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Indepth Arts News:
"The Stars Down to Earth: Selected by Andrew Hunt"
2006-06-24 until 2006-07-22
Bow Arts Trust and Nunnery Gallery
London, ,
UK United Kingdom
This year’s annual Bow Arts Trust exhibition, which opens to the public at East London’s Nunnery Gallery in Bow on Saturday June 24, has been selected by curator and art writer Andrew Hunt. The show, entitled ‘The Stars Down to Earth’, features the work of seventeen artists picked from amongst over ninety members of the Bow Arts Trust, and will run for one month, closing on July 22. The exhibition includes diverse elements, from video documentation and sculpture to formal painting. The title of the show is taken from a collection of essays by Theodor Adorno, and was initially sparked by two separate works. The first of these, Remaking the Planetarium, is a large domed structure made of doors and other reclaimed material by Alan Bond. This will dominate the largest of the Nunnery’s three galleries. The second work by Daniel Lehan consists of a number of framed pages from the artist’s personal diary. Each page contains an entry by Lehan along with a corresponding astrological prediction from a national newspaper.
Around half of the artists present work in the form of installation, mixed media, sculpture or video. These include Giles Corby’s Floor piece Underworld, Brignell and Raimes’ DVD footage of inner and outer space, Maslen and Mehra’s lightbox showing a photograph of a mirrored figure in a Death Valley landscape, Susannah Hewlett’s absurdly theatrical video works and Danny Pockets’ posters featuring blue plastic bags caught in trees.
The other half of the artists are painters. Amongst these is Gordon Cheung, who shows dystopic images of buildings and architecture painted onto a ground of newspaper. Another painter, Dawn Shorten has produced a small series of cloud formations that convey a feeling of suspended reality. Also showing smaller scale paintings are David Saunders, Mandy Hudson, and Robin Dixon, while some large abstract works are presented by Ruth Solomons, Deborah Crofts and Tomoya Yamaguchi, whose repeated motif of white concentric circles on a black ground somehow indicates a cosmic or spiritual concern.
‘It was a real pleasure to select this year’s exhibition’ said Andrew Hunt. ‘And I was very lucky in that a large number of the artists offered up work for the exhibition. If there is a creative side needed in the selector’s role it is the ability to recognise links between works and to allow these qualities to be brought out of their own accord, rather than projecting any existing set of theoretical or formal criteria onto the situation.’
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