conrad armstrong

born again

2nd September - 29th September 2021

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STOUR GALLERY

258 Kingsland Road

London E84DG

A bicycle commute from Streatham to Hackney Wick, looking at the shard, thinking about the pyramids. A meditation on repetition. History repeating. Masked power – structures – disguised. parasitic. A sensitive demolition of vanity towers. An emotional history of London.  Monuments and landmarks. In praise of DIY Barricades on Cable Street. Public Art – for the public by the public. Melt down Anish Kapoor’s Awful Tower. Save Hackney Wick and community resistance. Building site as warzone. Battlegrounds. A journey through Inferno to reach paradise by digging up the Roman Roads of linear thought. Glasgow to London. The 9 circles of Hell and 9 Zones of TFL. The Shard inverted is a dagger to the truth. A conical shaft to The Angel of Light, half buried in an air-conditioned penthouse in its apex. The purple forked tongue of the Metropolitan line from a plague pit in Aldgate to Milton writing Paradise Lost in dySuburbia at the other end, Underground, in quarantine, self-isolating. to escaping the plague. Face masks and facial recognition. A time traveller wondering what happened to my freedom of movement? While half remembered, half hearted, renditions of Land of Hope and Glory struggle beneath the eerie drone of a helicopter as News Crews pack their cameras away. Look up and see the looming Gargoyles of the American Dream.

Adopting a reflexive stand, conrad examines his artistic practice and city life in his solo show ominously titled BORN AGAIN. Showing works that straddle both time and times, with an exhibition forced underground by plague and fire to continue to grow without light.

armstrong has developed a unique artistic practice, abandoning the traditional canvas for a radical material process that involves layers of paint and plastic melted together with fire, but is also constantly experimenting with new formats and mediums.

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conrad-armstrong.com

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@conradarmstrong_studio

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DONT FRET

The Greatest The City Could Offer Me
Was A Stranger

STOUR SPACE GALLERY

04.11.2020

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Based in Chicago, Don't Fret is most well-known for his wheat-pasting practice but also paints, draws, sculpts and performs. He has produced large-scale murals in Chicago, New York, Miami, San Francisco and Denver as well as internationally in cities like London, São Paulo, Helsinki, and Berlin.

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A street artist, Don't Fret has nonetheless been exhibited in numerous galleries all over the world. His career allows him to produce art that is at the crossroad between practices, humour and critique, the street and the gallery. Inspired by pop culture and cartoons, he offers uncompromising political commentaries on contemporary society’s flaws. He expresses an honest and introspective standpoint which makes his practice unique.

Known as the Gentle Sculptor of Hackney Wick, Olivier makes poetic, round shaped sculptures, intuitively made by hand by intertwining accessible materials such as lime, sand, plants and found objects.

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His aim is to engage with his audience through memory and emotion leading an ongoing conversation about ambiguous loss, uncertainty and unfinishedness. Olivier believes that sculpture is accessible to all through using simple materials that can be bought at builders’ merchants, or even found in your street.

His sculptures create a dialogue with the audience through the sense of touch which allows to connect with our environment in a way that is impossible to our eyes. Olivier Adam creates an eternal cycle allowing the nature to become a part of the artworks or if those do come to an end, they gradually dissolve back into nature.

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The exhibition displays oil paintings that were created during the last twenty years of Terence Williams’s artistic practice.

The works presented are divided into overlapping bodies of work entitled: Life Drawing Sketches, Click, Beach and Political.

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The majority of the works on display are connected by the democratic use of images collated from magazines, newspapers and the internet that propagate and characterise collective memories of Western societies during the 20th Century.

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The images are deliberately altered via a process of collage and painting to create new compositions that consciously evoke alternate narratives as a method to subvert or dispose of the original intention of the image and give the material a new existence.

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On 6th August we opened photographer Steve Pulvernis's exhibition 'The Ever Changing Past' - an analogue hand printed collection at Stour Space Gallery.

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Working as a professional photographer during the 1990s, it was in the darkroom where Steven found his niche; working with monochrome negatives.

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The theme of this body of work is centred on street art within the context of streamline architecture of old and new through east London; concentrating on two main areas, Hackney Wick and Nomadic Gardens (RIP).

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With their ever-changing canvas and a wealth of both old and new structures, Steve searches for the angles to create the most aesthetic image. For him, cropping of the square Hasselblad negatives in the darkroom and composition are vital definitions of his photographic practice.

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