"E9: An Anatomy of an Area"
2004-10-16 until 2004-11-16
Transition
London, , UK United Kingdom

A small corner of East London comes under the magnifying glass, as the postal district that the gallery happens to be in becomes the theme for this show. Curiously this specificity becomes universal as the details that the artists focus on could be from any urban neighbourhood. A chance meeting in a park, street furniture, overgrown corners of wilderness.

These eclectic urban musings and jumbled city thoughts are neither sensational, nor shocking but by their very ordinariness they connect to something beautifully strange and profound. With this trawling through both the badlands and the genteel gentrified areas of E9, the exasperating, cursed tangle of this churned up city* gives up its ghostly melancholies revealing a hinterland of hidden delights.

Clie Brandon quite literally maps the E9 area by walking around its boundaries in the manner of some miniature urban Grand Tour. The resultant paintings and drawings are determined by a combination of conceptual parameters and random meanderings, giving equal importance to the banal, the ugly and the picturesque. Tania McCormack makes numerous bus journeys and walks, recording her experiences in trembly, scribbly, freehand line drawings and embroideries on bus tickets, postcards and paper. The immediacy of these direct responses, not filtered through a photographic or pondered axis, recall the quixotic, drifting nature of the visual experience of a journey.

Gary O’Connor is interested in the ‘space between reality and the imaginary’. For E9 his starting point is Victoria Park - the place where his parents first met. From here he creates a quasi-imaginary narrative work that includes writing, sound and T-shirts and incorporates influences from Suffragettes to Situationists. Mike Perry’s large-scale photographs focus on the intersection of city and wilderness by turning their gaze to the urban brown-fields of Hackney Wick’s canal district. The result is a series of dreamy, empty landscapes that record this transitory area before it is swallowed up by proposed redevelopment.

IMAGE
Tania McCormack
Untitled

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