Contemporary Film Screening

Thursday 28th Nov 2013
Refreshments and snacks available
Location: Gallery and Project space

rKive Productions (studio 63) invite you to view six award winning and or nominated Independent short films.

The emphasis of the films is on quality and mutual interest for debate, creating a unique viewing experience.

Genres include: thriller/drama, thriller/comedy and comedy/drama.

You will also get the chance to meet some of the film makers themselves and mingle with others that are passionate about contemporary Indie film making.

Inside Design with Dyson

Engineers Talk with: Sioned Owen, Catriona Sutter and Frederic Nicolas
Thursday 14th Nov 2013
Location: Gallery & Project space

Inside Design is an exciting season of exhibitions, where GWS has invited leading designers, companies and brands to share their creative journey in a business to business, creative to creative environment.

Six exhibitions and talks by six exceptional designers who communicate excellence in their product, brand, communication and DNA, and present their philosophies through a series of ‘show & tells’. The dissection of the working process of their products allows visitors to gain an ‘Inside Design’ knowledge on how successful brands are produced.

Award winning, renowned James Dyson believes that engineering is part of our DNA and that we are all inventors.

Inside Design with the James Dyson Foundation will explore the business of invention, high tech manufacturing, where initial ideas are sparked and how the products function.

Business skills for artists

Seminar: 13th Nov 6.30 – 8.30pm
Location: Gallery & Project Space

This seminar is a must for all artists and has been developed to provide the skills necessary to navigate more effectively in the commercial art world.

Areas covered:

• How to build a portfolio for presentation to a gallery/dealer.
• Marketing your work successfully.
• How to get the press on your side and get ahead of the competition.
• Communicating to a wider audience.
• Financial growth potential and realistic time frame.
• The artist, the market and profile building.

Further information: www.theartinsider.co.uk
info@theartinsider.co.uk / t.02082799916

Decade – 10 years of Totality

Exhibition runs: 18th – 23rd Oct 2013
Location: Gallery and Project space

To mark ten years of Place Marketing, Totality is delighted to present an exhibition offering an overview of work from the past ten years. The place marketing specialism marries our skills in branding and design with an ongoing fascination with places and why people may choose to live, work or visit them. In all work, we seek to define and create a unique and motivating ‘sense of place’, this being the foundation for developing a strong destination brand. A photo essay on Nottinghill  by Jon Stevens gestures towards Totality’s birthplace, whilst demonstrating the importance of individuals in shaping place.

The evening of 17 October will see a private launch of Decade, a publication offering Totality’s take on the last ten years, created to mark our anniversary.

Sci – Fi Lullaby by Machiko Edmondson

Exhibition runs: 8th – 13th Oct 2013
Location: Gallery and Project space

Edmondson refers to her practice as the ‘representation of painting’. Despite the overt use of faces as her image source, she regards her work as neither figurative paintings or as portraits, as they are not ‘portraying’ any particular person in a conventional sense; they are better described as ‘anti-portraits!’

Employing the momentary seduction of fashion photography to lure the viewers into the world of idealised beauty and yearning, her paintings mimic the styles and codes of the desire industry to question the value and obsessions of aspirational perfection.

Just as in fashion photography where the model is a support for the product and contextualises it, such images also support and contextualise Edmondson’s paintings. Although seductive, the ideal they present becomes hyper-real: the image is devoid of identity and is a paradoxically empty facade, which is quickly consumed, giving way to the anxiety and obsession that assert these paintings as paintings. Beyond the image that gives them their presence, what is being portrayed is the question of the aspirational perfection of painting itself. As the viewer engages with these works and scans the surface, shifting their reading between fantasy and modernist abstract painting, the skin of the image and the skin of the painted surface, these works become paintings of unattainable desire.

