One can often be thwarted by some antidisestablishmentarianiam

“One can often be thwarted by some antidisestablishmentarianism”

Curated by Richard Meaghan and Andrew Foulds

ARTISTS
Richard Meaghan
Andrew Foulds
Boo Saville
Paul Rooney
Emma Talbot
Brendan Lyons
Louise Thomas
The Singh Twins
Jaap de Vries

Antidisestablishmentarianism?

1 The movement which apposes the removal of an established authority from the position which that established authority now holds. Usually the right of that established authority to hold this position has only been assumed by that authority to be their right.


2 A really big word that means you’re against the disestablishment of stuff.


3 A long and entirely useless word used by posh gits to try and sound funny and intelligent.


4 The word high school kids use to sound smart while tapping off the bong.

5 The way to use one of the longest words in the dictionary in such a way that it makes sense in conversation.

6 One who is against those who are against those who want to commence a new form of life.


7 The movement which apposes the removal of an established authority from the position which that established authority now holds. Usually the right of that established authority to hold this position has only been assumed by that authority to be their right.


8 This is a word that describes a person or persons who are against the person or persons who are against an establishment of something or issue.


9 The fear of the measure of the amount of hate a person has of non-established society.


10 A very large scrotom.


(text taken from http://www.urbandictionary.com/)


Richard Meaghan

FORTHCOMING EXHIBITIONS
2009 Kapellmeister pulls a doozy; Danielle Arnaud, London
(Artists- Richard Meaghan, Andrew Foulds, Tamsin Morse, John Stark, Zavier Ellis, Andy Denzler, David Hancock, Rui Matsunaga, Rene Holm, The Singh Twins, Julian Lee)
Curated by Richard Meaghan

2008 No Current Bun; View 2 Gallery, Liverpool (solo)

Richard Meaghan & Rene Holm; galarie bn24, Hamburg, Germany

Group Show; Copenhagen, Denmark
Curated by Rene Holm

SELECTED RECENT EXHIBITIONS
2007 I’ll be your mirror; Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool & Gallery Primo Alonso, London
(Artists- Marit Andreassen, Jemima & Dolly Brown, Gordon Cheung, Juno Doran, Leo Fitzmaurice, David Hancock, Owen Leong, Andy Magee, Rui Matsunaga, Stuart Semple, Hannah Wooll, Dawn Woolley, Isabel Young, Richard Meaghan.
Curated by Richard Meaghan & David Hancock)

2006 Exposed- Art & Culture from England’s Northwest; Manchester Square, London
(Artists- Chris Ofili, Keith Tyson, Richard Meaghan, Kevin Cummins, Peter Saville, Rachel Goodyear, The Singh Twins, Neville Gabie, Ian Rawlinson, Leo Fitzmaurice.
Curated by Stephen Snoddy)

Jerusalem; Dean Clough galleries, Halifax
(Artists- Gordon Cheung, David Hancock, Richard Meaghan, Beth Harland, Roderick Harris, Reece Jones, Peter Lamb, Rui Matsunaga, Tamsin Morse, Simon Woolham.
Curated by Richard Meaghan & David Hancock)

Richard Meaghan's paintings are invented and are an amalgamation of a number of differing experiences that revolve around memory, making use of allegorical and pictorial inventions and references from art history. Meaghan's narrations are not linear, but rather associative and analytical, so that the works function like short stories, in which the plot is compressed into single images. However, the fragments have to be pieced together and thus can seemingly fall somewhere between dream, nightmare and reality. The resulting paintings appear as visions of somewhere familiar yet strange, uncanny shimmerings based on careful study of our world that in turn suggests another.


Andrew Foulds

FORTHCOMING EXHIBITIONS
2009 Kapellmeister pulls a doozy; Danielle Arnaud, London
(Artists- Richard Meaghan, Andrew Foulds, Tamsin Morse, John Stark, Zavier Ellis, Andy Denzler, David Hancock, Rui Matsunaga, Rene Holm, The Singh Twins, Julian Lee)
Curated by Richard Meaghan


Andrew Foulds creates complex personal narratives using a wide of found visual material from early photographs to Horror films, The aim is to evoke a mood so that whilst the story is personal, the reading can be universal and can be seen to evoke the epic and the mythical archetypes of the past.




