Edible Goods: Tender Touches
Open Space Contemporary
17th May–30th June
Open Space Contemporary
17th May–30th June, 2019
Open Space Contemporary launches Tender Touches, an artist-designed experiential art café where you can eat, touch and feel the artwork.
Taking the food-based practice of artist Inês Neto dos Santos as a starting point, Tender Touches will present an immersive installation in an unconventional space where everything – from the food to the furniture and the cutlery – is an artwork. This is the inaugural project in ‘Edible Goods’, a new exhibition series that draws on the culture of experimentation at the core of Open Space, to explore food as a medium in contemporary art practice.
Blurring the lines between the gallery, the studio and the dining room, the project will host a series of talks, dinners, readings and performances. These will take place among new commissions produced by a group of international emerging artists. Tender Touches takes food as a catalyst for conversation and discussion, questioning the dynamics of exhibition spaces. Visitors will be invited to use their senses to experience artworks as functional objects, and to engage with food as they might view the art. By encouraging a multi-sensory experience, Tender Touches dissolves barriers between audience and artworks, while exploring overarching themes of body, flesh and boundaries.
Guests will be invited to engage in a multi-sensory experience through the artworks as everyday objects , and to engage with food as they might view art. By encouraging a multi-sensory experience, the exhibition dissolves barriers between the audience and the art, while exploring the overarching themes of the body, flesh and physical boundaries.
The exhibition, co-curated by Huma Kabakci and Inês Neto dos Santos, will encompass a public programme of both free and ticketed events, ranging from supper clubs to artist performances.
Book tickets for our public programme of events on our Eventbrite page here.
Tender Touches is one of four projects in Open Space’s 2019 programme, which explores the idea of Space without spaces.
17th May —
30th Jun, 2019
Launch event 26th November, 6pm–9pm
KEY INFORMATION:
Wednesday – Sunday, 10am–6pm.
Exhibition entry is free.
Coffee is served free of charge, courtesy of Old Spike Roastery.
Food is available for purchase from a menu by Inês Neto dos Santos, especially created for Tender Touches.
PRESS:
Press links:
Frieze / Vogue / Wallpaper / Creative Bloom / FAD / TimeoutFollow: @openspacecontemporary #OpenSpace
Umbra
Umbra
6th–28th, July 2018
Anna McDowell
6th-28th, July 2018
Anna McDowell’s work explores loss, memory, time and the domestic space through a multi-disciplinary art practice.
Umbra focuses particularly on the subjectivity of time and our experience of it in the face of absence. Shadow Thing, a series of three embroideries depicting imagined black holes are displayed alongside three artist books titled Heraclitus, Old Fear and A Secret.
The Shadow Thing series borrows its title from a sentence in The Invention of Solitude by Paul Auster, a book written in response to his Father’s death. Writing about himself in the third person the line reads ‘Behind each real thing there was a shadow thing…therefore, it happened, it often happened, that his life no longer seemed to dwell in the present’. McDowell is interested in the multiple layers of time, memory and association which play out adjacent to our present experience. The discipline of embroidery – repetitive, cyclical, domestic – communicates this everyday phenomenon.
The subject at the centre of the Shadow Thing series, the black hole, serves as a metaphor. Black holes are associated with the commonly regarded theory that, ripping through the fabric of space-time, they have the potential to act as vehicles for time-travel. Here they are reframed in the context of another universe – our emotional experience. The work is a meditation on a want that often accompanies an unwanted absence – the desire to travel back. The act of sewing plots the journey through this feeling. The destination provides a hypnotic and introspective experience for the viewer, a portal through which to enter the mind’s space.
The artist books, printed and bound by hand, traverse the same territory but in stark material contrast. Each addresses the idea that our experience of time is mutable as well as themes of memory, grief, mourning, anxiety and the subconscious.
The work establishes a private space – While much is alluded to, a cavity opens up where solid ground might have been. The viewer is led through an intimate and multi-dimensional narrative where the past and present are at once at odds, and at play.
6th–28th, July 2018
Private view 5th July, 6pm–9pm
KEY INFORMATION:
Open Thursday–Saturday, 12pm–5pm, and by appointment
Exhibition entry is free.
In Praise of Shadows
Baud Postma
18th–20th May, 2018
Baud Postma
18th–20th May 2018
“Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty.”
-In Praise of Shadows by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki
For Baud Postma’s solo exhibition ‘In Praise of Shadows’ he explores the role played by ambiguity and uncertainty in promoting subjective responses to photographic images. Taking inspiration and his title from the 1977, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s essay of the same name, Postma has created a series of landscapes, interiors and portraits that place emphasis not on minute detail and forensic precision but rather on the indeterminate, the murky, and the obscure.
