Arni Haraldsson: The Goldfinger Project
Shary Boyle: The Clearances
01 September – 30 September 2007
Opening: Friday 31 August 2007, 6-8.30pm
Two solo exhibitions by artists Arni Haraldsson and Shary Boyle.
Exhibition Opening Hours: Mon-Fri 10am-5pm, Sat 12-4pm
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129-131 Mare Street
London E8 3RH
Direct: 020 8525 4330
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mail@spacestudios.org.uk
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Arni Haraldsson: The Goldfinger Project
The Goldfinger Project explores the social utopian ideology and reality of the Brutalist architectural aesthetic, documenting both fictional and factual narratives from one of Brutalism’s key exponents and a leading figure of the Modern movement – Erno Goldfinger.
Goldfinger’s architectural legacies, key moments from his life and the architectural world are presented by Arni Haraldsson in the form of photography, film footage, historical documentation, popular cultural memorabilia, sound and resourced information. Featuring material from such diverse sources as BBC news reels of the Ronan Point tower collapse, the Barbican, Trellick Tower, t-shirts, popular music songs, advertising campaigns, interviews with residents and James Bond movies.
The Goldfinger Project is Arni Haraldsson’s latest work in his investigation into the architectural language of the High Modernist era. This ongoing project of photographing and collecting material as a means to explore architecture and its cultural legacy has taken him around the globe from Rix Reinecke’s landmark Ocean Towers in Vancouver, Libera’s isolated Villa Malaparte on Capri to Le Corbusier’s Modernist city vision of Chandigarh in India.
Arni Haraldsson is a Vancouver-based artist and an Associate Professor of Photography at Emily Carr Institute in Vancouver. His practice documents the fading relics of High Modernist architecture as a means of reading recent historical change and exploring their symbolic complexity and status as monuments and utopian models.
Shary Boyle: The Clearances
Borrowing the title from a bitter period of 19th century Scottish resettlement the exhibition The Clearances is a construction of visual mythology based upon historical collisions of power and culture. Combining visions of the past with fresh experience from her time in London, Shary Boyle animates an exchange of fictitious and factual narratives in history, incorporating them into a mural, painted and cut-out figures and superimposed projections of light.The Clearances depicts folklore characters, colonised peoples and brute forces of power engaged in an infinite march of erasure. Boyle’s invented historical overview illustrates the slippage that occurs when worlds, realities and imaginations collide. Working on multiple layers, the dramatically lit installation stages a theatrical display referencing educational dioramas and childrens imagery. The Clearances is a result of three sources of inspiration for Boyle: The Four Kings show at the National Portrait Gallery, the New Worlds show at the British Museum and the Marks and Spencer’s advert of Myleene Klass emerging from the sea, clad in a white bikini.
Shary Boyle is a Toronto-based artist whose work addresses the historicity of perception through various media including drawing, painting, sculpture and performance. Often working with an international base of musicians such as Peaches (Berlin), Feist (Paris), Es (Finland) and Christine Fellows (Canada), Boyle creates ‘live’ drawings–handanimated screen projections displayed during unique audio-visual performances to diverse audiences around the world. Her feminist sculptural series of porcelain figurines, created for a 2006 solo exhibition, has been acquired for permanent collection by National Gallery of Canada, the Musee des Beaux Arts in Montreal, the Paisley Museum of Art in Scotland and the Art Gallery of Ontario.
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For further information and visual material, please contact:
George Unsworth
george@spacestudios.org.uk
