"
Push The Boat Out" is a group show curated by James F Johnston and Harry Pye with Amelie Lindsay taking place in South London for one week only.
Push The Boat Out takes place in the last week of July at
The Art Academy Newington in The Walworth Road.The private view will be on
Wednesday from 5 till 9pm On Thursday 26th & Friday 27th the show is open from 10:30 till 18:30. On Saturday 28th the gallery is open 11 till 5pm and some of the artists from the show will be talking about their work with
Sacha Craddock Saturday the 28th July from 3pm till 5pm. The gallery is open 11am - 5pm Monday 30th gallery is open from 10:30 till 18:30.
Gordon Beswick: "While playing the ‘don’t step on the crack’ game with my daughter on our daily walk to her primary school, I became fascinated by the patterns and geometry of the surrounding streets and buildings. These shapes, forms and patterns have informed my recent paintings. I also think this old rhyme and superstition reflects the often obsessive nature of painting. My latest series of paintings reference the urban landscape, modernist architecture, contemporary culture and elements of the natural environment. Many of the paintings are based on photographs I have taken of parts of East London and Elephant & Castle where redevelopment and gentrification are rapidly changing the local communities. I am interested in themes of abstraction, connectivity and inequality. Modernist painting, pop art and geometric art all influence my work."
For more info visit:
Gordon
Corin Johnson:"I started drawing as a boy but discovered I have an aptitude for it when I was studying for O levels. My tastes in art are extremely broad: I particularly like Egyptian art ,German Expressionism , Religious art ,Gothic and Baroque sculpture , outsider and Shamanistic art and all manner of contemporary work. The natural world is very important to me and I am drawn to working with natural materials like clay ,plaster, stone , marble and wood .I sometimes like to use colour too. Sometimes I use materials in a way they were used in ancient times other times I take a more modern approach .A lot of my pieces are figurative. I like to sometimes work from life and have a model , but other times I work purely from my imagination .I like representing animals too. Often I will sketch an idea , then I may produce a maquette to work from ,or sometimes I will simply work directly on the sculpture with little or no reference .That can largely depend on whether there is a brief for a commission or not. I do like a lot of sacred art from all faiths / backgrounds and I like to try and imbue my work with a spirit of life." For more info visit:
Corin
James F Johnston: - "Painting can be an opportunity to escape to another place, and hopefully create one too. Intense little worlds that reflect our subconscious, the loves, worries, joys and sadnesses, blurring past and present in dreamlike open visual metaphors. I began painting on a long music tour, fighting tedium and a musical block, hoping to free my imagination up. Initially working small in hotel rooms, and subsequently painting becoming an obsessive and prolific daily practice. I work from snapshots, found images, ideas from literature, dreams and the imagination - mostly without preparatory sketches, and often simply suggested by initial paint marks. Many of the pictures are scenes of isolation, landscapes both nature and urban, and are simply and descriptively titled to leave any narrative or metaphorical reading open, drawing inspiration from expressionist painting, neo-expressionism, folk art and medieval art." For more info visit:
James
Nicola Hicks: ""Nicola Hicks's sculpture and drawing practice has focused upon heroic, humanized animals and mythic, beast-like humans. From the moment she burst upon the wider public stage, there has been no doubting her remarkable talent. While still at the Royal College of Art, she quickly established an immediate presence among the artists of her generation as a serious and substantial figure. She was remarkable on every count, for she flew in the face of the critical expectations of those days not just in the nature of the actual imagery she celebrated--figurative, romantic and expressive--but also in the direct and gleeful joy she took in the physical making of these things." For more info visit:
Nicola
Cedar Lewisohn: "I am an artist, curator and writer. In my studio practice I am interested in Modernist art history and how it was influenced by “ethnographic” artworks from Africa. I have for the last three years been researching various museum collections around the UK and Europe looking at examples of these various artworks, both ethnographic and Modernist, which I reinterpret in my own visual style. I explore this idea of consumption of culture from a black British perspective. My work has recently looked at the marginalisation of the black body and the black experience both within Modernist art history, and within the contemporary psyche. This relates to the politics of the image and integrating the image. In practical terms my practice takes various forms. I make large and small scale wood carving as well as other types of print making and drawing. In 2015 I worked on a major project for the