approach to fieldwork in the everyday. The series of work that stems from the artists time as a practicing gardener is spilt into groups such as, The Public and Private, From the Imaginary to the Monstrous and Control and Compartmentalization; referring to the artists experiences and past histories associated with gardening as a cultural phenomenon.
Mexican born Ortega currently lives and works in Mexico City, he completed his MA at Glasgow School of Art in 2003, he has exhibited both in the UK and internationally, with solo exhibitions both in London and Mexico City.
Gideon Rubin
Gideon Rubin is fascinated by the course of time; in the new series of paintings the artist has used a found photograph album from the 1920’s as his source material. Rubin selects figures and scenes from these amateur and often banal snapshots that have some sort of discernible narrative but one that is open to conjecture. Installed together and independently the paintings hint at numerous narratives and histories offering no definitive reading or insight into the selected characters.
The figures and scenes move in and out of the picture plane and are embedded within layers of paint; the surface of the paintings revealing strata of previous paintings and scenes. As if entrenched in multiple histories the artist asks what it means to paint and to transplant people and objects into his selected medium. Rubin exaggerates the fact that the figures in his paintings are impossible to directly identify with, both physically and historically, rather, he offers the viewer overlapping and competing temporalities.
Often any facial features or details are effaced and in so doing Rubin not only instills his characters and scenes with multiple potential narratives but also reveals the inadequacies of painting. In bringing paintings representational possibilities and its self-reflective qualities within reach of each other Rubin asks the viewer to consider the act of painting and its legacy.
Michael Samuels
Michael Samuels tests the boundaries and our preconceived ideas of objects and space, presence and absence and fiction and reality. Interested in sculptures formal language and its material presence, Samuels uses furniture sourced for its distinctive quality and appearance and reconstructs it through experiments in form, colour and placement.
Reconstructed and refigured, sliced and spliced, the new forms created by the artist are deprived of their original function. Rather, they take the form of monumental and playful structures fulfilling ambitions beyond their sole purpose. Tables balance precariously upon each other, formal shapes are cut from tabletops only to reappear elsewhere, table legs, free from their original role, pervade new territory, whilst other tabletops are united so that colours sit alongside each other forming contrived hybrid surfaces. In many instances coloured light and LED’s are incorporated into the arrangements, so that everyday Anglepoise lamps sit upon dysfunctional tabletops casting carefully selected coloured light which at once infiltrates space and questions what sculpture can be.
Michael Samuels graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2000. He has exhibited throughout the UK, including the Millenium Galleries in Sheffield, The Northern Gallery of Contemporary Art, Gasworks, The Pump House and the Djanogly Gallery and has been nominated for this year Jerwood Contemporary Painters. Samuels has had solo exhibitions at the Architectural Association and this is his second solo exhibition at Rokeby. Internationally, he has exhibited in China, America and Europe; his work can currently be seen in Idylle at the National Gallery in Prague, later in the year he has solo exhibitions in America and Berlin. His work is in international collections including The Zabludowitz Collection and the collection of David Roberts.
WITH (withyou.co.uk)
WITH position themselves as a self-help company (www.withyou.co.uk ) that provides a range of Life Enhancement Solutions™ created by a team of agents for their clients. Examples of such services include TRAUMAFORMER™ where agents create and live out a traumatic experience on the clients behalf and VIOLENTOME™ where an agent will assume a clients identity and perform delegated violent acts. A new range of solutions have been created for 2008 including OBESITTING™ where an agent consumes everything a client chooses to give up and CONTENTIMENT™ where an agent lives an ideal version of your future. There are over 25 such solutions described on the website that are positioned between conceptual art and corporate satire. Each product dissects our obsessions, questions our principles and challenges our economic ideals.
Doug Fishbone
Doug Fishbone's installation, video and performance works place the viewer in an awkward position. In his video’s and performance’s the artist more often than not ransacks Google Image Search to illustrate — and undermine — his arresting, repulsive and undeniably amusing monologues on contemporary media and our cultural, social and political (sub)life.
The artist’s monologues use structures that seem to evoke the contexts and strategies of a variety of speakers, from the bad stand-up comic, to self-help tapes, psychiatrist’s consultations, corporate babble and drinking partners. Moving between these modes of discourse, the artist adopts contradictory positions, telling stories, truisms and cliches alongside bad jokes and sordid details. His position constantly shifts, narrating grey areas between our perceived notions of fact and fiction, myth and propaganda, comedy and advertising.
Famous for filling Trafalgar Square with 30,000 bananas, artist Doug Fishbone was recently selected for the British Art Show 6, a national touring exhibition held every five years to feature the best in contemporary British art. His work was included in the exhibition “Laughing in A Foreign Language” at the Hayward Gallery earlier this year. Fishbone was born in Brooklyn, New York; graduating from Goldsmiths in 2003 he now lives and works in London.
Doug Fisbone is not represented by Rokeby.
References
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