Frederick is a character of two extremes. His individuality is perfectly reflected in the surname he was born with. Although he comes from Poland, his family has both Russian and English blood, which is undoubtedly what lies behind the fact that he is romanticism and pragmatism combined.

The cycle of figures that have emerged from Frederick’s brush over the course of the last few years has been dubbed The Noughties. It is a name that teases in its perversity, since the figures in his paintings are often perceived as ‘naughty’ – incorrigible, coquettish and wholly flirtatious. Despite both their facelessness and the fact that they are frequently caught in the throes of ordinary, everyday, human activities, they always give the viewer ‘a wink’.

FREDERICK ROSSAKOVSKY-LLOYD

”THE NOUGHTIES”

4-9 April 2011 at the House Gallery

Frederick is also presenting a sneak preview of his new collection

”Now The Noughties see their world” which will be premiered in 2012.

Come and meet the artist on 8 April 2011 (7-9 pm).

Even though the artists use everyday objects, these loose their comfort values and become dysfunctional within the non-domesticated space of House Cafe-gallery.

Lisa Caratis’ main interest lies in the different levels of relationships a person builds with oneself and with others, what separates and brings people together.

Soaps are very intimate everyday objects, they reflect directly to the body, the way we assume it, deal with it. The pink soap installation looks rather attractive until one notices the weird shapes and body rejects. Hair and nails have a very feminine and seductive symbolic yet generate feelings of disgust and repulsion once separated from the body.

The Mobile-Home performance is a realization that home is within each one of us; it isn’t material, but a result of experience. Wherever one goes, he/she will carry his/her past and memories which is what creates a home.

Stella Norris is interested in the space between spaces. The multiple bird houses are the best example of the precariousness of her work which emphasises her reliance upon architecture. It is evident that her approach to the domestic is created through the interaction of the object within the space.

The video-documentation of the plates being stacked on top of another to reach the ceiling not only plays on the viewer’s expectation of the inevitable fall; but also emphasizes the devaluation of an everyday object.

In a playful manner, the bronze “rubber duck” evokes an idealization of a valuable object; a way to immortalise a personal relationship with an object.

Celia Rosario’s Sculptures are mostly made out of wood and appear to be extremely delicate, despite the strength of the material. She discovers and makes her own rules while making, no premeditated plans are made. Hence the unstable look of her work.

The central sculptures in this show consist in two chairs and two stools, so elongated they become unusable. A wooden structure, crawling like a snake in the gallery space, joins the whole exhibition together. One can easily build a house, but not a home. Home is where your heart is, and feels safe. It builds itself and no plans can be made. Celia’s sculptures are made in the same manner.

Tomoko Ueda’s sculptures are very much about time consumption and she often presents a concept and his opposite in the same work. Her repetitive making-process witnesses of an obvious patience and reflection.

Her loom-like structure examines the opposed states of order and chaos. The traditional repetitive process orders the cotton strings in vertical lines. As the strings escape from the frame, they entangle on reaching the floor. This sculpture shows how it is part of human nature to organize our surroundings and how we sometimes set ourselves limits and boundaries in order to control chaos.

Arts 4 Human Rights is a grass-roots, not-for-profit charity which seeks to explore and promote a range of issues facing today’s society.

Through the disPLACEment Festival, we intend to explore subjects including migration, human trafficking, and homelessness; we aim to tackle, promote, provoke and raise questions about such issues amongst our audience members. We seek to raise awareness and empower community members to defend their own rights and the rights of others through engagement in art that sheds light on contemporary ideas and situations.

We hope to prove that art can be a successful means by which to facilitate change.

With this in mind, we would like to invite you to join us during our week of events during the disPLACEment Festival. All details of our free events including visual artworks and installations, theatre, live performances, music, films, talks with experts, and schools and community workshops can be found on our websitewww.arts4humanrights.org.uk.