Jan Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, NL, making a series of very large scale book objects. The project took as its starting point research into museum collections and Modernist artworks which referenced African imagery or culture. These art historical images were seen in museums collections in the Limberg region as well as other nearby locations around Europe. For The Black Book (2015), these artworks I saw were re-drawn almost entirely in black creating images which verge on pure abstraction, but also hinting at figuration. A selection of these images was turned into a huge scale artist book/sculpture. The hand-made books have been screen printed using a unique printing method where drawings are directly turned into screens for printing, with no pixilation. The books were hand bound in Nijmegen, a city with an important history in relation to book binding. One of The Black Books has recently gone into Tate’s archive collection. In 2017 I had an exhibition at Exeter Phoenix. The show explored the collection of The Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM). I worked closely with RAMM’s curator of ethnographic collections to explore the history of a group of mainly West African objects in the museum’s collection. I was interested to explore the history of the objects and how they travelled from West Africa to Exeter. Using this historic research as a starting point, I made a series of drawing of the objects. These drawings where then used as the starting point for a collaboration with a costume maker, who turned the drawings into costumes. The costumes where then used in a short film (Ndungu, Isca, 2017 ), filmed at various historic sites in Exeter. The title of the film, Ndungu Isca, reefers to one of the West African objects I was inspired by, as well as the Roman name for Exeter, Isca. This mixing of various histories, locations told through museum collections and their hidden stories is central in my work." For more info visit:
Cedar
Morrissey & Hancock: "Patrick Morrissey utilises a modular language to promote an appearance of gradual mutation. Permutating numerical sequences are used in the process of creating images which are febrile, seemingly operating between two and three dimensions. This process leads to a kinetic binary outcome which can either be modified, controlled or left to accrue randomly. In every instance, the intention is not to present an identifiable focal reference point, but rather,to induce in the viewer, a visual and physiological saturation of consciousness. ‘The feeling of a durational changing space is critical to Patrick Morrissey’s work. He employs numerical systems, juxtaposing trapezoids, rhombuses and parallelograms in a ‘meandering geometry’. The works seem to respond to the possibilities in projected imagery, light, monumentality and sequential / serial development. For Morrissey the idea of playback or obliteration of content from continuous playing opens up the notion of an after-image, either from the modality of the past or from the experience of pure colour saturation in varying systems." (Laurence Noga 2017) "
Hanz Hancock’s work is derived from the use of numerical sequences that create a rudimentary code which ultimately creates variable, mandala-like imagery in his drawing, painting and constructions The picture plane is galvanized into a series of alternating planes which are evanescent in appearance, but never typically 'kinetic'. Structures that form in the close mesh of drawn lines coalesce and dissipate, and are metaphors for the transient nature of geometric form found in the natural and built environment." For more info visit:
Morrissey
Kate Murdoch: "Kate Murdoch works predominantly in the medium of assemblage, collage and installation. Her work centres around a lifelong passion for collecting. Found objects, images and other materials, mostly from the everyday and dating from the last century, are modified, transformed or placed together so that they retain a sense of their original function, but also assume new meaning. Work presented for 'Pushing the Boat Out' reflects Murdoch's interest in objects as clear indicators of the passage of time. Steeped in social and political history, the selected images and objects open up opportunities for personal and political discussion, particularly around issues of class, privilege and value and worth. Wider themes of loss and remembrance are also explored, reflecting Murdoch's fascination with the permanence of objects versus the fragility of human existence." For more info visit:
Kate
Harry Pye: "I studied Fine Art Printmaking at Winchester School of Art. I didn’t start painting till 15 years ago which was around the time I turned 30. Art has been a means of finding out how I feel about people and things. It’s also stopped me feeling bored and lonely and that everything is pointless. My paintings often cheer me up. Recently I’ve been working on a transcription of a Van Gogh painting called The Painter on the Road to Tarascon. I’m hoping to exhibit a new painting based on the Van Gogh painting and also a very large painting I made in collaboration with Gordon Beswick which is of Chris Packham and is also a part homage to Van Gogh’s
Starry Starry Night." For more info visit:
Harry
How to get to The Art Academy Newington...
