[NetBehaviour] Slump City at Space Media...

[info]

Slump City at Space Media...

June 6th – June 26th 2009
http://www.spacestudios.org.uk/blogcategory/Forthcoming_Exhibitions/

As the consequences of the global recession begin to take effect, the 
regeneration of East London, the traditional home of London’s large 
artist community, has slowed and the promised Olympic legacy looks in 
doubt. It is within this context that SPACE presents Slump City an 
exhibition presenting the work of 3 exciting emerging artists whose 
visionary and haunting work combines gothic fantasy, poetic social 
realism and psycho- geography to imagine the urban periphery.

Laura Oldfield Ford, winner of the VABT award, a recent graduate of RCA 
whose first show was at Marlborough Fine Art last Autumn, currently has 
a solo show at Hales Gallery and is about to show at Arnolfini in 
Bristol. For Slump City Oldfield- Ford is making a new piece, a large 
wall of A2 drawings which feed from her ongoing subjective exploration 
and psycho-geographic mapping of the neglected backwaters of East 
London. These relay a broken narrative centered on an East London that 
is being cleared and sanitised for the 2012 Olympic games.

Karen Russo is known internationally for her video, drawing and 
sculpture and the strange and disturbing source materials which she uses 
to transform the everyday in to contemporary surreal and gothic imagery 
that explores romantic notions of the sublime. For Slump City Russo 
presents a filmed excursion inside an urban sewage pipe system. Viewed 
through a small robot camera, used to locate blockages, an 
ever-expanding system of sewer pipes is revealed, mapping the ‘belly’ 
under our city.

Tessa Farmer's recent practice has been inspired by her 2007 residency 
at London’s Natural History Museum, playing on a strong undercurrent of 
horror and abjection that has always existed as a counter-narrative to 
the Victorian tradition of naturalism to which Tessa Farmer's work 
offers a redress. For Slump City she will be presenting her stuffed and 
reawakened ‘road kill’ arranged into fantasy scenarios where insect 
fairy tormentors seek revenge for all their brethren once smothered in 
killing jars and pinned in display case trophies. Tessa Farmer’s work 
was included in the 2004 edition of the 'Bloomberg New Contemporaries', 
where her installation 'Swarm' was spotted by Charles Saatchi and 
purchased for his collection.

To compliment the context and content of Slump City SPACE will be 
conducting a tour of the artist enclave Hackney WIck, combining studio 
visits and tours of artist run space as part of CREATE 09- the annual 
arts festival hosted by the five host boroughs of the 2012 Olympic games 
and Hackney Wicked the artists run festival.