9^th May-1^st June 2013

 My own personal archeology is a balance between creation and revelation.

Sarah Lightman

[In] the compelling still life’s of Lightman, her intensely penciled teacups and benches illustrate themes of longing and disappointment.

“Women Strength”, Kerry Politzer

OregonJewish Life Magazine, December 2012

Occupy My Time is delighted to present Sarah Lightman’s on-going autobiographical project, The Book of Sarah.

Sarah Lightman is an award-winning- artist, curator and researcher who explores visual memoir. The Book of Sarah is a text/image project that traces the artist’s life through drawings and animation films.  Begun in 1995 when the artist was an undergraduate at The Slade School of Art, The Book of Sarah also references the Biblical silence of her namesake, the Matriarch Sarah, and her unpreserved voice. The Book of Sarah transforms Jewish history into contemporary visual herstory. The exquisite, meticulous and often fragmentary pencil drawings that form the majority of The Book of Sarah transform unhappy experiences into something beautiful. Lightman’s remarkable skill is to distill time and experience into art that, though based on her own personal experience, can also have universal appeal and resonance.

Lightman has been working with filmmaker Conor O’Grady on a series of animation films based on her diary drawings. These will be shown for the first time in a Londongallery. Films include Families (2012) about sibling put-me-downs and hand-me-downs, Family Table (2012) about the differing constellation of chairs and people around her parent’s dining table and The Reluctant Bride (2012) that reflects the mixed emotions of the persistent cycle of life – planning her wedding, whilst knowing her desperately ill Grandfather will not live to see her under her chuppah [Jewish wedding canopy]. Sarah’s most recent artwork is Shanah Rishonah [The First Year of Marriage] (2013) and her thoughts on starting a family.

This work was carried out with the support of a grant from the European Association for Jewish Culture.

About the Artist

Sarah Lightman is an internationally exhibiting artist who studied at The Slade School of Art for her BA and MFA where she was awarded numerous scholarships and awards including The Slade Prize, The Slade Life Drawing Prize and The William Coldstream Award for Excellence, as well as an AHRC Award. Lightman currently researches a PhD in “Autobiographical Comics” at the University of Glasgow, and has been the recipient of multiple Research Awards. She has lectured worldwide on her research and has contributed to numerous books and journals. Recent essays have include “Metamorphosing Difficulties: The Graphic Novels of Sarah Leavitt, Nicola Streeten and Maureen Burdock” in Expressions of the Unspeakable: Trauma and Narrative, (Berghahn Books 2013), “Life Drawing: The Visual Autobiography of Jewish Women Artists,”
 The Routledge Handbook to Contemporary Jewish Cultures (Routledge, 2013), and “Cartoon Tears in Diane Noomin’s Baby Talk: A Tale of 3 4 Miscarriages,”Trauma, Narratives and Herstory (Palgrave Macmillan 2013).

Lightman has curated many exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world, most recently co-curating “Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women”, a critically acclaimed touring exhibition. Sarah is editor of Graphic Details: The Book (McFarland 2014) Lightman’s artwork, writings and curatorial projects have been featured in The Independent, The Washington Post, The National Post, The Toronto Star, The Chicago Jewish News, Haaretz, Oregon Jewish Life, The Jewish Week, J Weekly, The Forward, The Cincinnati Review, The Jerwood Visual Arts Blog and many more. Lightman is co-director with Nicola Streeten of Laydeez do Comics, theUK’s first monthly comics forum focusing on domestic drama and the everyday.

www.sarahlightman.com

In Conversation: 30 May 2013 6-7.30pm

Sarah Lightman, Dr Rachel Garfield, and Dr. Nadia Valman

Rachel Garfield is an artist who works with expanded documentary to explore the formation of identity and teaches at the University of Reading. She has exhibited in the UK, US, India, Italy and Canary Islands. Garfield also writes about the formation of identity in texts such as, “A Particular Incoherence: Some Films of Vivienne Dick”, Between Truth and Fiction, The Films of Vivienne Dick, Treasa O’Brian (ed.), (Crawford Art Centre/Lux publications 2009), “Questioning Perceptions of Jewish Identity in the work of Ary Stillman” (Merrell 2008).

