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Blood event September 2006 - Gasworks: Studio visits

Blood at Gasworks: Studio visits

Wednesday 20 September 2006
7pm-9pm
Gasworks, 155 Vauxhall St, SE11 5RH
gasworks.org.uk

Blood members are invited to an exclusive evening to visit some of the studios at Gasworks.

As you may know, Gasworks is an independent art organisation, part of Triangle Arts Trust, comprising a gallery and fifteen artists’ studios. Twelve studios are rented to London based artists and three are reserved for International Residencies.

We will have introductions to the existing work, and of works in progress, by visiting artists Hamra Abbas, Krishna Luchoomun and Anup Mathew Thomas. The three artists are part of Gasworks’ International Residency Programme. This programme provides non UK based artists with the opportunity to live and work in London for a period of up to three months. The programme aims to encourage international contacts for artists and to facilitate exchanges of ideas through practice. We will also visit the studio of two of the permanent artists who rent their studios, Alexandre da Cunha and Saki Satom.

This is a unique opportunity for Blood to meet the artists and catch a glimpse of their ongoing projects and ideas in development.

Drinks will be kindly provided by Gasworks.

Hamra Abbas (Pakistan) takes a playful approach towards traditional stories and iconography, appropriating imagery from a range of cultural sources, transforming them across media into works with humour and renewed contemporary relevance. Through special access to the V&A’s collection of Mughal miniature paintings, Abbas has made a series of contemporary recreations in photography and animation, featuring London park-goers.

Through paintings and site-specific installations, Krishna Luchoomun (Mauritius) reconstructs and redefines familiar images and spaces found in nature and popular culture. In London Luchoomun has been working experimentally in painting and collage in response to the recurrence of the colour red in London’s tourist landscape.

Anup Mathew Thomas’(India) photography draws on various genres including photojournalism, documentary and fashion, in order to present a diverse set of approaches to the human subject. One project developed during his residency is the continuation of New Friends, in which he asks the subjects of his portraiture to share in the art direction and styling of the shoot.

Alexandre da Cunha (Brasil) often presents the viewer with a notion of the exotic played out through the micro-economies found in the poorer districts of his native country of Brazil. In general the objects he appropriates are those that have fallen out of the mainstream economy - objects that now transgress specific use and are traded on the street and in flea markets and junkshops. To date da Cunha's work has reinvested these prosaic semi-retired objects with a sense of purpose such as the hockey stick that becomes a crutch or the old t-shirts and golf clubs that become a tent.

Saki Satom's (Japan) work explores patterns of human behaviour, and more specifically those that are particular to large urban centres. The situations she creates allow her to interact with the public in order to expose such overlooked behavioural patterns in fresh and unexpected ways.

More info on Gasworks and the artists gasworks.org.uk