Lousie Schmid and Elaine Woo MacGregor

8 April – 22 April

The boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea and that, from port to port, from tack to tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in their gardens, you will understand why the boat has not only been for our civilization, from the sixteenth century until the present, the great instrument of economic development, but has been simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. (Foucault, M. (1967) Of Other Spaces)

Michel Foucault described a situation in which, to contrast the unobtainable utopia, exists both an illusionary and yet real disputation of the spaces where we live. This ubiquitous yet unstable duality between isolation and penetration, influence and inadequacy, is a discussion appositely cited in the title Heterotopia by Elaine Woo MacGregor and Louise Schmid. The boat is Foucault?s metaphor for this place; the nomadic free flowing motion of a structure based on foundations without heredity — and what more pertinent situation to explore this system than in the art gallery.

Informed through personal experiences, residences and travels through Russia, Mongolia, China, the artists investigate the disjunctions implicit within interaction between cultures of such vast variation. There is a deliberate ambiguity of visual language in the works, which cultivates atypical and subjective interpretative processes from their audiences. Faced with disparate symbols and images, obfuscated objects and subverted sites, depicted through timeless analogue processes of image making, instinctively we attempt to decipher. Yet as we seek solace in classification – simplification in order to comprehend – between the abstract and the representational, between the old and the new, some other meanings slip from our grasp. Schmid and MacGregor communicate in neither literal nor linear fashion, but through layered metaphoric and symbolic interpretation of experience and culture. The fluid motion of calligraphic expression, the fractured languages of cohabiting social systems and the other, expound the duplicities of human communication and cultural identity.

And now patterns begin to emerge between things, places and people. In and between both nature and nurture, these patterns of relation are present; whether fascias of mobile phones and leaves, or the elusive geometries of individuality and social structures, each coalesce and synthesize, resurfacing as a philosophy of subjectivity. Even these letters carry no intrinsic meaning, just ink characters on a piece of paper, yet their combinations and arrangements are understood, as language at least. The value of semiotics is just that, there is no definitive allusion – only that which is applied. And therefore it is imperative that you should make up your own mind.

19 March – 1 April

The exhibition Threads focuses on the work of Roger Murrell and specifically the common threads reoccurring through his practice (and life.) Murrell has no interest in revealing the finer intricacies of life or specifically his life but instead use the tenuous nature of uncertainty to provoke the viewer; an abstract and unsure engagement with the work rendering a more meaningful emotive evocation.

New work Ariel features antique photographs of lone men or, more specifically something the viewer cannot see tentatively held against the wall seemingly reflecting the fragility of the photographs content. Trans uses washed up bricks in a state of flux, partly covered with gold leaf the connotative nature of the objects provides clue towards their meaning and status. Pieces involved use beeswax, human hair, gold leaf, moths and driftwood. There is a tender and performative handling of the materials in addition to their qualities and properties in terms of their histories and restorative ability towards the viewers’ experience. Why restorative and, a questioning of relative start-points for each viewer remains an important issue not least his own foundation of existence.

Murrell attempts to create new religions based on simple, and fragile beginnings; a delicate enlightenment. It could be argued that we are evolved enough to invent new religions (such as Scientology) and belief systems; in this case they may not be shared but bespoke practices somewhere between philosophy, religion and one’s own artistic practice.

www.rogermurrell.com

roger.murrell@btinternet.com

3 March – 17 March

An exhibition of new sculpture, installation, painting and photography by four women artists, originally from Spain, Australia and the UK. It is their third project together in London but individually their recent projects include exhibitions at the London Art Fair, Fundacion Focus-Abengoa in Seville, MONA Detroit and Arco Madrid.

This exhibition brings together four individual narratives that capture a particular moment in time. The viewer is presented with stories both personal recollections and those of shared experiences, that accumulatively suggest states of loss and estrangement.

www.mandywilliams.com
www.doloressanchezcalvo.com
www.linda-duffy.com
www.pi-villasenor.com

10 August – 24 August

I am interested in memento mori and how memories can bring to mind our own mortality. Figuring the presence and absence of people from cradle to grave I am reiterating the notion of fragility and time. Stitch is significant for me as a representation of the domestic, childhood and the passing of time.

