A year ago, the award-winning artist Yinka Shonibare bought Sunbury House in Hackney, London, with the intention of creating a sustainable (and solar-powered) working-living space for artists, himself included. It is currently being offered as a usable space for events and exhibition projects, before the start of any work to the building itself by Riches Hawley Mikhail Architects. Shonibare’s invitation to artists and curators to use the house over the next year, together with its existing contents, is a true soil-based work in progress aiming at future collaborations and exchange of ideas. So far Ian Monroe and Doug Fishbone have curated projects there.

The third exhibition, Urchin Eater, is a curatorial project by artist Dan Coopey that explores the dynamism of interrelated concerns through the selection of six artists (Coopey being one), eschewing formal representation despite the formally disparate elements delineated from one work to the other. Here, the space has been used as a real challenge. A contradiction between its temporality as an office of commerce and exchange, with its inferior decoration and partitioning ad hoc walls on the first floor, and the warehouse concrete walls of the ground floor galleries.

Urchin Eater is the title of one of Ian Whitfield’s paintings. He is the only painter in this Sunbury House exhibition who, instead of isolating his medium as the nostalgic opposite to media-technological lines of departure, intuitively guides us in this unique space and selection of works which subverts fiction to non-fiction but which is consuming enough to the viewer, who recognises the collective experience of the six artists coming together. Whitfield’s painterly works of exploded figures represent the play between the non-figurative and figurative fiction of perception, which starts with drawn, painted or photographic source images chosen from his personal archive, and moving from what he has initially identified as poetic in each of his archival elements to their list of textual phantoms. Though each piece stands independently, at the same time together, the works collectively transform the story, revealing half of the narrative told.

Magali Reus’s Breakers (on the ground floor), a complex barricade of metal breakers that reflects the colours of the nearby installations and interrupts the way into the ground floor, comes as a playful coincidence to Whitfield’s collective independence. Her humourous comment on object familiarity and the light-hearted decisions, made in the process of communicating via the indulgence of finding objects, brings a fresh influence to the familiar and animates the representation of works brought together by the exhibition. One of the selected artists in ARTFutures 2008 at Bloomberg SPACE (London), Reus’s post-minimal aesthetic in her work stabilises object practicalities and direct interpretations.

Post-abstract coding is celebrated with Le Coq Sportif, the site-specific work by Maria Georgoula, an assemblage of found objects prescribing the tacky architecture of colour and form of the space before its innovation. Founder of the Nauru Project (an ongoing artists’ collaboration based on the interaction of found facts about the world’s smallest island nation of Nauru in the South Pacific), Georgoula is fascinated by the idea of a monument found upon the obsessive linkage between information, objects and their otherness. A hill of white towels, a pair of electrical sockets and a switch are some of the objects in the installation which resonates with the simplicity of prevailing habits and, as in Nauru Project, with Le Coq Sportif Georgoula exhausts the inner, infinite life of context found in multiple dimensions.

A graduate of the Byam Shaw School of Art and one of the New Contemporaries 2008 artists, David Stearn manifests the active determination of the working non-formalist context in Urchin Eater. His work Untitled Interlocking Structure (diamond/146 balloons) consisting of black balloons filled with helium and air, arbitrates a delicate state in physics through its equivocal balance. Juxtaposing its uncertain steadiness inside the small gallery passed Whitfield’s Urchin Eater, the piece shifts towards any movements of the audience as it is going in and out. A balloon is released daily making the work’s mathematical complexity all the more alarming while it mirrors the romanticism of object collecting at every angle in Coopey's consumed reality.

In many ways this exhibition seeks the true invention of experience throughout nostalgic influences as well as traditional concerns and the humour they exhibit via social levels. Peter Fillingham's sculptural Museum of Christmas, recently exhibited at Ellen de Bruijne in Amsterdam, utilises nostalgia at its best. Here, its indicative form is unveiled from his expanded photographic recordings taken yearly during the festive period and displayed as a slideshow. Nostalgia’s hyper-saturated nature is featured in Coopey’s Hidden Sums, a series of televised hypnotic forms that derived from his video footage of a garden, reflected onto mirrors and consequently projected onto powered white-ballooned fans. Made with cheap technological devices, the unexpected possibilities are endless in this work featuring perhaps its real nature which ironically completes with his series of framed ‘print errors’, Untitled, on the first floor.

This succession of exhibitions in Yinka Shonibare’s new studio, tagged as Three By Three (3), have morphed the currently untouched interior of Sunbury House into a homeland of poignant projects development. Urchin Eater further mutated the comprehensible to blast the real aphorisms of experience, memory, and parody.


More:
www.nauruproject.blogspot.com
www.magalireus.com
www.iwhitfield.co.uk