21/04/2005-12/06/2005.
Opening: Friday 22nd April 2005, 6.30-9pm.
Closing: Sunday 12th June 3-7pm.
Two artists.
A long friendship.
A lot of trust.
Two exhibitions.
One made by Eric.
One made of Eric’s.
Part One: ERIC [rosoman] – Bednarskiego Park
open 21/04/05 – 8/05/05
Thursday – Sunday 12-6pm
Transition (window show) open 9/05/05 – 25/05/05
Thursday – Sunday 4-6pm
Part Two: Penny Davis – What are you thinking?
open 26/05/05 – 12/06/05
Thursday – Sunday 12-6pm
also viewable by appointment at other times.
ERIC [rosoman] – Bednarskiego Park 21/04/05 – 8/05/05
For this exhibition Eric has created a new body of sculptural and photographic work. Themes from earlier works are revisited in his exploration of our attempts to escape ordinary life.
A rocket points skyward, a raft refers to survival on the oceans and a lighthouse illuminates the awesome power of the sea. Sculpted in, steel and wood these iconic objects refer to the romantic lives we could have lived but some how didn’t and ironically use the language and logic of domestic furniture.
The sculptures are bathetic evocations of our place in sublime nature. They are all reproductions of human attempts to control, explore and protect us from our environment. They seem to dream of greater things, of the sea, of craggy cliff faces and outer space, but are marooned in the gallery, like their captive audience.
Accompanying the sculptural works are lens-based works including large-scale photographs of Bednarskiego Park in Krakow. They show an empty and frozen playground, it’s eerie silence in stark contrast to the vitality of children at play. Eric’s associated video work of a playground is similarly dark but also reveals the environment to be as addictive as it is inescapable.
Transition 9/05/05 – 25/05/05 (window show)
Penny Davis commences the reconstruction of Eric’s exhibition into her exhibition, What are you thinking? Viewers can see Penny in the process of transforming Eric’s work by a live feed from inside the gallery.
Penny Davis What are you thinking? 26/05/05 – 12/06/05
Eric and Penny have been friends since their time at Chelsea College of Art. This show will test their friendship to breaking point.
Over the duration of the exhibition Penny will transform Eric’s exhibition into something recognisably hers. In response to the way her relationship with Eric has shifted over the past decade she breaks and reworks the material of his exhibition into an exploration of physical form and process.
Playing on the ways that ephemeral memories are intertwined with material objects Penny creates sculptural installations of melancholy beauty. She uses traditional technical processes of casting and weaving besides more spontaneous destructive methods such as burning and breaking. The finished works are often obsessively worked, elegant and fragile. The forms and surfaces reference domestic interiors and minimalism.
The title What are you thinking? is the question Penny most often puts to Eric. In an attempt to answer this question her process of making is on display as an integral part of the show. Her work is the interpretation of an artwork, the interpretation of a friendship, a kind of autobiography and a memorial. The enormity of the gesture and self-erasure in the gift of ones own work for destruction suggests a contract between the two artists.