Even in this era of digital manipulation, we are conditioned to see photography in terms of its evidential authority. French Philosopher Roland Barthes used the words “ça a été” (this has been) to pinpoint the medium’s very essence as a recorder of reality. This series queries what exactly the photograph documents if the subject and its resulting depiction are so mutable and even unrelated.
In these works, rich in shadow, often underexposed and softly focused, Postma exploits the brain’s innate and subconscious instinct to fill in the blanks in what is proven to be a highly subjective fashion. As Andy Grundberg observed, “All we see is seen through the kaleidoscope of all that we have seen before”. This body of work explores this idea in the context of photography’s wider and inherently complicated relationship with authenticity: how willingly we accept a photograph as a reflection of a definitive truth.
Influenced by our era of fake news, the fascinating evidence for photography’s impact on memory and ideas of credibility, along with the brain’s proven ineptitude at distinguishing manipulated from authentic images, these works expand the assertion of Hirshi Sugimoto’s that “however fake the subject, once photographed it’s as good as real”. Postma seamlessly brings together images captured on location in wild and remote places with others made in his Peckham studio to curate a sense of singular location. Avoiding the use of digital manipulation, he constructed stage sets and used large scale image projection to build a visual and visceral sense of atmosphere and place that, despite appearances, never really existed.
This is a solo show by Baud Postma, as part of Peckham 24.
18th–20th,
May 2018
Launch event 18th May, 6pm–9pm
KEY INFORMATION:
Launch event 18th May, 6pm–9pm
Open 19th & 20th May, 12pm–6pm
Exhibition entry is free.
Follow:
My Eternal Summer Full of Imperfect Stars
Hee Jae Kim
2nd–23rd December 2017
Hee Jae Kim
1st–23rd, December 2017
A solo show by Hee Jae Kim, recent graduate of the RCA and winner of the AMP Prize 2017.
‘At the time when my jewel box breaks that is when the real whale begins to surround me. Though it doesn’t show up when I try to see it, it is determined to keep a stranglehold and churns slowly in my heart.
We need a solid personal belief system as a means to protect ourselves from the pain of life – one which helps us to endure any pain which bypasses this protection. Though others may seek to alleviate their pain using the illusion provided by the “exit” this system must also serve to protect us from losing belief in the value of the individual.
The “exit” I propose refers to a medium created by a personal belief system, one which makes spiritual liberation possible. With this medium we can better endure hardships by performing acts which attempt to relieve spiritual pain.’
1st–23rd, December 2017
Private view 1st December, 6pm–9pm
KEY INFORMATION:
2nd–23rd December, 10am–6pm.
Exhibition entry is free.
Invisible Mending
Nicky Hirst
13th May–3rd June 2017
Nicky Hirst
13th May–3rd June 2017
Nicky Hirst’s work is best described as an exploration of serendipity that can occur in unintended and unexpected places.
Nicky has created works for AMP by using photographic images taken from magazines. For the front window of the gallery she has made a new specific work, which can be viewed both internally and externally and references her time spent exploring the surrounding area.
She is also showing diptychs from a series called Elementals 2012 – 2017, where magazine pages are selected and paired to create their own intern al logic and visual poetry.
13th May–3rd June 2017
Private view 12th May, 6pm–9pm
KEY INFORMATION:
Wednesday – Sunday, 10am–6pm.
Exhibition entry is free.
Meeting Point
MAR-DEN
17th–31st, August 2016
MAR-DEN
17th–31st, August 2016
MAR-DEN takeover at AMP with works by Patrick Mifsud.
In August 2016 AMP Gallery are really excited to welcome Frances Marden and Patrick Mifsud, who are jointly curating a new exhibition which will see furniture and art displayed side by side; a celebration of the linear forms which link the aesthetic of the finest modernist and midcentury-inspired craftsmanship with Mifsud’s striking geometric pieces.
MAR-DEN source, sell and make furniture and objects which they think have a unique brilliance and character. They don’t pin themselves to a particular decade, but instead hunt for pieces that stand out in 20th Century design, pieces they think should be celebrated and incorporated into our modern lives.We want customers to be inspired and share our taste and enthusiasm. We believe that furnishing your home should be fun, there are no specific rules. Our main aim is to help customers step away from buying new, mass-produced items which can lack personality, and explore the past through pieces that are both functional and beautiful. The MAR-DEN MADE bar stool is a midcentury inspired design, a collaboration with furniture maker Luke Joyce, that focuses on handmade quality, beautiful form and function.
17th–31st, August 2016
Launch event 17th August, 6pm–9pm
KEY INFORMATION:
18th-31st, August, 12pm–5pm
Exhibition entry is free.
Follow:
@mardenstudio
@patrickmifsud