In this way, Edmondson’s paintings are really about ‘language of painting’.

www.machikoedmondson.com

1:1 Inside Design with Pearson Lloyd

Exhibition runs: 13th – 23rd Sept 2013
Talk with Suzanne Trocme: 12th Sept
Private view: 12th Sept
Location: Gallery & Project space

The fourth in the series of Inside Design exhibitions within Great Western Studios, exploring work from a range of leading designers. As part of London Design festival, PearsonLloyd – award winning product designers, will demonstrate how objects affect space and the way people inhabit it.

1:1 is an exhibition about industrial design in the making, the thought processes behind finding interesting solutions and the formidable reality of the finished product. PearsonLloyd are award winning industrial designers who are renown for their thoughtful design solutions for spaces including airplanes, city scapes, offices and even hospitals. They are increasingly interested in how people can live, travel, work and inhabit cities together more fruitfully?

Their Inside Design exhibition will express a personal reflection on the  projects that they have been involved in and the ideas that interest them. New designs experiments, from accessories to speculations in the manipulation of space will be presented around the theme of 1 to 1, asking questions around the nature of production and the realities of life as a shared experience.

With their wealth of design experience, PearsonLloyd look at how our environment can be improved by the things that surround us, whether that is wayfinding in Westfield, A&E signage to prevent violence, a bed on an airplane or the creation of a chair that really works. They are passionate about the craft of industrial design and making it work for a shared experience in our communal life.

Furniture design is central to PearsonLloyd’s practice, The studio celebrates the restrictions imposed by industry and seek solutions that work both for the client and the user. This exhibition will highlight the wide and varied ways in which Industrial Design and design in general is not only part of our lives but can also benefit our living experience.

The Contemporary London presents… System Failure

Exhibition runs: 30th Aug – 5th Sept 2013
Private view: 29th Aug 6 – 9pm
Location: Gallery & Project space

Sandra Erbacher, Rowena Harris, Rowena Hughes, Jess Littlewood,  Ines Rebelo, Eddie Villanueva. Curated by Sandra Erbacher.

Space is always under construction, in a perpetual process of being negotiated, choreographed, made and un-made. Fluid and non-hierarchical, it is an anti-system without centre or apparent unifying motif. By embracing this incomplete conception of space first proposed by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, System Failure offers a snapshot of a ceaselessly shifting spatio-temporal constellation.

The artists presented each interrogate a spatial organizing principle (or the absence thereof) in their work. While Rowena Harris’ work investigates the intersection between virtual space and the material world, Ines Rebelo traces outer space onto a wall in the exhibition space traversed by the viewer. Rowena Hughes employs geometry and science in combination with found imagery to complicate our sense of spatial logic, whereas Sandra Erbacher examines the intersection of space with time as an organizing principle. At the centre of Eddie Villanueva’s practice, is an understanding of architectural space as an archeological site, as a collection of surface layers and histories.

Formally, the featured works play with pattern, repetition, as well as contingency. Their arrangement in the context of this exhibition, however, ultimately de-stabilizes any linear structure or singular meaning and instead allows for multiple spatial narratives by activating the in-between. Thus, the dialogue opened up by these works equals a ‘system failure’, revealing space as an open, organic, and heterogeneous formation.

HOLY COW! – Natasha Kumar

Exhibition runs: 9th – 23rd Aug 2013
Drinks: 15th Aug 6 – 9pm
Location: Gallery & Project space

In ‘Holy Cow ’ Kumar has taken up the bold, flourescent colours of Indian advertising art in its various forms to cut through the picturesque, giving a sharp contemporary twist to traditional Indian motifs. The sacred Hindu bovine competes for attention with a brazen wall advert, oblivious to it.

Natasha Kumar, an established British-Indian artist, unveils her latest solo exhibition ‘HOLY COW!’ The show will run from the 9th – 23rd August in the Gallery at Great Western Studios, that extraordinary nexus of all things cultural, just off Westbourne Park, W2. ‘Vivid, colour – saturated images of contemporary India. A delight, with ordinary humanity right at the forefront. Not a Taj Mahal in sight. Wonderful.’ Says Christopher Hart, novelist and critic.

