Artists

Artists and works exhibited at Construction Gallery

BBKP, Big Wheel
Main Space Weeks 7 Wed 29 Feb- Week 9 Sun 19 March

Installation artists BBKP bring their wry humour to the main space by setting out to build an impossible structure. Each of the four artists will use their particular craft to repair and re-construct the other’s invention until they manage to create a working ‘Big Wheel’ in a space that doesn’t actually have the height for it.

Egle Vaituleviciute Artist in Residence
(Wed 29 Feb & Thurs 1 March with exhibit in the Construction Room until Sunday 4 March)

Project Space and Excavation Room
Born and raised in Lithuania, I am a textile designer, based in Colliers Wood, specializing in knit. Recent projects include a seven week professional commission in India and participation in Spinexpo Shanghai, September 2011. I work as a freelance designer on new season collections. Knitwear is like painting for me, I relate a lot of my work to heritage and tradition, making designs to be loved by the people who wear them. I can undertake private commissions.

Matthew James Kay, Artist in Residence
(Fri 2, Sat 3, Sun 4 March) Project Space Exhibition continues in the project space until Sunday 11 March)

During his residency at the Construction Gallery Kay will explore the absurdity behind the search for perfection as he attempts to build a mountain in the gallery’s project space. Using throw-away materials, Kay seeks to capture the immensity of the sublime and it’s inextricable relationship with the everyday and the mundane.

Savinder Bual, Road
The Observatory Week 7 – 29 Feb – 4 March
From the innovations of Construction Gallery to the aspirations of the aesthetes concerned with the uncovering of culture, the A is for Art movement of the late 00s fashioned its own visual and auditory underground in Tooting. Aesthetes of ‘A’ enlightened residents in the London Borough of Wandsworth, restoring a sense of community. James Yule presents a radio documentary on The Origin of A, featuring interviews with Peter Piontek and Aubrey Dumonde. Yule, Piontek and Dumonde are alumni of Wimbledon College of Art and Curatorial Consultants of the Continental Operations Gallery.

James Yule, The Origin of A
ft. Peter Piontek and Aubrey Dumonde
Writers Room Week 7 – 29 Feb – 4 March
From the innovations of Construction Gallery to the aspirations of the aesthetes concerned with the uncovering of culture, the A is for Art movement of the late 00s fashioned its own visual and auditory underground in Tooting. Aesthetes of ‘A’ enlightened residents in the London Borough of Wandsworth, restoring a sense of community. James Yule presents a radio documentary on The Origin of A, featuring interviews with Peter Piontek and Aubrey Dumonde. Yule, Piontek and Dumonde are alumni of Wimbledon College of Art and Curatorial Consultants of the Continental Operations Gallery.

Olga Koroleva, Unintentional
Sound Room Week 7 – 29 Feb – 4 March
Unintentional is a direct and unaltered recording of a real radio broadcast. Occurring due a technical error, this slowed down and distorted dialogue between the two broadcasters at first appears falsified. Almost merging with the music in the background the voices acquire a robotic yet melodic quality of their own.

Christopher Mayer
Cafe Walls Week 7 – 29 Feb – 4 March

Christopher Mayer, an artist based in South London is a recent graduate of Wimbledon College of Art. His work exudes a love art history, yet is resistant to interpretation. Despite a theoretical framework it denies obvious explanation upon viewing. This nihilism, which dodges intention, is rescued by its art historical celebration. It does not undermine histories or devalue an art historical framework, providing instead a whimsical transubstantiation of quotation in the post historical context.

Hamja Ahsan – Residency Artist
Writers Room (Week 4: Wed 8 Feb – Sun 12 Feb)

Hamja Ahsan is a multi-disclipinary artist and curator based in London (UK)/ Dhaka (Bangladesh). Ahsan has exhibited extensively nationally in the UK and Internationally. He has presented projects at Tate Britain, Shiplakala Academy (Bangladesh), the Guild Gallery in New York, Resonance FM and Gwangju Biennale. A significant body of his work is concerned with the contested histories of South Asia, race relations and diaspora settlement. He is also interested in the space between curatorial practice and fine art practice.