Nadia Valman is Senior Lecturer in English at Queen Mary, University of London. Her research interests include literature, gender and religion with particular interest in Anglo-Jewry and published The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture (Cambridge University Press 2007). She has also edited a number of publications on Jews and Jewish representation in British and European culture, including, most recently, Nineteenth-Century Jewish Literature: A Reader (Stanford University Press, 2013). With Larry Roth, she is the editor of the forthcoming Routledge Handbook to Contemporary Jewish Cultures.

For more information and images contact:

Sue Cohen Director

Occupy My Time Gallery suecohen@ntlworld.com

T. 07932 536327

15th June – 31^st August 2013

Private View: Saturday 15^th June 4-7pm

Harvest event: Sunday 16^th June 6pm (invite only)

Nadege Meriau is currently working on an evolving, edible and compostable installation to be installed at Anarch over the summer. Creating the conditions for mushrooms to fruit within the gallery.

This new commission is as much about biological and creative processes – the ability to adapt and the possibility of failure – as it is about a specific outcome. This project is made possible by the support of Anarch and the guidance of Fungi Futures, a social enterprise based in Plymouth.

For her solo show at Anarch, Nadege Meriau will present new photographic works alongside an installation made out of 150 hessian sandbags filled with shredded paper and mushroom spores.

Throughout the two month period there will be a series of events centred around Meriau’s installation including harvesting, dining, discussion and exchange of ideas. Foragers, biologists and botanical writers will be invited to speak on subjects that invite discussion and encourage cross pollination of disciplines.

The exhibition and correlative events will investigate survival strategies on a global and personal level. It will point to the concept of resourcefulness, the ability to change and the necessity to establish physical and psychological boundaries in extreme situations. It will highlight the need for time and introspection as essential parts of the creative and biological processes.

As a response to limited financial resources and her wish to engage with waste issues she is shredding the paper herself from food packaging, newspapers, junk mail, bills and old birthday cards. This daily, repetitive activity of recycling has become an integral, unseen part of the artwork. This performative process of shredding, provokes reflection on the passage of time, food and waste cycle, and the predicament artists find themselves in sustaining their practice.

Living and working in London, French artist Nadege Meriau is a graduate of the Royal College of Art (2011). She was nominated for the Arts Foundation Fellowship in 2012, shortlisted for the Bloomberg New Contemporaries and the Conran Award in 2011 and was nominated for the Arles Discovery Award in 2012. Recent Shows include Academy Now, Hanmi Gallery, London 2013, Snow, Ilan Engel Gallery, Paris 2013,Tulca Arts Festival, Galway 2012, FFWE ,The Photographers’ Gallery, London 2012. Nadege is currently an artist in residence at the Florence Trust, London.

Part 2 preview April 26th 6-9pm with performances by Harold Offeh
Exhibition runs April 27 – May 25, open Fri and Sat 12-6pm

Part 2 at Enclave gallery: Harold Offeh, Chris Rawcliffe, Eileen Perrier, Denise Hawrysio, James Robertson, Steven Morgana

Friday 26 April, 6-9pm: Harold Offeh
Saturday 27 April, 12-6pm: Chris Rawcliffe
Friday 3 May, 12-6pm: Eileen Perrier
Saturday 4 May, 12-6pm: Denise Hawrysio
Friday 10 May, 12-6pm: James Robertson
Saturday 11 May, 12-6pm: Steven Morgana

Harold Offeh, April 26 6-9pm: In ‘Covers’ an ongoing series of performances Harold Offeh attempts to transform a series of music album covers from 70s and 80s into durational performances.
Covers. After Funkadelic. Maggot Brain, 1971 (V2) will see Offeh try to re-enact Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain, 1971. The original cover depicts the scream of a buried afro haired woman, Offeh reconstructs the image in the gallery. This will be one of several Covers enacted live on the night. The performances will be accompanied by music from the original albums.

Intensive Care, Part 1 & 2:

Part 1 of Intensive Care runs concurrently at news of the world (Enclave 3): Rose Gibbs, Richard Parry, Esther Planas, Markus Vater, Stephen Wilson, Sam Curtis

An important rule one learns in basic first aid training and lifesaving: the casualties that scream for attention are not the priority in the first instance, no matter how desperate their cries. You go to the silent ones first.

The facility with which art institution press releases, exhibition concepts, curator’s statements deploy the concept and language of ‘urgency’ can recall the strident shrieks of a weather presenter forecasting heavy rains in Wales and the drama of an everything-must-go sale in the high street.

