Ferdinand Evaldsson

Fight Flight Freeze

Painted wood relief. Gelatin, pigment &

eggtempera on linden

200 x 200 x 6 cm

2024

Frances Drayson

baby girl final rotation

Plaster, plastic milk bottles, steel, fibreglass, polyester lace, cotton, poly cotton, shirring elastic, polyurethane foam

Dimemsions variable

2024

SO

“sometimes I think he’s an alien. I remember how, when he was three or four, he furiously stomped a beetle to death in front of the dacha. But kids do that… Or when on new years eve, stood by the window looking at Father Frost down on the street and asked where he was going. I said “only to NICE children” and then felt guilty because nobody would come to us.”

In school he and some boys were caught chewing gum and having their shirts untucked. As punishment they were banned from Little Octobrists. Another time, when I had a headache and was bedridden, he had to write “Communist” one hundred times in cursive. He had his back towards me, with the notebook on the windowsill and when I came to have a look he had written “Cummunist” the whole way.

His father didn’t want anything to do with him before the age three. Before that children are uninteresting, he said. But later he taught him how to draw and gave him lessons in art history and helped him get admitted to the Soviet Artists Union as their youngest ever member. Even to participate in a group show at Krymsky Val.

“I’d like you to meet someone very interesting” Vlad said as we stood in the endless escalator heading up at Shchyolkovskaya. This person was you. And you had dark hair, brown eyes, wore sandals and a lumberjack shirt. Your voice was almost nasal and you didn’t say much, as you guided us to your studio which was one of many in a corridor. One of your studio neighbours had a pet turtle and the other painted large portraits of Lenin on commission. Both were very friendly.

We sat down surrounded by finished and unfinished portraits. You talked about your work, that you wanted to leave the Soviet Union. You liked horses and temporarily had a job at the Moscow Hippodrome. Early one morning, before it opened, you let me drive laps on the enormous racetrack in a Sulky. Late in the night we went swimming, in a pond that smelt like gasoline in a park that belonged to Brezhnev. Three weeks later we decided to get married.

But where were you? My mom wanted to meet you. She and I came to Moscow at easter, you didn’t pick up. I left the hotel and went to your studio. Lyonya, with the turtle, said you were in a hospital. Why was unclear but you had cut yourself and your mother had left her number in case I got in touch. So I called. We met at metro station and she told me about you. If I’d known I would’ve warned you, she said. “About what?” I thought.

I took a taxi to the hospital. You were dressed in a blue hospital gown and very beautiful. Outside the sun was fire-red and when I told you my mom was waiting at the hotel you got up and sent me to get a bottle of wine to bribe the doctor, so that we could sneak out. I saw a glimpse of the grid pattern you’d carved into your stomach when you got dressed. But, I only asked why later, when the scars had become pale white lines.

Mom felt completely at home in your studio, holding a glass of whiskey. You were at your most lovable and addressed her by her actual first name, Anne-Marie, which made her happy. I only drank soda not to jeopardise the pregnancy. He was on his way, you could already see a roundness on my belly.

At Yalta, where we had gone on our honeymoon, you earned money by drawing portraits of tourists. You were very honest in your expression, which those portrayed weren’t too happy about. “I can only show you what I see…” you said. We rented a rowboat and and headed out on the Black Sea. You kept wanting to go further out. I protested, but kept rowing. Suddenly you bit yourself in the arm. I shouted and pleaded for you to stop, but you wouldn’t.

The next moment you threw yourself overboard. You were a good swimmer, but we were outside the perimeter and soon a guard in a motorboat drove up and demanded you get up. At the police station in Gursuf they shook their heads at “Moscow manners” and wanted a small bribe to let you go.

Back in Moscow we walked along the streets and you took me to the art museum and showed me their byzantine collection, your main interest. You explained angles and perspective, said you have to be bold and as we were walking you’d grab my shoulder and point “look how beautifully she’s reaching out the window…!” We ate at a restaurant and you addressed the old maitre d’ as “father”. “I’m not your father” he said but you just laughed. We listened to Alexandr Vertinsky who sang about the sailors who wouldn’t sing of the island on which a giant blue tulip grows. About the rejected lover’s last meal with their beloved, and the dumb, lonely poor girl who was crucified in cocaine on the snow-slushy streets of Moscow.

“Paris!” you exclaim while pulling the curtains in the hotel room overlooking the Neva river in Leningrad. You dancingly strut a few steps across the room and say you have the body of a ballet dancer.

“He used to only dress in black” Vlad said. “And he gave away all his books and possessions as a cleanse”. He’d been inspired by Dostoyevsky and would start afresh from zero. One day he attacked a police officer who stood directing traffic in a crossing. He wanted to get his gun in order to hijack an airplane and leave the country. Instead he was committed.

