cloudprojectspace-blog

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Homebodies Location and Opening Times

Where:

Cloud Project Space

Flat 137-24th Floor

Balfron Tower

St Leonard's Road 

London E14 0QT

When:

Opening 

S-S 6-7 Sept 12-6pm

S-S 20-21 Sept 12-6pm

and by appointment

Special Events:

Opening reception Sat 6 Sept 12 noon-6.  Stop by and meet the artists and enjoy some refreshments!

Closing reception and artists talk Sun 21 Sept 5pm

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Here's a preview of some animation that will form part of an installation by Paul Coombs at Home Bodies.

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Bex Massey:  First day in space with 1,612 hand made resin mice.

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Alex J Wood

Blueprints and models, Space inspired, Obsessive in their creation…

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Preview of Paul Coombs' new work

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Balfron>Bonners Ferry>Balfron

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Drawings, blue prints and sculptures... Alex J Wood

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View from Balfron Tower of The Shard

Alex J Wood

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View of Balfron Tower from The Shard

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Artists Paul Coombs, Bex Massey and Alex Wood come together in Necole Schmitz’s first curatorial project, Home Bodies.  The exhibition reflects on the impact domestic spaces have on memory, the way one exists in these spaces as well as the impact future events have on the importance placed on these recollections.  As Freud states in The Uncanny:

Our childhood memories show us our earliest years not as they were but as they appeared at the later periods when the memories were aroused…And a number of motives, with no concern for historical accuracy, had a part in forming them, as well as in the selection of the memories themselves. (p. 322)

The artists will take this presupposition as a starting point to create works specific to the iconic Balfron Tower, examining the truth of Freud’s conjecture by contemplating how memories are formed and whether these personal mythologies and stories are underpinned by images of the domestic spaces in which they occurred.  The artists will also take into consideration Balfron’s history as part of the high rise solution to the post-war housing crisis in light of its recent transformation from a private to a public cultural space.

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Paul coombs

Paul Coombs is a sculptor, animator and multi-media artist. Coombs' current sculptural installations incorporate slide shows of collaged work and immersive analogue audio/video environments built from cassette players, TV monitors, projected imagery and collaged walls. Themes in the artist's work centre around the dividing lines between the lived and the perceived gay experience/identity and exploring the reach and limit of voice, opinion and memory.

Coombs’ recent work, My Inalienable Right, explores the idea of childhood memories in a domestic space and the way later in life these memories can take on a great significance. Based around the artist’s memory of watching Margaret Thatcher's anti-gay speech of 1987, he re-examines the impact of this speech and reclaims in for his own purposes. The speech is recorded and replayed on several tape players with varying degrees of battery power, accompanied by an animation of the moment when her face grimaces the word 'gay' before the cameras.

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Bex Massey

Bex Massey draws the content of her work from the vast excess of images and narratives that invade our everyday experiences. Sitting somewhere between painting, sculpture and archive, her work examines the role of painting and the language of display in the face of popular culture. Massey’s work takes a more personal view of world events and figures by focussing on images and accounts from her lifetime: Nelson Mandela’s death, Madeline McCann’s cherubic face emanating from every newspaper, Margaret Thatcher speeding away in a car. These moments are treated with a world-weary sophistication that acknowledges the complexities of fact and fiction, which intertwined make up history.

In Massey’s recent series of works, she combines hundreds of painstakingly crafted multiples of sugar mice, toy tyrannosauruses and marmite jars with mass-produced everyday items like tacky holographic placemats, children’s masks and inflatable trees. Through this amalgamation of sculptural form and simulacra she investigates notions of worth, both in terms of narrative as well as to highlight deeper concerns about the phenomena of celebrity, the throw away nature of British popular culture and the undercurrent of anxiety drifting just below the shiny surfaces of daily life.

http://bexmassey.wordpress.com/author/masseybex/

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Alex Wood

British eccentricity and the notions of obsessiveness are a significant part of Wood’s work. He combines lo-fi ready-made models and bronze to create intricate, absurd and amusing sculptures that question feats of human endeavour. Wood’s otherworldly configurations know no bounds as he envisions the many misplaced optimisms of humankind’s effort to move ever further into their world and the worlds beyond. This nostalgic look back on the memories of inventive folly roots itself in a re-imagination of these moments of unrestrained optimism and epic failure.

In Wood’s recent works, he highlights the seemingly ludicrous dichotomies of material limitation and invention by marrying together unlikely ingredients: paper model Eiffel Towers meticulously put together with schoolboy obsessiveness and untidy bronze rockets dangling perilously overhead. Works such as We Have Lift Of!, an 8.5kg bronze hot air balloon, is based upon the world’s first flight in the Montgolfier balloon, which famously caught light over the roofs of Paris.