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Cover image
Back to Schooldays
Rowson's Comment
Around the Block
News in Brief
Stop the War
Mini-march
Lysistrata Day
Fringe Festival
Straight to the Point
Time to Finnish
Day in the Nick
Starting Over
Readers Letters
Herbal Cleansing
Local Music
Tripping Out
Tippling at the Tup
Property
Housing Matters
Very Testi
Art Happenings
Vietnamese Food
Entertainment
Gardening
Marathon Man
Surfing N16
Man in North Bank
Xword

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Photographs transforming place into character, mortality playing itself out in minimalist grids, ceramic pods like vessels of imagination and memory. Just a snapshot of Stokey visual arts this Spring…

If geography was the mapping of personality, what would the cartographer make of the Auld Shillelagh? A question posed by renowned photographer Seamus Ryan in his series of portraits of regulars and locals, currently on rotated display there. The sitters are photographed frontally and without idealisation. Instantly engaging, together they suggest a tapestry of interconnected personal histories; lines on faces become enigmatic signs for the fullness of lived time that has steeped these subjects with character. The uniqueness of each sitter guides us to think of people not as objects or things, but rather as ‘ways of happening’. The passing of time is stilled in the photographic instant, but what has been before and what lies behind those eyes are not fixed so swiftly.

Time’s passing, and a subsequent sense of loss and contemplation imbues the abstract paintings of Sawako Ando, a Stoke Newington based artist whose show, Temporal Schem,a is at the Century Gallery in Shoreditch from 9 – 19 April. Using a minimalist pictorial language of dots organized on a hand-drawn grid, Ando employs repetition to focus attention on the difference between repeated elements. In places the dots are fully formed and mature, in others they seem to waste away in smoky wisps of ink washes. Adjusting to the reduced language of her paintings, a deep and reflective sense of sadness accompanies the subtle depletions of forms. Reading these abstract images metaphorically, we might regard them as meditations on Time’s corrosive power, on transience and mortality. Here is an affective engagement with a ‘schema’ shared by us all.

Different schemata are the field of Charles Danby’s enquiry in his forthcoming show entitled ‘defgh o st’, to be held at The Kiosk Project (28 March-27 April). The title is made from a sequential selection of letters from the alphabet to form the phonetic script of ‘deaf’ and the word ‘ghost’. This conceptual motif introduces a concern with the structure of language: we speak and write with means that are pregiven; we use letters, words and grammars that are readymade and which we are therefore only able to repeat.

Danby’s work combines craft and conceptualism: a model rollercoaster with elements of track missing – we are given the structure of the ride (through life?), yet must connect for ourselves the metaphorical ‘highs and lows’. A hand-written story gives us structures of experience (speeds, visibility, brief indicators of feeling), but leaves the content largely to the imagination of the reader. How much of our understanding of the world and of the words of others is formed by such projection and reading-in?

A retrospective of the late Kathleen Paenson has just finished at the Vortex. Recalling Impressionists such as Morisot, Cassatt and Degas, the selection is dominated by a concern for enduring themes of maternity, intimacy and the vitality of nature. Celebrating emotional empathy and human connection, Paenson died before completing a work entitled The Blessed Ordinariness of Being. Paenson’s more expressionist designs for theatre posters and masks will be exhibited at the Arcola Theatre in June. An exhibition of contemporary art, entitled ‘As I see It’, by Jo George runs at the Vortex until 7 April.

At the Ranch on Bouverie Road, Mandee Gage creates and displays her hive-like, hollow ceramic pods; illuminated from within, they are punctuated with spy-holesto allow glimpses of the objects and offerings placed inside (see photograph). Tempting and rewarding the curious eye, Gage’s works are like vessels of some imaginative territory, treasure troves of the throwaway and the transient, resonant with an internal landscape of dream, symbol and lyrical memory.

The Igloo Gallery on Church Street shows a selection of easel paintings including work by Mike Bishop, Sophie Knight and Adrian Taylor. Pirasteh Courang shows
photographs of her native Spanish townscapes and landscapes, worked over with paint, at Ryan’s Bar until end April. Ryan’s are also hosting nights of music and visual projections once a month (check with Ryan’s for details).

Teresa Mills has an exhibition, entitled Splash, at the Reservoir Centre between 6 and 12 April. Her sculptures and films draw on Buddhist and Eastern influences (for details phone 020 7502 0386).

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