Hot summer days Moscow has a specific sweet smell. You walk down the street humming “There in Tahiti a girl dances by Bounty Bay…”

Written by Janina Orlov

For the exhibition by Sergey Orlov at St. Chads Penton Rise

Cristiano Di Martino

‘Borrowed Time’

Earthenware Glazed Ceramic, Steel

36x46x27cm

2024

‘Untitled’

Earthenware glazed ceramic, steel

42x56x34cm

>>>PIECES

This is not the whole story. The Hunters Enter the Woods is one of The Unicorn Tapestries, seven early modern  Flemish tapestries currently in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum in New York.

The Met places The Hunters Enter the Woods as the first in the sequence. But the tapestries are famously shrouded in mystery and speculation; questions remain open about the order of the sequence, whether there are any missing pieces, and whether these seven tapestries ever really constituted a unified set.

This isn’t the whole story, clearly. The hunters are not even in the woods yet. The main event of the unicorn, which appears in all the other Unicorn Tapestries, is still out of shot here. We’re at the edge of the forest, and we’re still on the periphery of the heroic narrative of the hunt.

Sam Keogh’s collage installation and performance The Hunters Enter the Woods Cartoon takes the peripheral scene of the hunters entering the woods as a starting point, before cutting to a close-up on the peripheral figures of the page boys.

In the original tapestry, these pages have been tasked with guiding and facilitating the noblemen on their unicorn hunt. The noblemen, who appear in fine, colourful garb with elaborate plumage on their hats, are the main characters. This is their hunt. Their story. Their spears and hounds. But the wealthy tell their story as if it’s the whole story, when it isn’t.

What happens if the story is told by the minor characters of the pages instead? Follow the gazes of the page boys, and find yourself led outside the edges of the pictorial frame. The plot wanders off, beyond the familiar framing, as the spectacle of aristocratic heroism is decentered and made peripheral.

As with all large-scale tapestries from this period, The Unicorn Tapestries would have been extremely expensive. Objects like these were commissioned by the wealthy merchant and aristocratic classes – and since it was their money, the pictures had to tell their stories of morality and conquest and grandeur.

But The Hunters Enter the Woods Cartoon zooms in on a part of the woven image, to find alternative plot threads that lead beyond its frame. There are always ways to look at images while looking at the limits of their frameworks. Always ways to digress from the main plot; to puncture its semblance of wholeness, to misread its details, and to follow tangents that lead outside the limits of its frame.

As with other pieces in Keogh’s Unicorn Tapestries Cartoons series, The Hunters Enter the Woods Cartoon explores the form of the preparatory cartoon in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

To make pictorial tapestries in this era, artists would start with 1:1 sketches on paper – preliminary cartoon fragments or “working drawings” that allowed them to figure out the elements of the scene and its overall composition.

In the final tapestry, the various image parts have been fixed in place, and flattened into a unified pictorial plane. But through the preliminary phase of the working drawing, Keogh enters into an image ecology of layers and seams and gaps and shifting relations.

The parts are still very much parts; they can be moved around and reassembled, maintaining a sense of disjuncture that also recalls early twentieth-century forms of collage, where found image fragments are brought into new hybrid entities.

Part of the appeal of the collaged image is that it maintains a sense of awkwardness in the relation of the parts to the whole.

The stitches in a tapestry are parts brought together to make whole pictures, just as the pixels on my screen are bundled together to form the letters I’m typing... But pixels and tapestry stitches are supposed to add up to a sense of smooth coherence, with the separateness of the tiny parts disappearing into the greater whole.

In contrast, Keogh’s collage-based installations bring disparate parts into alternative, busted wholes – in ways that feel provisional and propositional.

The seams between the parts are always visible; bits are pieced onto other bits with blue tape that doesn’t try to disappear.

Coherence is continually undone, and spaciousness is found within the brokenness.