Since 2008, he has been co-director of Other Asias – a transnational family of art collectives (www.otherasias.com). In the short future, he will be opening an artists project space in Dhaka.

Ahsan was born, lives and grew up in Tooting.

Robert Aldous – Magenta and Grey
Gallery Shutters (Wed 18 Jan – Sun 25 Mar 2012)

Aldous’ practice combines poetry with image. His poem on the front shutter of Construction Gallery uses the gallery’s colour combination of Magenta and Grey. The poem is accompanied by the scattering of blossom that appears to have been blown out of the gallery entrance and across the frontage.

The colours are used as a starting point that conjures up associated imagery of blossom on stone pavements – blown there by a wind that passes through time. Magenta and Grey is a poetic installation that is part of a wider project initiated by the artist using shop shutters as a canvas for poetry and painting. Robert works with a wide range of media often exhibited in locations that lie outside of the usual gallery context.

Rodney Dee – Daedalus
Video Room (Week 4: Wed 8 Feb to Sun 12 Feb)

Daedalus is a video based upon the fabled architect who fashions wings of wax and feathers so as to fly from King Minos’ labyrinth. In Greek mythology the story of Daedalus underpins mans innate desire to escape from the human condition whilst elevating him self to a celestial vantage point.

Heather Jones – Autumn Tree
Video Room (Weeks 1 & 2: Wed 18 Feb to Sun 29 Feb)

Although only just over a minute long, “Autumn Tree” is made up of more than an hour of footage, filmed in 100 segments and pieced back together into the resulting video. This lengthy process of filming and construction of the image was an attempt to get to grips with the stuff of digital video, an exercise in looking and focusing on the detail. Like putting a jigsaw puzzle together, pixels are “stitched” to pixels, building up this moving picture of a tree. “To me, this particular tree references the archetypal tree, similar to those we draw when we’re children. As the representation deconstructs piece by piece, it gives us the opportunity to reconsider how images retain meaning for us and what part our imagination plays in this process.”

Nichol Keene and Toby de Angeli – Carousel
Writers Room (Weeks 1 & 2: Wed 18 Feb to Sun 29 Feb)

Carousel, is a semi autobiographical spoken word story accompanied by online material and a musical score composed by William Edelsten and Harry Balazs. It tells the story of two people, who never meet, but live in the same street. All set in real time it explores a narrative, which connects events that happen on the same day and how the two lives are interconnected. Each character begins to look back at their past and starts to analyse its effect on the present.

Written and produced by Nichol Keene and Toby de Angeli
Musical score composed by William Edelsten and Harry Balazs

Nichol Keene and Toby de Angeli – Catch a tiger by its toe
Writers Room (Weeks 1 & 2: Wed 18 Feb to Sun 29 Feb)

This short story uses spoken word and a musical score from William Edelsten to explore the idea of gaining wisdom with age or whether we are born wise and lose wisdom as we grow up. It tells the story of a boy and girl assessing where they are in life and whether it’s where they thought they would be.

Written and produced by Nichol Keene and Toby de Angeli
Musical score composed by William Edelsten

Ursula Kelly – ‘Pitch 78 East Street Market, 2008

Ursula Kelly is an Irish artist living in Tooting. She makes work based on conversations with people relating to their memories and how memories form our identities.

Sound room (Week 4: Wed 8 Feb – Sun 12 Feb):
“The work on show in the sound room is a piece completed during my MA at Camberwell in 2007/08, which is part of a larger series of work that documents a market trader from East Street Market near Elephant and Castle. During the recorded conversation the trader can be heard exchanging banter with customers and passers-by, while also discussing more personal family issues, specifically his recent reconnection with his adolescent daughter. “Pitch 78 East Street Market” is an attempt at simultaneously portraying the trader’s public/social and private/personal identity.”

Project Space Residency (Week 4: Sun 12 Feb):
“For the one-day residency I intend to test a new mixed media work that is based on a woman I interviewed in Killaloe, Co.Clare in 2009. The piece is a short video of the bridge in Killaloe that connects two counties but disconnects one mother and her daughter. I will be editing a sound recording to accompany this video as well as making a ransom note using the words of a family prayer that was hanging in the Catholic Church in Killaloe.”

