Posted on

Hans Rosenström “Why is the remote always so far away” at Maria Stenfors, London


Hans Rosenström, Together, 2015. C-Print. Courtesy the artist and Maria Stenfors, London

HANS ROSENSTRÖM
WHY IS THE REMOTE ALWAYS SO FAR AWAY

11 September – 24 October 2015
Maria Stenfors, London

Text by Yasmina Reggad

With his first solo exhibition at Maria Stenfors, Finnish artist Hans Rosenström outlines themes that have punctuated his practice in the past years. The exhibition presents recent works that address the notions of liminal and transitional states and study the limits of our experience of the world from a singular perspective.

The title Why the remote is always so far away clearly points at something unattainable ahead of us and at the same time paradoxically replicates the precision of a measuring tool. Nevertheless, the very question Hans Rosenström is raising lies in the position of the body itself in relation to the remote. The body stands in the centre, in the in-betweeness surrounded by unreachable far-aways. In this exhibition, the artist investigates the multiple nature and social functions of liminal spaces. Rosenström also strives to draw and mould the contours of the inside and the outside of the body as well as reveals its faculty of resonance that gives shape to its surroundings.
Continue reading “Hans Rosenström “Why is the remote always so far away” at Maria Stenfors, London”

Posted on

Lilah Fowler “Which Pixel am I standing on?”

website4_564
Lilah Fowler, Which Pixel am I standing on?, 2015. Courtesy the artist and Maria Stenfors, London

Maria Stenfors (London) presents…

LILAH FOWLER
WHICH PIXEL AM I STANDING ON?

15 – 29 July 2015, 6pm

whichpixelamistandingon.com

“In computing, traceroute is a computer network computer diagnostic tool for displaying the route (path) and measuring transit delays of packets across an Internet Protocol (IP) network. The history of the route is recorded as the round-trip times of the packets received from each successive host (remote node) in the route (path); the sum of the mean times in each hop indicates the total time spent to establish the connection. Traceroute proceeds unless all (three) sent packets are lost more than twice, then the connection is lost and the route cannot be evaluated.” [source Wikipedia]
Continue reading “Lilah Fowler “Which Pixel am I standing on?””

Posted on

Yasmin Mueller “Gosh, I Fantasise” at Maria Stenfors, London

YasminMueller-Press_Release-1_564
Yasmin Mueller, Portrait Skygirl (open eyes), 2015. Courtesy Maria Stenfors, London.

YASMIN MUELLER
GOSH, I FANTASISE

6 May – 13 June 2015
Maria Stenfors, London

In Gosh, I Fantasise, Mueller continues her exploration of the muse through sculptural objects, with an installation that oscillates between the dreamlike and a hardedge reality.

A series of wall and floor sculptures reveal graphic abstractions intertwined with meaning. Black denim is fashioned into geometric shapes, akin to a soft skeleton or a labyrinth of guts, which starkly puncture the white cube gallery space, claiming its own domain. Mueller’s hand makes the soft material behave like hard metal or more traditional sculpture, and the resulting installation presents a tension between external structure and the inner world.
Continue reading “Yasmin Mueller “Gosh, I Fantasise” at Maria Stenfors, London”

Posted on

Mathew Sawyer “Please Take All Your Rubbish With You” at Maria Stenfors, London

Matthew-Sawyer_023_564
Mathew Sawyer, FUCK YOU to the future (without me), 2014, C-Type Print, 103 x 70 cm. Courtesy the artist and Maria Stenfors, Lonodn

MATHEW SAWYER
Please Take All Your Rubbish With You

16 January – 21 February 2015
Maria Stenfors, London

I meet with friends
no one but me is aware
I’ve tied one of my shoelaces
tighter than the other
it’s barely noticeable
but at times all-consuming
I bury the words FUCK YOU
set in concrete
to be discovered at some unknown point in the future
how big is the invisible trap?
I stack pennies
37 precarious
one from each year I’ve been here
the newest the brightest
stupid music
I drink myself drunk as I walk
collecting feathers
in the morning a sculpture
please take all your rubbish with you
Continue reading “Mathew Sawyer “Please Take All Your Rubbish With You” at Maria Stenfors, London”

Posted on

“Confusion in her eyes that says it all” at Maria Stenfors, London

2014-11-06-Maria-Stenfors-IMG_6701_564
Confusion in her eyes that says it all. Installation view. Courtesy Maria Stenfors, London

Confusion in her eyes that says it all

7 November – 13 December 2014
at Maria Stenfors, London

Artists: Tamsin Casswell, Jennifer Douglas, Hans Rosenström

Confusion in her eyes that says it all brings together three artists who each in turn explore perceptions of intimacy and communication, deceptive illusion and control. Humble, everyday materials are transformed, creating new narratives and spaces that draw us in and make us question the nature of experience. Hereby, the exhibition examines the unique perspective an individual experiences at a particular moment in time, and the altered perceptions evoked by an artwork. Continue reading ““Confusion in her eyes that says it all” at Maria Stenfors, London”

Posted on

“Ideas in Things” at Maria Stenfors, London


Alan Currall, Silent dog whistle, 2014. Wooden stick, bite marks, beeswax, acrylic stands. Courtesy the artist and Maria Stenfors, London