I use a pinhole technique, as a form of drawing, focusing on the holes and the space in between that these holes create, the gaps, the void, the loss. The process is a repetitive and slow one, similar to the passing of time with the finished work being suggestive of the transient nature of time. It is a work of process and signifies the physical rhythms of making.

Drawing is a way of registering time, making time and perhaps even stopping time. Piercing through paper leaves a fragile trace, an impression, of an image taken from a photograph, however it also seems to make these fleeting moments in life more permanent. It ensures that the drawing won?t fade, as it penetrates it is incorporated into the fabric of the paper, ensuring the memories of the image are captured before they fade, crumble and disappear. The action of the making becomes a memory in itself.

www.paulamcgurdy.com

8 May – 20 May

For a quarter of a century John Bently has annually (sometimes bi-annually!) catapulted a new book at the world, under the pseudonym Liver & Lights. This exhibition celebrates these books, being a selection box of the most flavoursome bits from those 25 years, including prototypes, original paintings, illustrations, text experiments, invitations, begging letters and the books themselves.

A constantly evolving species, these books have ranged over the years from very handmade to very machine made. They have been sold in galleries, shops and at performances. Back in their beginning in the cold war eighties, they were a kind of ongoing manifesto, plotted and planned by Bently and likeminded colleagues Stephen Jaques and James Blundun, mutating into a chronicle of the Deptford underworld. The books became a strange kind of history textbook, filled with acutely observed London characters, found objects; books in boxes, parodies of Livre d‹artiste.

Extended into the art world on gallery walls, they got political and railed against injustice. They got banned from galleries and even one whole town. They became community projects &endash; records of people and places; the homeless, Harrow, Fife, Dundee, South London. Eventually, some of them got collected by museums!

Liver & Lights celebrates low tech printing and is a kind of deposition of discarded reprographics ?Print Gocco, stencil, rubber stamps, letterpress photocopies, silk screen, lino, inkjet. They are made to perform, in the hand and beyond the pages. They became plans for music, most recently with the band Afterrabbit ? (Alan Outram, Phil Outram and Oliver Briggs); a collection of musicians brought together by the books themselves. Sometimes they contain CDs aping the style and shape of records, fanzines, illustrated books.

Most recently they have been celebrations: of a DIY lifestyle, of a campervan, mundane household objects, late fathers, children, friends and neighbours and the useless beauty of printed money.

They have been many things, but never the same, neither in shape or motivation or purpose

A lifelong celebration of the book.

7 April – 19 April

Duration is an exhibition of four artists whose practices involve the durational. Brought together in these works are the knowledge of the physical gesture and the anatomy of space and time.

Beverley J Bennett
The primary act of the mark making process later becomes a conscious act where the language portrayed in the works creates a sense of unease. This is transmitted to the viewer through the obsessive, repetitive nature of the gestural marks.
nowthaticanaffordlaughter.blogspot.com

Laura Davidson
Slipping off the wall, the rolls of paper retain a carbon memory of a previous movement, where the body has shifted back and forth in somatic actions. The viewer can regard the charcoal sequences as symbols hanging on the vertical plane of representation or as texts resting upon the horizontal plane of writing.
The marks themselves are measures of something, but of what the interpreter cannot define. They propose an incalculable geography, an ancient place described by the Greeks as Chora. The Chora is an inscribing space, an event preceding the semiotic systems, a receptacle beating a rhythm; dancing across the paper.
www.lauraelizabethdavidson.com

Susannah King
I explore the notion of recording passages of light through common ground non-spaces to assimilate landscapes of memory. What was once real becomes imagined and constructed. The process of encapsulating time absorbs a legacy of marks to create an intervention to a place and its past, present and future readings.
www.susannahking.com

Sally Jones
My work is primarily involved with the experience and interpretation of space. The images are composite, built from different experiences and perceptions of time and place. The images are built using a variety of sources; memory, photographs, film, television and fiction to form constructions that create entirely unknown fictious spaces that are recognisable though shared experience and culture.