This ‘urgency’, and seeking its bestowment onto the art object itself, becomes a theatrical framing device. As a visibility strategy, it seeks to raise a consumer craving for action and intervention and to fulfill this with a presentation of artworks. Bent on drama, it scripts the parameters in which these works are to operate. As a call for action, it sucks the lifeblood out of the social and political context to spit out lymphatic dogmatic rhetoric.

news of the world space in Deptford exists as a ‘curator’s studio’, allowing works to be looked at in an R+D / process setting.

Each Friday and Saturday over the coming weeks, one new artist is present in the space. Under the curator’s duty of care, the artist on an examination bench inhabits the gallery alongside their work, underlying the visitors’ part in the diagnosis of observable trauma, anxiety, acute failure, unstable critical condition or fitness for purpose.

Rather than summoning ‘urgency’, Intensive Care refers to some of the procedures and mechanisms which can deal with emergency; aligning in one space the artist, the work, the curator, the visitor, to take the time and foster calm, focus, expertise, dialogue and unity of purpose in the truthful assessment of the artwork.

Is ‘urgency’ a symptom of a much deeper malaise affecting the curator patient?

‘The possibility of physical and mental collapse is very real now… but collapse is out of the question; as a solution or even a cheap alternative, it is unacceptable. Indeed. This is the moment of truth, that fine and fateful line between control and disaster’
Hunter S Thompson

‘A Domestic Image of Preemption’, a multimedia installation by Helene Kazan, sets the ordinary image of the domestic space against a complex conceptual framework of preemption. Bringing together under one roof a sequence of interacting moving images made using a unique methodology of extracting visual information found in a set of photographs, the space depicted in each is reproduced, with the films revealing the potentially catastrophic breaking point under which each photograph is generated. Here, the architecture of the home is shown to transform, through a set of overarching conditions, from a space of shelter to a space of potent threat.

Whilst preemptive action has been etched into our collective consciousness through its application as a strategy of war, Kazan’s claim is that there is no less at stake when such measures are applied to the domestic context. Rather a reproduction of scale is performed, bringing into focus actions of a necessary fortification that take place within the domestic realm: for instance, the use of tape to prevent glass windows shattering when exposed to violent force during natural disaster or armed conflict. As such, the focus for this exhibition is image production – above all photography – as a preemptive act.

Exploring the conditions that provoke such actions, Kazan draws on the idea that any potential threat to the assumed security of this environment creates a situation that reconfigures the relationship between past, present and future. Rather than preventing future catastrophe, preemptive action becomes a driving force inducing it into the present. This proposition is unfolded from two standpoints: a series of photographs taken of Kazan’s own home during the Lebanese Civil War in 1989 and a set of images produced as a home insurance inventory in the UK in 2013.

Operating through the potential of these visual objects and unlocking the information harboured within them, Kazan utilises the elasticity and fluidity of time that is brought to light by this conceptual framework. The tensions of a limited futurity are activated through the use of filmmaking processes to trick time, capture it and then playfully traverse through it. Revealing to the viewer a narrated dialogue formed between the independent, yet interconnected scenarios. Illustrating the dissemination of sovereign power through these conditions, and therefore how domestic space is re-fabricated within the parameters of its control.

Helene Kazan is a multidisciplinary artist who has exhibited extensively in the UK and internationally. Across her practice, she uses research and archival material to generate moving image and mixed media sculptural installations. She is currently completing a Masters at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London.

www.helenekazan.co.uk

Curated by Iavor Lubomirov and Bella Easton. Text by Helene Kazan.

Guy Bolongaro, Tom Mason, Neil Zakiewicz

IT MAKES ME FEEL WONDERFUL is a three man show exploring the space between the mundane and the wonderful.

Lance likes to dress like Caesar. It just makes him feel wonderful. Guy Bolongaro‘s portrait doc ‘The Last Emperor’ could be viewed as a film about escapism but it is much more than just that. Whilst dressed in his robes Lance makes astute comments on the people and places around him, the suburbs of London, what he sees wrong with it, how closed-minded the people are. He is bitingly critical about it all, yet finishes each sentence with a smile, seems happy and amused; he presents himself just as he is; a free individual living in his own way.

