Adrian Lee "Don't let them leave"

Adrian Lee "Don't let them leave" performance for The Endless Descent, 3/12/2009

Invigilators and attendants have always been present in large, permanent galleries but security guards in small art exhibitions are becoming more common. They could suggest that the work (or equipment) on show has a high financial value, that it is a stipulation of the exhibition insurer or the collector(s) that lent the work, that the work on show could be easily damaged by the viewers or that the viewers could be damaged by the work on display. They fall in the category of ‘overlookable’ and ‘to be ignored’, like plug sockets, fire extinguishers and picture hooks. Unlike the gallery staff, it is understood that the security personnel are not working in an intellectual capacity, they have no special interest in the work on show, they are purely a physical presence.


Our interest is piqued though when they become animated, running in the street, calling for back-up and we rubber-neck, looking for action. We catch intriguing snippets of radio-speak and catch a glimpse through the doors to the back-stage areas where these modern wizards of Oz live with their banks of cctv monitors.

The Endless Descent Flyer

The Endless Descent

The Endless Descent brings together artists from Birmingham, Bristol and London; the exhibition will be installed on the distinctive 1930’s Modernist stairwell, lobby, lift and entrance areas of Rea Studios playfully exploring the dormant potential of a site that exists to be passed through not lingered in and the potential meanings of either the space or an endless descent itself.

There is a sympathetic relationship between the concept of the Show and the function of the space itself as a transition between the floors and rooms in a building with the diverging identities of what goes on behind those individual doors. Endless Decent, like the function of its location is an imaginative space for passing through, for connecting diverse approaches and unexpected enquiries.

Exhibiting Artists: Dylan Atkins, Arlene Burnett, Jamie Fowkes, Gene George Earle, Anne Guest, Adrian Lee, Andrew Mania, David Miller, Paul Newman, Cathy Wade, and Justin Wiggan.

PV Thursday 3rd December 6 - 8.30

Show Open
Fri 4th to sun 6th 12 - 5pm
Fri 11th to Sun 13th 12 - 5pm

Rae Studios, 90 Floodgate Street, Digbeth, Birmingham, B5 5SR

Dylan Atkins

Dylan Atkins, Landscapology, oil on Ply, 2007.

In challenging a number of key art movements – by invoking a series of apparently disconnected aesthetic parodies – what exactly is achieved?

Could it be some truth regarding the normalisation of art that occurs when it is converted into history? This then would be no concrete constructivist truth, but instead an unveiled Heideggerean truth of correspondence or aletheia.

www.foldgallery.com

Arlene Burnett

Arlene Burnett, Secret Garden (Series), 2008.

Arlene Burnett is a Birmingham based artist. Her work is primarily interested with the transformation of spaces, where she often inhabits spaces in a state of flux and creates temporary artworks in response to the environment. The process and outcomes are documented with photographs which often become the work in their own right.

http://arleneburnett.wordpress.com

Gene George Earle

Gene George Earle, Untitled, 2009

Currently my work is informed by an intensive studio practice, and operates within a formal and intuitive framework, often in response to a particular space or material. Preferring pre-existing images and materials for the work, I am wholly appreciative of oddity and imitation, of cartoon like forms and coded visual language, and how one may be mistaken for the other. My interest lies in how forms might relate to its psychology and the conditions or context within which it becomes plausible.

Jamie Fowkes

Jamie Fowkes, Hobbs Moat Lane Church, 2009

I predominantly produce paintings from fabricated buildings or structures that I find interesting. The buildings or structures are fabricated by recreating them out of everyday objects and materials such as cardboard, foil and found objects. These models serve as the subject matter for my paintings.

The models that I make are not exact recreations of real buildings or structures. Recently I have been interested in creating paintings from models I have made from 1960’s – 70’s buildings, such as shopping centres, car parks and churches. My process of painting results in my paintings of such buildings to be ‘Baroque’ in style, which is very different from the actual buildings, that are rigid and in ornate.

Anne Guest

Anne Guest, Endless descent (Still from video), 2009

Anne Guest is concerned about how things are perceived and experienced in the world.

Temporality, the ephemeral and semantic ambiguities are her main interests and her work is often humorous with an underlying disquieting aspect.

www.annguest.co.uk

Adrian Lee

Adrian Lee, Banderol, Mixed Media, 2008.

Adrian Lee works in video, performance and sculpture. Lee identifies the insidious meanings which abound in the visual and verbal material which commonly surrounds us. The trappings of a commercial culture, which form the background noise to our daily lives, are reworked and re-examined in Lee’s darkly humorous practice which explores the processes of communication and persuasion used on micro and international scales. He turns over the rock of clichéd banality to reveal the wriggling worms and scurrying beetles of mercantile motivation below.

www.inquino.com

Andrew Mania

Andrew Mania,Gavin Forest, Mixed Media, 2006.

'I am like a collector of curiosities, or a cultural vagrant; sometimes recycling found images like old master drawings or photographs, then adding my own obsessions or dialogue. Such as Yeti's, UFO's, or birdlike swarm, that invade otherwise stable images. My work may be unsettling and odd, with an irreverent nostalgia for art history.

The pictures seem to be going through a state of mischief. They form clusters, spills, columns or concentrations on the wall or more likely off the wall. I am interested in how pictures can be seen as passive or active props in a given space. Within these arrangements of collections and fragments a narrative is set up.'
Andrew Mania 2009

www.vilmagold.com

David Miller

David Miller, Up Jumped the Devil, Photographic drawing, 2009


Through engaging with such writings as A Rebours by Huysmans, Inferno by Dante and photographic writings by Roland Barthes it is inevitable that Miller’s work is concerned with self-representation, caricatures, religion, mythology and process. These literary inspirations lead to a practice involving both comedy and tragedy alike, the work playing on the sentimentality of looking back into a historically ambiguous time approaching a fairytale image.

Miller’s visual presentation of these themes falls into no single category. His thought processes are represented through unfixed photographs, torch drawings, video, installations and darker performances, which touch on sexuality and death. Miller’s method is directly affected by his subconscious, experiences, musical and filmic tastes and a slippage of fantasy into reality. His alter egos the Dandy, the English Gentleman and the Lace Gimp become the personifications of an inner turmoil found threaded throughout his works.

Charlie Levine

www.mysterdavid.co.uk

Paul Newman

Paul Newman, The Secret Garden (Project), 2008

Paul works across drawing, painting and performance. His scope of interests includes the absurd, the monstrous and the whimsical. By exploring gesture and figuration, his work investigates surface through the seductive properties of mark making and form and the plasticity of paint.

www.paul-newman.net

Cathy Wade

Cathy Wade, The light pours out of me, Carved & gilded wood, 2009

In my work I explore how practice can be informed by interdictory post-industrial urban spaces; liminal buildings that are neither iconic or loved enough to be preserved: the decaying shopping mall, the car park exterior and the profusion of signs that host themselves on existing structures aggressively competing for the gaze of the viewer.

www.vertigogallery.co.uk

Justin Wiggan

Justin Wiggan, Brotherhood of the order of the wing, 2006

Wiggan’s work uses medias of phonics, text, film, object changing and drawing to make interface solutions to problems that only he has have created.

These artifacts and documents are a reaction to the shouts, screams, shrieks, wails, hoots, howls, death rattles and sobs that are all soaked up by his surrounding unfinished structure of space. His body of work engages to this swollen cityscape and space, discovering the links between the internal tourist and the external explorer. His investigations embrace of a sense of evolution and eradication of a problem that goes way beyond cultural breakdown, addressing the problem with an end of a system.

www.dreamsoftallbuildings.com