THE SASSOON GALLERY curated by pat and trevor

The work of boyleANDshaw is populated by a variety of conceptual personae. Their recent work has semi-fictionalized Wakefield born boxer Paul Sykes. At his peak Sykes was a top professional who toured the US with Don King but ended up a homeless alcoholic in his hometown and died last year.

For this exhibition boyleANDshaw are presenting an installation combining film and sculpture. Incorporating their film Paul Rest In Peace (2007), the setting for which is a city centre building site in Birmingham. In part of the film we see the central character, played by Shaw, building a memorial for Paul from discarded granite paving blocks. The installation will include a sculptural reconstruction of the memorial using reclaimed granite cobble stones.

boyleANDshaw is a collaboration between Adrian R Shaw and Matthew Boyle. They describe themselves as ‘local catalysts’ working with a broad range of mediums including film, performance, painting, drawing and sound. Their method is of approach is experimental and playful, often taking the form of a happening. Taking up the Deleuzian challenge to “hazard an improvisation”.

Private view - Thursday 1st May, 6-9pm

Exhibition open daily, 12-6pm

32 Interactive Design and Moving Image students from London College of Communication explore ‘desire lines’ in and around The Sassoon Gallery.

The environment around the gallery is ripe for interactivity; the train line running over head, the large glass front of the gallery, sliding doors on the bar, markets in Peckham, etc. Miscallanious heavy tings will no doubt be taken into account when the 32 students explore the space.

This is an experiment for both course and gallery.

An example of desire lines.

| Tim Bennett | Jorge Cabieses Valdes | Stephanie Chabot |
| Kyoko Kanda | Robin Kirsten | Christl Mudrak |

The title of this exhibition is a figurative misreading of a quote borrowed from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s book Tender is the Night, originally written “fire-red, gas-blue, ghost-green signs”. Unpunctuated, the descriptive sentence becomes a rhythmic phrase, a series of ideograms naturally punctuated by the silent spaces that compartmentalize each image-word. This literary excerpt is composed: a staccato of words colliding with one another to create poetic connections broken up by subsequent associations between conflicting pairs of words so that each term stands autonomously within the sequence as a multiple sign. Charged by its relationship with the other words in the phrase, each term is also perceived singularly so that the range of its possible referents extends beyond the confines of the phrase’s contextual specificity.

Such is how the works of Tim Bennett, Jorge Cabieses Valdes, Stephanie Chabot, Kyoko Kanda, Robin Kirsten and Christl Mudrak, will come together as part of the exhibition. “Fire red gas blue ghost green signs”, as a title, is meant to be a metaphor, the best no-good stand in for a show, which, as any other, by nature, always remains to be seen rather than talked around or explained away.

Sweet Monument brings together two young and exciting painters from the shortlists of the Jerwood Painting Prize and Saatchi’s 4 New Sensations 2007.

Jonathan Stubbs and Louise Thomas draw inspiration from both the ephemeral and the eternal. While Jonathan’s work points towards the metaphysical infinite, a space beyond, Louise paints a world abandoned by it. One transcends the material and dares to imagine a presence invisible. One celebrates emptiness, not denying the ghost, but content to linger in the monuments alone. Both, in lament and testament, paint the edifices that men leave behind, solid and passionate, they capture the silence that surrounds both the ruin and its maker.

Jonathan builds his world from dark caverns with glittering ceilings to classical ruins bathed in neon light: the ghostly structures standing as symbols of mortality, reflecting the absence of humanity. Paintings that shimmer, decay and glow in the dark like jewels.

Louise Thomas’ environments are spectacular, in one way or another, majestic and excessive, structures desperate to impress their power, their strength and purpose. Yet when deserted and left to spoil they become the fading signs of human caprice, embarrassed, ashamed and forgotten.
Text: William Lilley, 2008

Private view - Wednesday 11th June, 6-9pm

Exhibition open daily, 12-6pm

www.jonathanstubbs.co.uk
www.louisethomas.org

More information to follow.

More information to follow soon.