As the pages from The Hunters Enter the Woods start to wander beyond the picture that frames them, their bodies start to change. Through the propositional incoherence of collage, they acquire the green heads and huge three-fingered hands of Tolkien trolls …

>>>possibly something to say here on their composite bodies marking what Keogh refers to as a transversing of fantasies, with part of the twentieth-century fantasy genre cut out and pasted into the projected fantasies of the wealthy sixteenth-century tapestry owners?<<<

>>>Holes: Having stepped outside the frame, the page-trolls are then able to get behind the pictorial plane. In the installation, they are seen climbing up the back of the picture, protruding above it, and puncturing it from behind – opening up new space within the plane, undoing its wholeness with an insistence on a hole-ness that lets other things in.<<<

>>>& something here on the parallel between moving from the noblemen hunters to the “minor character” pages who facilitate their hunt, and moving from the tapestry to the preparatory (paper) pages that facilitated the tapestry’s execution. The main characters of the wealthy noblemen, like the rarefied objects of their finished tapestries, are not supposed to appear with evidence of the amount of labour required to create and sustain them. The pages are supposed to disappear into the background, never taking centre stage. This background of labour comes to the foreground in The Hunters Enter the Woods Cartoon, where the pages are visibly messed up with marks and folds and tears, which accrue with each iteration of the installation and performance<<<

>>>Also want to say something about lushness and pleasure (and craft?). The gorgeousness of the colours? The dizzying scale of Keogh’s collage relates back to the huge expanse of the Unicorn Tapestries – as does the abundance of detail; the fullness of the image. In both cases, one senses the amount of hours that have gone into the making. But through all the attentive absorption and luxurious detail, Keogh keeps things unfinished and scrappy and provisional. So that they might become otherwise<<<

Published on the occasion of The Hunters Enter The Woods Cartoon by Sam Keogh at St. Chads 30th of May - 16th of June 2024

Amelia Groom is a writer and art historian who has published texts on mud and swamps, on Mariah Carey's refusal to acknowledge linear time, and on Beverly Buchanan's ruinous, environmental sculpture Marsh Ruins, among other topics.

PAPER WORK

John Costi

PV 3.3.2024 6 PM - 9 PM

Open by appointment 4.3.2024-30.3.2024

EACH SATURDAY EVENING AFTER ‘BANG UP’, UNCLE RECALL, AN I.P.P* INMATE RESIDING IN HMP PENTONIVILLE, ASTRAL PROJECTS INTO ST. CHADS PROJECT SPACE TO HOLD A SEANCE WITH A PAST SELF.

A 3 WEEK PROGRAMME OF SHARED RECITALS INCLUDING RAPS FROM FELTHAM, AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PLAY READINGS AND LETTERS SHARED WITH COSTI’S MUM, St. Bridget, WILL OCCUR IN THE PROJECT SPACE.

BY ANALYSING RESTRICTED DOCUMENTS FROM YESTER-LIFE COSTI CLEANSES WRONG DOINGS, ADDRESSES PAST TRAUMAS AND CRITIQUES GOVERNMENT AGENCIES.

ENACTMENT AND RITUAL ARE THE MEETING PLACE OF PARA-POSSIBILITIES WHERE TIME LINES CROSS AND ALTERNATE REALITIES MERGE.

THE COULDA-BEENS AND THE SHOULDA-BEENS HOLD COURT IN SHARED REGRET AND RESENTMENT.

The Vessel

Chris Thompson

PV 25.11.2023 6 PM - 9 PM

Open by appointment 26.11.2023 - 13.1.2024

Reclaimed Pinewood Cupboard Doors

Stained 3x1 Timber

Mahogany Parquet, C. 1960

Wooden Dollhouse

Recticel

TV, C. 2000s

Butchers Block, fragments. C 1900

Ark of the Covenant (Miniature)

Cast, Bone (Numerous)

Eagle Cane

Golden Eagle, Pair

Fractured Elephant Ceramic

Broken Shredder Parts

Cheap Old Wardrobes

Pinewood Furniture Board

Broken Glass, Keys, Receipts

Wreaked Laminate Flooring

Flight Pins (Battlestar Galactica)

Bed knobs

American Flag

Mount Rushmore figurine

Old Books

Golf Balls (River)

Glass Eye (Stolen)

Wood Shavings

Opal Perspex

Stone Carving, Contemporary

Imitation

Silk, Blue

Fur, Synthetic

Soil

Mini Fridge (Well Stocked)

Duvet. Old

Exhibition Texts.

Duct Tape

Mammoth Rib Bone, c. 30,000.BC

Draw Runners. Lots.

Reclaimed timber; Stripped Out Parquet.

Recovered Stage Floor.

Repurposed Exhibitions.

Detritus, Sound.

Media:

Star Trek II Wrath of Kahn, 1982. © Paramount Pictures

‘Spocks Death Scene and funeral’

METAL GEAR SOLID, 1998. © Konami.

‘GAMEOVER Sequence’

‘The Best is Yet to Come’

Written by Rika Muranaka

Battlestar Galactica (2004), by Bear McCreary

2009.

‘So Much life’

‘Reuniting the Fleet/Roslin Confesses’

‘Roslin and Adama’

‘Grand Old Lady’

Metal Gear SOLID 4, 2008 © Konami.