Christopher Lawrence – Residency Artist
Writers Room (Week 3: Wed 1 Feb to Sun 5 Feb)

Christopher Lawrence is an artist, writer and curator currently living in south-west London and a recent graduate of Wimbledon College of Art. Collaboratively, he works as a film maker with the Wimbledon Maverick Film Unit and as a pop musician in the band Welcome to the O.C. Bitch. His solo work reflects an interest in psychoanalytical interpretations of popular and high art culture as well an attempt to escape the self-referential trap of post structuralism. His written work could be called ‘Borgesian’ but only if you were referring to the Star Trek villains, although he’s definitely a bit off a Chekhov if you catch him on the wrong day.

Rebecca Lucraft – Window display
Cafe Area (Wed 18 Jan – Sun 25 Mar 2012)

Rebecca Lucraft responds to the exquisite creations of our resident pop-up cafe, Tea Party Cakes, to provide an atmospheric landscape for the cafe window display; a work of intricate detail to both charm and intrigue. With a background in print design, Lucraft’s integration of 2D surfaces with 3D forms began whilst studying for an MA in Mixed Media Textiles at the Royal College of Art.

Alistair McClymont – After the Rain
Main Space (Weeks 1 – 4: Wed 18 Feb to Sun 12 Feb)

In the main space, Alistair McClymont’s large scale installation After the Rain conjures up the smell of rain on a hot summer’s day. Introducing infra-red heaters, dripping water and large asphalt road surfaces into the gallery, the Royal College of Art MA Sculpture graduate uses man-made debris to create a visual and sensory experience constructed from environmental waste.

Present Attempt – Keeping the Park
Sound Room (Weeks 1 & 2: Wed 18 Feb to Sun 29 Feb)

Keeping the Park was created by Present Attempt in collaboration with local residents from Colliers Wood. Present Attempt is a collective of artists (James Bush, Alex Eisenberg, John Pinder) making experimental theatre, performance and live art. The music is by Zubzub.

Bending and borrowing the conventional form of the tourist’s audio guide, Present Attempt created a bespoke audio guide for Away Day, POST Artists Network’s 2010 festival of publicly sited works in three parks in Merton. Generated from interviews and conversations with the local community and incorporating ephemeral performance acts and unsuspecting occurrences, the guide is made through the lens of the networks present in the park.

Sam Robinson – Residency Artist
Project Space and Cafe Walls (Weeks 1 & 2: Wed 18 Feb to Sun 29 Feb)

A recent graduate of the BA Painting at Wimbledon College of Art, Robinson overlays romantic paintings with geometric man-made forms, investigating our changing relationship to nature and landscape. The paintings hung in the main gallery space are part of a series of works depicting harsh man-made structures set into or imposed upon large open wildernesses, carving up and channelling immersive spaces and movement within the paintings and creating a potential energy across planes of flat abstraction.

Eva Rudlinger – Arctic Echo
Video Room (Week 3: Wed 1 Feb to Sun 5 Feb)

The gradual appearance and disappearance of a cliff facing its double at the mouth of a fjord, subtly alters scenery and atmosphere.

The temporary transfiguration of sea and sky recall phenomena such as the arctic mirage witnessed in remote and high latitude settings.

Melanie Russell – Residency Artist
Project Space and Cafe Walls (Weeks 3 & 4: Wed 1 Feb to Sun 12 Feb)

Melanie Russell is interested in visual perception, spacial ambiguity and negative space; her works give foregrounds and backgrounds equal priority. During her project space residency she will take colours and shapes from her collages and paintings, transforming them into a large scale 3D environment/installation. An exhibition of Melanie’s paintings will also be on display at the gallery until 26 February.

Shop

A range of works for sale by UKlandscapes, Gurley, Anna Pharoah, Honest Publishing, Helen Lang, Ruth Martindale, Melanie Russell, Ludwig Wagner, Egle Vaituleviciute, and Matthew James Kay

Chris Wood – ‘the lines beneath your feet…’
Sound Room (Week 3: Wed 1 Feb to Sun 5 Feb)

…is an interactive sound installation which seeks to explore how the public engage with protest. The sounds were all recorded in London on November 30th 2011, the day of the biggest national strike in a generation. The locations were pickets, marches and demonstrations around central London.