Neil Zakiewicz also explores the private world of the individual with a series of photographs presenting objects in the local environment that have come from small, idiosyncratic modifications by people to enhance and personalise their surroundings. His documentation of unselfconscious signage, home improvements, urban survival, territory demarkation and the adaptation of obsolete technology articulates his interest in the vulnerability of mundane materials and the serendipity that is relied on to elevate the every-day to the art object.

Tom Mason‘s new series of paintings explore a gesture of age-old escapism – “A man goes into a bar“ – the joke begins this way and we don’t know what comes next.. anything could happen, anything could be said, all stemming from this simple scenario; a man, and the contents of a public house, utterly familiar and yet holding an unknown that will be both unleashed and ultimately contained. He’s opening the door and stepping inside. Freeze-frame.

Though working in different media theses artists are united by their concern to elevate the mundane into the wonderful.

Friday 29th March, 6 to 9 pm: Rose Gibbs
Saturday 30th March, 12 to 6 pm: Richard Parry

Friday 5th April, 12 to 6 pm: Esther Planas
Saturday 6th April, 12 to 6 pm: Markus Vater

Friday 12th April, 12 to 6 pm: Stephen Wilson
Saturday 13th April, 12 to 6 pm: Sam Curtis

…and further to be announced April 2013

An important rule one learns in basic first aid training and lifesaving: the casualties that scream for attention are not the priority in the first instance, no matter how desperate their cries. You go to the silent ones first.

The facility with which art institution press releases, exhibition concepts, curator’s statements deploy the concept and language of ‘urgency’ can recall the strident shrieks of a weather presenter forecasting heavy rains in Wales and the drama of an everything-must-go sale in the high street.

This ‘urgency’, and seeking its bestowment onto the art object itself, becomes a theatrical framing device. As a visibility strategy, it seeks to raise a consumer craving for action and intervention and to fulfill this with a presentation of artworks. Bent on drama, it scripts the parameters in which these works are to operate. As a call for action, it sucks the lifeblood out of the social and political context to spit out lymphatic dogmatic rhetoric.

news of the world space in Deptford exists as a ‘curator’s studio’, allowing works to be looked at in an R+D / process setting.

Each Friday and Saturday over the coming weeks, one new artist is present in the space. Under the curator’s duty of care, the artist on an examination bench inhabits the gallery alongside their work, underlying the visitors’ part in the diagnosis of observable trauma, anxiety, acute failure, unstable critical condition or fitness for purpose.

Rather than summoning ‘urgency’, Intensive Care refers to some of the procedures and mechanisms which can deal with emergency; aligning in one space the artist, the work, the curator, the visitor, to take the time and foster calm, focus, expertise, dialogue and unity of purpose in the truthful assessment of the artwork.

Is ‘urgency’ a symptom of a much deeper malaise affecting the curator patient?

‘The possibility of physical and mental collapse is very real now… but collapse is out of the question; as a solution or even a cheap alternative, it is unacceptable. Indeed. This is the moment of truth, that fine and fateful line between control and disaster’ Hunter S Thompson

“The paintings do not tell a story or illustrate an event to describe an external world. I do not wish to label a painting with a title which would be a distraction to the viewer’s recognition of the painting.”B.White

White’s monumental world consists of procedure, composure and loyalty to his cause. His large scale (often heavily re worked) canvases can be described as an unearthing of external, improvised states. These circumstances fall into place and run a discourse of accertion.
“Making a painting is a process of discovery, an uncharted journey in which I have no preconceived idea of the final image.” 

“As words/verbal thinking do not come into the painting process, why attempt to explain or justify it through the use of words? A painting can be ‘described’  verbally but it is essentially to be experienced as one might experience an unfamiliar landscape.   The response will depend on the viewer’s background and temperament.” 

For Whites solo show at ATOI & CULL, we have selected a series of large scale canvases, prints and drawings dating from 2000- 2013.

White, born 1937 Lancashire, studied at Goldsmiths in the 60′s, he worked and taught extensively in and around Manchester, Chicago. He currently lives and works in Gr Manchester and his work is frequently shown in Helsinki.

The show runs from Friday 29th March – 20th April

Preview and special performances: March 29th from 6pm
Show: March 30th – April 20th, open Thu – Sat 12-6pm or by appointment
Finissage: April 20th

Special performances March 29th, 7-9pm: Rachael Champion: Pebble Dash / Lucy Conochie: Listeningking ‘Facts’ / Alice Newsholme: Catsby and the Christ Child / Luke McCreadie: To Be and Not to Be Mean

Half-words is an exhibition and program of talks, screenings and performances which has no aim.