Q) Where did you grow up and what kind of education did you receive?
"I grew up in a small town just outside Bilbao, in Northern Spain. I made it all the way to Uni but I got restless and dropped out during my first year as I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life! Because I was studying English at the time, I decided to come to London to practice the language as the perfect excuse for an adventure… And 24 years later, I am still here."
Q) How long have you been working at the Tate and what's the best show you've seen there?
"Time flies at the speed of light. I have been working at Tate for almost 14 years now as a Visitor and Information Assistant and many great and not so great exhibitions have come and gone in that time. If you are sensitive to things, you can always pick up on something that can be inspirational or technically revealing, even if the themes or the visual content is not your thing. One that sticks out ( and it is a blatant and shameless source of inspiration for my painting at Inside Job ) is the Lichtenstein retrospective a few years ago. I was in heaven for over 3 months, as he is one of my art heroes. Being in the space surrounded by all those iconic works and much more was so uplifting, I think I cried inside when the show came to an end! I loved POP LIFE as an exhibition too, and all the little controversies that came with it. It was brimming with light and colour and cheekiness and clever stuff. I like art that gets people talking and it’s a bit provocative sometimes!"
Q) What can you tell me about the work that you exhibited in the Tate Modern show?
"My painting for INSIDE JOB is called WE ROSE UP SLOWLY and as I mentioned earlier, it is directly inspired by one of pop art’s iconic images created by Roy Lichtenstein. I decided to create a brand new work for the exhibition rather than apply with something that was ready made. I had about 5 weeks to finish the large canvas and I enjoyed the deadline factor of it. In the original, we have your standard square jawed American hunk and pretty girl from the 1950s about to embrace in this dreamlike setting. What I did as a personal twist is remove the girl and swap her for another ginger hunk. I subverted the conventional expectation and added my own personal and visual experience as a gay man in the XXI century. The image is very pop and bright and looks like a fragment out of a comic book or graphic novel. I retained the original text which gives the piece its title. I had a lot of fun and it was a thrill to experience people’s reaction and feedback to it during the running of the exhibition.
I love it that Tate has such emphasis on diversity and inclusion, I wanted to celebrate that support that I have felt all these years by including some boy on boy romance!"
Q) How can people find out more about your work - do you have a website or do Instagram?
"I am currently in the process of creating a website for my creative output ( I think this is many artists’ Achilles heel, the working on the promotional side of things when you’d rather be creating!! ) but as it stands right now, Instagram is a bit my home for showcasing old and new stuff. I enjoy the immediacy of it and you can get to know me and my work a little bit better through it. My profile name there is iggstamatic."
Q) What's the best thing about working for the Tate?
"The best thing about working at Tate is not just one thing but many. First and quite importantly, it gives me the flexibility to keep creating and making more of my art as I am now part time and the work-leisure-creative balance has been pretty much achieved nicely ( always room for improvement on this one, obviously ) . Also being exposed to all these new exhibitions and display changes, it is a luxury and privilege that we cannot really take for granted. I have my eyes peeled for anything all those artists may be able to give me in terms of technical knowledge and experience and all kinds of new tips that I could incorporate to my artistic practice at some point.The atmosphere at work is most of the time chilled and relaxed and we are really a big family and that is a great thing to remember. All families have their little moments obviously but I feel at home here so that says it all really."
"Inside Job": An exhibition of art by Tate Staff took place on Level 6 of the Blavatnik Building of Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1 9TG