Boo Saville

The first time I laid eyes on the work of British artist and Slade graduate Boo Saville, I was immediately struck by the intensity, intricacy and rawness of her monochromatic ink drawings most of which were created using the humble ballpoint pen which according to the artist can be "worked just like graphite and ink". Since graduating from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2004 Saville has notched up an impressive list of achievements in a short space of time with her work having been exhibited at the General Public Gallery in Berlin, the British Affordable Art Fair and Sesame Art Gallery in London and an exhibition at the extremely prestigious London gallery Martin Summers Fine Art Ltd planned for Spring 2008. In 2004 Saville became one of the first members of the artists co-op The Children of !WOWOW! which enjoys cult status among the contemporary art fraternity with big name artists such as Matthew Stone, Gareth Cadwallader and Ellie Tobin behind its success.An obvious eye for detail and what can only be described as a masterful and innovative use of tonal variation has resulted in works that are far from what one would expect to see from a traditional ink drawing. Detailed, realistic and expertly executed depictions of monkeys and other primates dominate Saville's work and are full of personality and appeal but it is her more adventurous, abstract works that are the most exciting. The ghostly human figures and alien-looking life forms with titles such as 'Grimace', 'Bang Face' and 'Bogman' evoke an immediate response that seems to constantly evolve as one becomes acquainted with each image. It is these works that truly showcase Saville's creativity and ingenuity.

Nicholas Forrest (art critic)




Paul Rooney


Artist Paul Rooney was born in Liverpool in 1967, and trained at Edinburgh College of Art. Paul’s individual practice focused from 1997 to 2000 on the music of the ‘Rooney’ CD’s and performances. He achieved an appearance in John Peel’s Festive Fifty in 1998, and a Radio 1FM ‘Peel session’ by Rooney was broadcast in 1999. Paul now primarily works with text, sound and video, focusing on the voices of semi-fictional individuals exploring the presence of history within the everyday. The works use or reference narrative forms such as short stories, songs, audio guides and sermons.
Commissioning bodies for Paul’s work include Ikon Gallery, Birmingham and Site Gallery, Sheffield. He has had residencies at Dundee Contemporary Arts/University of Dundee VRC and Proyecto Batiscafo, Cuba, and was the Tate Liverpool MOMART Fellow for 2002-2003, the ACE Oxford-Melbourne Artist Fellow for 2004 and is currently the United Artist’s Fellow at the University of Wolverhampton.
Paul has shown recently at Tate Britain, London; BALTIC, Gateshead; Kunst-Werke, Berlin; and at the Shanghai Biennial and showed in British Art Show 6 which toured around the UK in 2006. Other recent projects include a red vinyl record broadcast on Radio Lancashire, Radio 1 and BBC 6 Music, a video piece for Film and Video Umbrella touring to eleven cities around Europe and a short story published by Serpent’s Tail. Paul is currently working towards separate solo shows at Matts Gallery, London, Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, and Kunstlerhaus, Nurnberg, in 2008.


I currently make text, sound and video works that focus on the ‘voices’ of semi-fictional personas which are presented as written, sung or spoken monologues. The works use or reference narrative forms such as short stories, songs, audio guides and letters, and have as their basis the nature of individual subjectivity and identity in relation to place and history.
The narratives voiced by the personas ­– a hotel maid, a packaging company middle manager, an airborne sprite – sometimes start from a real interview with a real person or group of people, but are as likely to arise from a scene from a novel, a TV documentary or an overheard local urban myth. Each voice is not presented as a unified identity but as a collection of many different voices or cultural and historical references, and all of the separate sources that are referenced in the monologues, including the interviews, are not treated as authentic or inviolable, but are often extended into fiction or used mischievously.
I try to allow each piece I make to filter a different set of ideas through the persona involved. A short story I published recently explored a comedian’s ambition for his writing, and his willingness to literally erase himself to fulfill the potential he felt that his writing had. A recent sound work extended the Brecht/Weill song Pirate Jenny into a hotel maid’s meditation on the presence of history within the everyday; and a new 16mm film I am working on, based on a packaging company manager’s trip to Paris in May 1968, engages with the subjective experience of contemporary events as often one of distance rather than engagement.
There are moments in the works when we suddenly glimpse into a world of unsettling absurdity or ambiguity, and these moments, triggered by comically odd twists in the narrative or by the visual or musical context, are crucial to the understanding of the work as a whole. I am interested in the way our mundane and routine world also resonates with constellations of historical presences, unfulfilled potentials and the messiness of our subjective experience. It is often through confabulation – the creation of imaginative fictions – that we are able to sense this rich potential within our everyday world.





Emma Talbot


Emma Talbot studied at Birmingham Institute of Art and the Royal College of Art. She was a Rome Scholar in 1995 and spent six months in the USA on a Bob and Susan Summers studio award in 1996.
Recent exhibitions include solo shows ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ at Transition, London and ‘Emma Talbot in translation’ at Quay Arts, Isle of Wight and group shows; ‘The Craft’ with Cathie Pilkington (in association with Marlborough Fine Art) at Folkestone Metropole Galleries and Transition, London, ‘Painted Ladies’ with Eleanor Moreton and Rose Wylie at The Surgery, London, G:Love, Lange Gasse 28, Augsberg, Germany, ‘Goth Moth’, Transition, London, ‘Thy Neighbours Ox’ Space Station 65, London, ‘Acid Drops and Sugar Candy’ Foster Fine Art, London and Transition, London.
Emma Talbot has exhibited internationally in Paris, Le Havre, Tornio , Hameenlina, Sydney, Berlin and Rome, and has work in private and public collections including J. Sainsbury plc, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Unilever, English Heritage.
Emma was guest editor for the ‘Painting + Translating’ issue of Garageland magazine.