‘Microwave corridor scene’

2023

water-resistance

Josephine Baker

PV 7.10.2023 5 PM - 9 PM

Open by appointment 8.10 - 28.10.2023

water-resistance

Asphalt, cables, chalk, charcoal, construction lights, copper, crocodile clips, dowelling, filler, glass, grit, oak, pigments, pine, plaster, plywood, rubber, sand, sawdust, steel tubing, tiles, timber, tulipwood

2023

VIKTOR TIMOFEEV

Circular Alphabet with word puzzle

Two-channel generative software

Link

2023

DAVID COOPER

UNCONSCIOUS DRAWING No.3

Bronze, concrete rubber, wax, human hair, heat shrink tubing, lagging, jubilee clips, tubing, white spirit, bitumen, ink, steel grate, mannequin stand, iron roof support, latex, lead, gauze cloths, wooden plinth.

2023

CAROLINA AGUIRRE

I want to be like you

Charcoal, sumi ink, natural pigments on layered paper

2023

David Cooper

UNCONSCIOUS DRAWING No.4

Bronze, rubber, latex, steel cable, gun foam, polystyrene, steel clip.

200 x 140cm

2023

GRIM GRIME GRIMER

Bora Akincitürk

Otto Byström

PV 2.6.2023 6 PM - 9 PM

Open by appointment 3.6 - 24.6.2023

BORA AKINCITÜRK

Andrei Karlov Suikasti,

Silkscreen print and silver skull pendant tied on raw linen

200 x 140cm,

2023

OTTO BYSTRÖM

Toys for Fulfilling The Nihilist’s Fantasy 1-4
cast aluminium, 3D printed resin, aluminium tube, steel bracket, wood

2023

OTTO BYSTRÖM

Overcoat of Exaggeration

PVC, digital print on georgette fabric (polyester), thread, cast aluminium, wood, cast brass, steel chain

2023

BORA AKINCITÜRK
Piss Baby

Silkscreen print on raw linen

200 x 140cm

2023

Do You Believe

Silkscreen print and aluminium tape on raw linen

200 x 140cm

2023

OTTO BYSTRÖM

Lonely Star

cast aluminium

2023

Risk 5.0

204 x 110.5 x 18.5 cm, foam, epoxy, plaster, rice paper print, stickers, vent, hermit crab shell, ceramic beads, spray paint, polyurethane paint, varnish, rope, plastic hooks.

2023

Search Engine (with prints by Beth Frey)

200 x 115 x 35 cm, foam, plaster, jesmonite, rice paper print, rope, ceramic beads, spray paint, polyurethane varnish, acrylic paint, steel rods, wood.

2023

39.6012•N, 9.0701•W (with a painting by Kenneth Winterschladen)

200 x 118 x 22 cm, foam, plaster, hooks, rope, plastic, rubber, ceramic beads, spray paint, lacquer, polyurethane varnish, oil paint and pencil on board.

2023

Gnarly Lettuce (with a painting by Alfred Boman)

63 x 398 x 254 cm, foam, plaster, spray paint, wood, polyurethane paint, lacquer varnish, grip pads, hooks, rope, oil and acrylic on greyboard.

2023

Surfing the Hell Realm (with a print by Beth Frey and a painting by India Nielsen)

135 x 138 x 14 cm, foam, plaster, nylon strap, QR code, epoxy putty, spray paint, lacquer, utilitarian hooks.

2023

THAW

Estefanía B Flores

Joey Holder

Julie Maurin

PV 17.3.2023 6 PM - 9 PM

Open by appointment 18.3 - 11.4

Julie Maurin Just get through the goddamn day / One damn foot after another

Up-cycled crocs, polyurethane foam, spray-paint, epoxy resin, tin, human hair, electronic cable, rings

2023

Joey Holder

The Evolution of the Spermalege

SLS prints, spray paint

2014-ongoing

Estefanía B Flores

Garura, wings of resonant life [winged beast / fusion / effect]

Steel, latex, wood, resin, pigments, pewter, wire, spray paint

2023

Julie Maurin

They tear your heart out / There is a terrifying beauty to it all

Polyurethane foam, 1kg of dry worms, paint, pearls, roses, teeth

2023

Julie Maurin

F(e)ather

Drawing preserved in epoxy resin, heron foot, stickers, silicone, dried scorpio, car-paint

2023

Joey Holder

The Evolution of the Spermalege

SLS prints, spray paint

2014-ongoing

Julie Maurin

Spice Story

Found ceramics, pickles expired since 2009, plastic toy, wooden object, silicone, necklace

2023