“Last week our picture window, produced a half-word.”

A rounded object that fits in the palm of your hand. Look at it for a second, maybe two. What comes across has little to do with language. More like a feeling or a thought. This is a lozenge shaped thought, it is easily squeezed from larynx to cochlea. The incommunicable space between people. The chasm of difference between the physically aligned last and first pages of books next to each other in a library. Ordered but not continuous. With huge gaps filled with the stuff nobody ever wrote about. I could tell you everything you wanted to know here, if I really believed that you would hear the sounds I made. So back to that object. In fact, think of an allegorical painting or a metaphorical sculpture. Think of the phrase, “why not” and think there has to be a better way of thinking. The round object is sitting there in the palm of your hand and you still don’t know why. It gives you nothing and it is even hard for you to give it something. But still it hums a medieval hum as though it is teetering on explosion with the millennia of experience it has but cannot communicate. You misunderstand me, you confuse me. You have misinterpreted my actions, you have painted me with the wrong brush. It’s not about nothing, but sometimes something. When the whole facade of your face begins to stretch outwards and you can see the world through two ever distancing eye sockets and the exterior becomes a place which is decided, which has an air of inevitability, and there is no way to distract those around you from the misplaced theme they have found and will stick to. This is interpretation, interpretation of form. When the dogma recedes, the objects come out and act as conduits for us to understand the specificity of what it is to exist over there. The rounded object either grew like that or its experience made it like that. The weather constantly erodes and so you can tell there is weather. The weather is like the human gaze. The history of art. The impossibility of the present to unite the past and the future. The object’s rounded edges do not look bloated and empty, they look red and knocked back. Homogenisation, archiving, encyclopedias. Understanding. Library catalogues and book shelves. Ordering the chaos. The late Thomas Eade was a revolutionary, keeping his Toxteth library in a constant state of decomposition, no shelving allowed, certainly no archival system, room upon room with floors filled ten books deep in undulating, towering piles. So take the red object, in the palm of your hands and feel it. It’s like a slippery sentence, wily and wise. It is by no means non-committal. It is a feeling or a thought, formed through experience which does not need to be communicated accurately.

Half-Words is curated by Luke McCreadie for Enclave, 2013.

Lubomirov and Easton have been collaborating as art professionals since 2011 and lately this collaboration has extended into their practice. While continuing to produce their own very different work, emerging synergies have suggested natural ways to complement each others’ competencies and in January 2013 the pair co-produced the first of a series of collaborative artworks – A Romance of Many Dimensions – for London Art Fair.

Lubomirov and Easton have brought together an unusual combination of talents to their collaborations. An Oxford Mathematician and a Royal Academy Painter, Lubomirov creates uncompromising geometric objects, clothed in Easton’s luxuriant patterns and colours. Their literal melding of practices is soft yet substantial, blending seduction with seriousness in surprising and unlikely objects, which fall within multiple remits and disciplines, straddling sculpture, printmaking, animation, drawing, painting and architecture.

They share a common obsession with hand-made multiples and a belief in creating valid possibilities for craft to exist in contemporary art. Their work is radically different in conception, execution and material, but achieves a harmony through a common use of the grid to explore the role of the hand of the artist in the production of multiples. For both the need for a precise structure is not an end in itself, but a way of containing and inviting chance, just beyond the edge of human ability. They are thus able to ask relevant questions about making that are not couched in nostalgia, but are part of a larger resurgent discussion about craftsmanship and the role of the artist in the production of work.

In Easton’s looming wall panels, a system of geometry orders the repetition of hundreds of hand-painted or printed patterns in a way that establishes a connection between images of architectural spaces and the pattern of the work itself. Lubomirov grows sculptural pieces through a slow and laborious process of layering of grids drawn on thin materials, creating a spatial distortion of flat geometry.

For Pattern Recogniton (from Blue), Lubomirov and Easton are showing a collaborative piece framed within the context of independent artworks by each artist. The total coming together of a-tonal sculptures and colour-rich wall works into a single central piece can thus also be seen in reverse as a litmus-like separation of the two artists’ individual practices.

www.iavor.co.uk

www.bellaeaston.co.uk