Emma Talbot’s paintings of women are open-ended narratives. The figures and spaces are painted from images found in fashion and lifestyle magazines dating from the 1960s to date, sourced in archives and library collections.
These paintings reference the language of desire and aspiration but are at odds with what we see in current mass media, referencing out-of-print images, which, for their original marketing purpose, are now defunct. The paintings draw on ‘old dreams’ and describe a life which full of anti-mainstream, alternative activity, suggestive of kidnappings and cults, brat camps and hide outs.
The lumpy physicality of the paint and use of tertiary colour emphasises the fictional space that occurs when found images are translated into painted scenarios.





Brendan Lyons

Selected recent exhibitions

Solo
‘Window Paintings’ @ Liverpool Biennial Independents 2006.
‘Brendan Lyons’ , @ Hollow Contemporary, London, 2005.
‘Brendan Lyons’ (with Piers Secunda) @ Seven Seven, London 2004.

Group
‘Superscope’ @ Lounge, London , Feb/March 2008
‘Sovereign European Art Prize 2007’ @ Club Row , London Mar 2007.
‘Celeste Art Prize 2006’ @ The Well, London May 2006.
‘Hollow Salon’ @ Hollow Contemporary, London 2006.
‘Art Gene NW Prize 2005’ @ Art Gene, Cumbria, UK 2005.
‘Jerwood Drawing Prize 2004’ @ Jerwood Space, London, + UK tour incl.
Manchester, Birmingham and Cardiff
'Paint in 2003' @ Century Gallery, London Oct 2003.

Many of Brendan Lyons' paintings are made of artists' paint
only. The entire surface, structure, and support consist of
paint alone. A cross-section cut between any two points of
any one painting, would reveal paint only. Other works
consist of sheets and strips of dried artists’ paint – which
are then placed or fixed to other elements which form its
support. These can be windows, floors, walls, and even
traditional canvas supports.
Through experimentation with the techniques of painting,
and the material of artists’ paint itself, Brendan Lyons uses
the traditions and references of Western painting as a
base from which to investigate various issues of interest.
The paintings deal with issues of perception, implied
space, context, surface, framing, language, signs,
reference, history, time, givens, boundary, attachment,
ambiguity and association. Oppositions such as
internal/external; negative/positive; front/back; use/form;
surface/structure; simple/complex. Undecidables such as
painting and/or support; signifier and/or signified;
representation and/or original; subject and/or object.
The selection of ‘what’ to make from this artists’ paint, and
It’s context, are central to Brendan’s practice.




Louise Thomas

June 2007
Concrete Hole You Clench My Soul
PZ Gallery, Penzance
Curated by myself. Showing recent work by Yasmin Ineson, Cat Bagg, Rose O'Gallivan and myself.

X-posure Revolver
PZ Gallery, Penzance
Artists led revolving exhibition. Curated by Jesse Leroy Smith and Volker Stox. Showing work of both established and emerging artists.

4 New Sensations
Brick Lane, LondonArt prize organised by The Saatchi Gallery and Channel. The exhibition, sponsored by Coutts and the Zabludowicz Collection was held at the Truman brewery, brick lane, London.
Sunrise with Sea MonstersTrinity Buoy Wharf, London
www.sunrisewithseamonster.net
A self initiated and self directed graduate group show.
Debuting new contemporary Cornish art in London.
Position: Head of fundraising/initiator of event.

June 2007
Falmouth Graduate showWoodlane campus, Falmouth, CornwallDegree show.

March 2007
Ferdynand Zweig Scholarship
Poly arts Centre, Cornwall
Exhibition of work made after receiving the scholarship that allowed me to conduct studies in Italy. Including paintings, photography, journals and film.

August 2006
ShelflifeThe gallery, SurreyJoint painting show with Jonathon Stubbs. Organised and curated by ourselves


My current work is the exploration of tourist space both past and present. Sites of interest for me include children’s holiday resorts, hotel architecture, Lido's in Britain and resort complexes. I work in a hotel and I have collected many recommended hotel brochures from the bedrooms. My recent paintings have been produced through the collection and reassemble of these holiday brochures. It is the innate banality of the holiday resort that fascinates me. I am influenced directly by the brochures. There are no traces of the past nor are their signs of the future.