Ideas in Things
27 June – 26 July 2014
at Maria Stenfors, London

Artists:
David Blackaller
Juan Cruz
Alan Currall
Siân Robinson Davies

Curated by Dean Hughes

“Now I am not what I was when the word was forming to say what I am.”
– William Carlos Williams, The Great American Novel

Ideas in things presents an equal sense of wonder between both ‘things’ and ‘language’. The artists included in the exhibition are collected here for their resonance in how each charts the movement of the making of an artwork from a natural to an artificial phenomenon. This transition presents a classic artistic or, more commonly associated, poetic problem of the desire to evoke uniquely personal experience through a public medium. The drive to force the conventions of a language to express the private nature of experience is the bedrock of creative work. In working with quotidian objects the dilemma that presents itself is that in choosing to talk about ordinary matter is to risk falsifying – yet equally and at the same time to remain silent or speechless is to risk creative annihilation. Continue reading ““Ideas in Things” at Maria Stenfors, London”

Posted on

Philip Newcombe “COMPANY” at Maria Stenfors, London


Philip Newcombe, ‘6 pink gym balls liberated from a lifetime of physical abuse’ 2014, 6 gym balls; ‘Clap’ 2014.Rubber band snapped to the sound of a loud clap. Installation view. Courtesy the artist and Maria Stenfors, London. Photo: Mike Taylor

Philip Newcombe
COMPANY
2 May – 7 June 2014
at Maria Stenfors, London

Newcombe often uses familiar and democratic objects such as lollipops, darts, folded up paper, thread, perfume, other people’s business cards and scent dispensers. By adding to or subtracting from these with subtle and well aimed interventions, the possible narratives seem ambiguous, contradictory, open ended and looped; revealing truths, half-truths, red herrings and trip-ups. Sometimes not all is what it seems to be. Although titles can describe an activity (’20 pints of milk dispersed throughout a city’, for example), there is rarely any photographic documentation of the event or a date or any other superfluous conceptual padding to justify the action. There seems no need. Instead they stubbornly hover in the territory between fact and fiction. Continue reading “Philip Newcombe “COMPANY” at Maria Stenfors, London”

Posted on

Dean Hughes at Maria Stenfors, London

2014-01-23_Maria-Stenfors_DEAN_HUGHES_IMG_1561
Dean Hughes, Windowless work, 2013. wood, dyed calico and thread. 64 x 42 x 4.5 cm, 2013. Courtesy the artist and Maria Stenfors, London

Dean Hughes
24 January – 8 March 2014
at Maria Stenfors
London, UK

“the art of making knots, which is the peak of both mental abstraction and manual work, could be seen as the human characteristic par excellence, just as much and perhaps even more than language…” – Italo Calvino

In his first exhibition at Maria Stenfors, Dean Hughes introduces a new series comprised of hand dyed, stitched calico shapes composed upon identical wooden slats. Calico, being unbleached and not fully processed, absorbs colour easily into the threads of equal weft and warp. Once the fabric is saturated with dye, it does not return to its original flat and uniform appearance and shows the definition and contours of the lines of dots and dashes that constitute the fabric. The geometry is allowed to relax and demonstrate the nature of the material. The work does not focus on its physicality but what the material reveals.
Continue reading “Dean Hughes at Maria Stenfors, London”

Posted on

Biopic at Maria Stenfors, London

Harold_Offeh_web
Harold Offeh, Covers: After The Rolling Stones, Exile on Main Street, 1972 (3 Balls) 2013 c-print. Courtesy the artist and Maria Stenfors, London

Biopic
15 November – 21 December 2013
at Maria Stenfors, London

Opening: Thursday 14 November 2013, 6.30 – 8.30 pm

Gabriel Acevedo Velarde
Miguel Aguirre
Philip Newcombe
Harold Offeh

Curated by Nathan Jenkins

We receive it, we feel it, we embody it.

Receive, feel, embody.

The reading of an artwork is a multifaceted one, incorporating voluminous layers of referencing. In the percept of object, how intrinsic is the maker’s own life to our reading? Our reading rings true with empathy. We attach to biographical stories by our own experiences, our memory. The imagination is superb at filling in gaps, and functions through an anthropophagic alchemy of imagining and knowledge. Building on existing images; eating, digesting and assimilating them, to form a new hybridisation.
Continue reading “Biopic at Maria Stenfors, London”

Posted on

Lilah Fowler “Passage and Pair” at Maria Stenfors, London

Lilah_Fowler_Passage-and-Pair_1
Installation view. Courtesy the artist and Maria Stenfors, London

Lilah Fowler
Passage and Pair
4 October – 9 November 2013
at Maria Stenfors, London

Opening: Thursday 3 October, 6.30 – 8.30 pm

Just as reading a text is a journey from start to finish, the reading of an artwork and exhibition is dictated by the same process. Lilah Fowler’s exhibition invites us to explore our relationship to space and our experience of it, the passage of moving through a physical space and experiencing its proportions and elements. Separate elements are disassociated from their original context, creating an unexpected pairing of matter and material. The forced arrangement of space rendering the familiar unfamiliar.
Continue reading “Lilah Fowler “Passage and Pair” at Maria Stenfors, London”