Where were who or what? Still still poking at things? We already said all this, we almost certainly do need to (or maybe don’t need to do?) do that five art things thing again don’t we? We probably should? Just a bit more of that glue that holds the who or what together. The art of repetition? Where were we? No one ever reads the editorial at the top, we could say anything here. We are kind of still repeating ourselves whilst under stress, did you even notice the repeating? Do you just cut to the chase every single time?. And well, we could do it again, we could? We could? We really could? Shall we? Who reads this bollocks? The Artist Taxi Driver? What is this Five Art Things thing? We said all this last week didn’t we? And the week before, and so five art things…
So five art things, five more art things happening somewhere around right now, or coming up any moment now, five art shows to check out in the coming days . Hey, I know we said it last time but we will try to do it most weeks and now we appear to be coming out of lockdown, and yes this admittedly rather fractured Five Art Things feature was and is intended to be a regular, almost certainly weekly, or something like something near weekly thing – an almost weekly round up of recommended art events. Five shows, exhibitions or things we rather think might be worth checking out. Mostly London things for that is where we currently operate and explore, and like we said last time (and the time before), these five recommendations come, as we already said up there, with no claims that they are “the best five” or the “Top Five”, we’re not one of those annoying art websites that ignore most things whilst claiming to be covering everything and proclaiming this or that to be the “top seven things” or the “best things this weekend”, no, this is simply a regular list of five or so art things coming up soon that we think you might find as interesting as we do, five art things coming in in the next few days in no particular order and not a selfie of any of us hanging out at the damn show next to a piece of art either…
1: Zizi – Queering the Dataset – The Gazell.io Project Space will be taken-over by multimedia artist Jake Elwes throughout July. Elwes will bring his Artificial Intelligence project ‘Zizi – Queering the Dataset’ to the recently launched digital art space on Dover Street.
Originally commissioned by The University of Edinburgh in 2019 for Experiential AI at Edinburgh Futures Institute and Inspace, ‘Zizi – Queering the Dataset’ sets out to tackle the lack of representation and diversity in the training datasets often used by facial recognition systems. Elwes’ site specific video installation was created by disrupting these systems and re-training them with the addition of drag and gender fluid faces found online. This causes the weights inside the neural network to shift away from the normative identities it was originally trained on and into a space of queerness. ‘Zizi’ provides insight into the machine learning system and reveals what has not yet been learnt. LED screens installed in the Gazell.io Project Space will feature a procession drag artists’ faces in constant flux, morphing gender and sexuality; melding the real and the artificial.
Elwes will present a performance piece during his residency, more information to follow on Gazelli Art House’s Instagram page @GazelliArtHouse. Gazelli Art House is at 39 Dover Street, London, W1S 4NN
2: Adam Hennessey – Adam and Steve at New Art Projects – 1st July until 7th August – “For Adam Hennessey’s third solo show at New Art Projects ‘Adam and Steve’ he looks back to his awkward teenage years growing up gay in the 1990’s. Hennessey describes his new paintings as “memory fantasies”. He uses a reduced palette of greens, to create an artificial light that helps to set the scenes in them, in the past. Like watching an old film or discoloured home movie the figures move through a distorted green haze acting out his teenage dreams and desires. In his autobiographical comic ‘Tank’ he makes light of having crushes on his then school friends and navigating a house party where the aim was to lose his virginity. As with his comics, each painting seems to be one frame that informs the next, making a kind of comic strip of dreamscapes around the gallery that hark back to the days before online dating and the mobile phones to the days of loud dial up modems and phone boxes.
New Art Projects is at 6d Sheep Lane, Hackney, London, E8 4QS. Just by Broadway Market, not far from the Regents Canal and a stone’s throw from Beck Road
Previously at New Art Projects
3: There is also a Kate Belton exhibition running at the same time at the same gallery – “For her first solo show at New Art Projects, Kate Belton started making works on paper, working in mono print and watercolour. Her subject matter is at first glance, landscape, however ideas of memory, pattern and repetition also inform her compositions. The works for this exhibition are centred on the east end of London and developed using photographs taken by the artist of the surrounding area. However these are not formal compositions, the references are taken from the hinterland, the edges of the city: canal towpaths, abandoned buildings, land about to be re-developed, or overlooked in the regeneration of the area”.
Belton states: “They are about forgotten spaces, and of the cracks that develop in our landscape and in the process of painting itself. The subject is not just about what is depicted literally, but also about the handling of paint and its intricate intertwining with that which is represented. Paint is pushed around to make an image like a memory that is about to form and disappear simultaneously…”
4: Toby Mott – I Love Summer – at Boo’s Closet until July 4th – “a British artist, designer, and Punk historian”, is having an exhibition at Boo’s Closet in Notting Hill Gate, London. It will include new unreleased paintings, as well as pieces from his I Love My Neighbourhood series, The Escape, The Love Series, New Luxury Punk, and the Empty The Archive collection. Boo’s Closet is at 198 Kensington Park Road, London, W11 1NR
5: The Toby Mott show at Boo’s Closet is followed at the same space by a Sara Breinlinger exhibition “of richly textured and layered abstract painting and bold, dynamic collages made in 2020 and 2021. As both an artist and psychotherapist Sara is drawn to working in the space where memory, emotion and sensation are just filtering into consciousness, where things are just bubbling to the surface or are just beneath it. The work on show here is energetic, often a bit off-kilter and just holding the balance compositionally. There’s always a touch of disequallibrium in the mix which adds tension and excitement”. Boo’s Closet is at 198 Kensington Park Road, London, W11 1NR The show runs from 7th July until 11 July 2021 with a late opening on the 8th (5pm to 8pm – Sara Breinlinger
And while we’re here and while you’re here, here’s a small taste of Saturation,, The whole of the Saturation on-line group show brought to you by Cultivate is now open and can be fully explored via this link right here
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