The Singh Twins

Solo Exhibitions

2006 Masala Art; Anant Gallery, New Delhi, India. 7th-21st March 2006.
2005 Past Modern;The Singh Twins; major retrospective at The City Gallery, Leicester.
4th June - 9th July 2005.
2005 Past Modern:The Singh Twins; major retrospective at The Walker Art Gallery,
Liverpool. 22nd January - 17th April 2005.
2004 The Singh Twins; Derby City Museum and Art Gallery. 22nd September - 24th
October 2004
Group Exhibitions

2006 Two 2 Tango; Organised by Gallery Nvya but held at Lalit Kala Academi, New
Delhi, India, 15th-29th April.
2005 The Via Dolorosa Project; A multi-media presentation of the 'Stations of the Cross'
by artists of different faiths. St Mary's Church, Slough then touring. (An 'Art
Beyond Belief' initiative launched on 19th March 2005).
2004 Ritu:A Gathering of Seasons; Organised by Anant Art Gallery but held at Triveni
Kala Sangam, New Delhi, India. 8th - 17th January 2005.
2005 Faith; Nottingham Castle Museum.18th December 2004 - 13th February 2005
The Singh Twins employ traditional techniques used in Indian miniature painting to produce vibrant, exquisitely-detailed paintings that are a joy to explore. Some of the paintings are by a single twin – others are produced in tandem, with both painting simultaneously. The exhibition features works from the past seventeen years, as well as some new pieces.
The fusion of Asian and Western influence and their interest in global iconography has generated some fascinating juxtapositions in the Singh Twins’ paintings. This is both a reflection of their dual cultural identity and a clever vehicle for political and social commentary.
Their colourful, illustrative pictures cover a diverse range of challenging themes, from materialism and the cult of celebrity to politics. They question existing stereotypes and attempt to redefine narrow perceptions of heritage and identity in art and in society.
The Singh Twins’ work has an optimistic, decorative visual quality that captures the attention of the viewer and draws them in to the minute detail. Although their observations are often witty, closer inspection and interpretation reveals that they are dealing with themes of important critical debate.
Many early works, such as ‘All Hands on Deck’, were created in response to the prejudice that they encountered as art students when their style was criticised for being inappropriately rooted in an Eastern artistic style.
Some of their most famous paintings are deliberately provocative, encourage debate and have sparked lively reactions in the media. These include the Beckhams as ‘the New Royal Family’ and the more serious ‘Nineteen Eighty Four’, which depicts the human tragedy of the Indian Government’s storming of the Golden Temple in 1984.
During Manchester’s 2002 Commonwealth Games, the Singh Twins were appointed as official artists in residence. They produced their SPOrTLIGHT series, which examined the relationship between the worlds of sport, media and celebrity. It features sporting icons such as Venus Williams, Muhammed Ali and David Ginola.
More recently they have worked on ‘The Art of Loving’ Ragamala series. This takes its influence from traditional miniature paintings that developed in 17th century India. These ‘ragamalas’ traditionally reflect the emotions prompted by melodies (or ragas) of classical Indian music. The Singh Twins reinterpret the Ragamala tradition in a contemporary context. Each work adopts the title of a modern Western popular song whose theme, melody and lyrics reflect the key sentiments of the painting.

Jaap de Vries

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
2006 Let your body talk , ARTI E AMICITIAE, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
2006 KUNSTVLAAI, Westergasfabriek, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
2007 20 HOXTON SQUARE, London, UK
2007 Decay, Decadence and the Demimonde. THE HOME HOUSE, London, UK.
2007 Gallery Majke Hüsstege, Den Bosch, the Netherlands
2008 Gallery Stefanie Bergot, Paris, France
My work is centred on juxtaposing a world controlled by prohibitions and another, more sacral world: the world of play. Recurring themes include: ‘the unity of the sacred’, ‘the erotic’ and ‘the aesthetic’.
The basis of my work is painting and water-colouring. I also make films, photographs and sculptures. I am motivated by my experience ‘that the world in which I live does not tally with my desires’.
Art, I believe, enables me to create the space that allows those desires to come alive that in the world around me are subordinate or hidden. I like to experiment with different materials: paint, ink, rubber, photo/paper, purfoam, aluminium etc. I usually work on the standing format 200 x 150 cm. I have developed my own techniques, which involves working on paper and aluminium, with acrylics, cutting up shapes, and subsequently 'sticking' them back on the base with paint...
I use watercolours to create imperfect portraits, in which the mutilation is a metaphor for genuine experience. The watercolour shows that it is the paint itself that makes the wounds; the blood-flowing paint apparently has the capacity to do the same as real cutting. A face evidently still has the power to speak and to torment us with the question what experience it is hiding from us, and apparently the paint itself (and not the representation) is enough to convey this power. Unlike the moving images of a film, art (painting) allows us to experience the unreal as unreal and thereby creates an intimacy and rapport with our desires, in an atmosphere that allows us to become conscious of ourselves and our desires!