‘Blow Horn’ is the imperious advice given to overtaking drivers in India painted on the back-end of lorries and buses. Both a warning and an encouragement delivered in a glorious rococo signage of swirling colour and curlicues, the words are just one example of a culture that considers every flat surface a potential canvas. In India, if it stays still long enough for someone to paint on it, it will be, with a graffiti of spiritual texts, folk art, and underwear ads. It’s the art of the everyday, of India as she is lived.

It’s this world, a visual cacophony of signs and life, that Natasha Kumar explores in her work. But the exhibition title is appropriate in another more personal way. Second generation British-Indians will recognise the journey she is making through her award-winning figurative art. ‘She is one us,’ says Sangita Myska, the BBC broadcaster. ‘Fascinated by the country our parents left behind, we return, again and again, to seek a more rounded sense of ourselves. … Natasha’s work evokes with deep love what is embedded in our souls.’

The works of ‘HOLY COW!’ take us from city to village, soaking up the bold design and colours of street art, to cut through our preconceived notions of picturesque India. Iconic images are given a sharp, acutely observed, contemporary twist. To paraphrase John O’Farrell, author and broadcaster, Natasha Kumar’s work captures the collision between Indian tradition and modern Indian consumerism.

So, in ‘Coca-doodle-do’ a proud village rooster scratches a living below that ubiquitous cursive emblem of the American (or Slum Dog) dream, a Coca-Cola sign. In Holy Cow, confident of its own elevated cultural status, the sacred bovine ambles blithely past the brazen charms of a street ad. A timeless view of Indian village life in Tuff Cemento – a woman swathed in a sari, waiting patiently for who knows what, becomes a 21st century moment in a powerful, growing economy. Not even the gaudy colours of the sari can compete with the strident green of the cement company’s message.

info@natashakumar.co.uk
www.natashakumar.co.uk

Twenty Two by Two Times Elliott

Exhibition runs: 23rd – 30th July 2013
Private view: 25th July
Location: Gallery and Project space

Twenty two agencies from across the UK and Europe have been selected to create their own interpretation of ‘Two’ – The core element of the Two Times Elliott brand who are celebrating their 5th year.

There have been no guidelines, the only restriction is that it has to be one colour. The designs will then be screen printed A1 as Limited Editions of 22. They will appear in a one off exhibition from the 23rd to the 30th July with a private view at the studios Thursday 25th July.

The prints will then be sold and the proceeds will go to Cancer Research UK.

Participants include:

Bänziger Hug Bunch
BVD
Colophon
Construct
Craig Oldham
Dan Mather
Dn&Co
Give Up Art
Heydays
Hort
Hyperkit
Julia
Lundgren Lindqvist
Magpie Studio
Man Vs Machine
Neubau Berlin
Sea
Six
Spin
Studio Makgill
Two Times Elliot

In association with: GF Smith, Identity, Thomas Murphy

Left Half of a Beauty

Exhibition runs: 12th – 17th July 2013
Private view: Thurs 11th July 2013
Jonathan Hallam talk: Thurs 11th July 2013
Location: Gallery and Project space

Great Western Studios announces Left Half of a Beauty, a group exhibition of contemporary photography from graduates of the BA (Hons) Photography programme at Barking & Dagenham College.

The title reveals a collision of aesthetics and to consider current perspectives in photography based on a shared knowledge and understanding of modern thinking.

Left Half of a Beauty demonstrates a unique freedom of ideas and interpretations based upon a solid contextual background, viewing photography as a simple and honest communication. It is the culmination of a unity of ideas and subconscious investigation.

The show will include work by Bradley Archer, Jenni Ashford, Natalia Asimi, Tiffany Coverdale, Catherine Holmes, Abbie McDermott, Davy Priestley, Hayley Rogers, Dimitrina Sidova, and Aaron Tucker.