ALEXIS ZELDA STEVENS: Installation
KATIE PUGSLEY: Photography
SARAH EVANS: Installation
LAURA MOUSAVI, MARIJKE VASEY, DANNY WILSON: Paintings & photography

Alexis Zelda Stevens’ recent work is focused on the idea of painting outside of the boundary of the canvas. She works with drawing, installation and constructions within the context of painting, investigating and developing the painterly language outside its conventional constraints. Inspired by the similar structural

Using materials usually applied to drawing and collage, Sarah Evans constructs makeshift, architecturally inspired environments into which the audience can enter. In a site-specific work for Phoenix Gallery, she creates a “drawing in space”, in which light illuminates white cotton threads, creating a luminous aura and casting new shapes within the space. The final piece has a raw, exploratory feeling which underlines its precarious and fragile nature.

Photographer Katie Pugsley presents a series of portraits depicting the lives of nuns at the Stella Maris Convent in Swansea. Through a combination of revealed detail, emotional intensity and intimacy, this story explores the interaction between these women and their insular existence within their environment. As a testament to these women’s stories, the photographs provide an insight into a gradual erosion of a way of life, where change must be embraced in order to survive.

Following a recent trip to Iran, Laura Mousavi made a series of paintings based on places she visited. Through the part-imaginary, part-real depiction of these settings, she offers an alternative to dominant media representations of the country. The paintings harness the dreamlike properties of painting in an attempt to capture the experience of viewing a scene and the role the imagination plays in this process.

Media images, art history, observational painting, and discarded slides found in charity shops are some of the diverse sources that find their way into Marijke Vasey’s oil and gouache paintings. Sometimes fantastical, sometimes near-monochrome studies from life, the work often contains strange forms and interventions, and emphasises the materiality of the paint in a way that both entices and distracts the viewer, creating small ruptures within the image.

Danny Wilson’s photography juxtaposes the monumental, the mundane and the ephemeral. The world as pictured through the lens of a camera reveals the extraordinary aspects of everyday subject matter. He explores his relationship with the immediate environment by considering aspects that are often ignored or overlooked, and raises fundamental questions about our perceptions of time and place.

A fibreglass stream, filled with live fish, snakes its way through an artificial garden, and a real tree, fruiting plastic apples, grows from the floor.  The viewer is invited to wander into this paradoxical landscape, which resembles a strange hybrid between an ornamental garden and an abandoned camp in the woods. 
Fiona MacDonald (www.fionamacdonald.co.uk) immerses us in these orchestrated landscapes and borderline spaces, combining fine art methods, natural materials, and pound shop aesthetics to create a new dwelling place for the imagination.   Idyllic and exotic, this habitat both puzzles and seduces the viewer, who is encouraged to gather up and complete the various strands of potential narrative according to his or her innate instinct and psychology.  In conceiving and creating this parallel world, MacDonald wishes to examine our relationship to landscape - how we inhabit, manipulate and exploit it - and how it in turn shapes us.  
Supported by Arts Council England, South East.
 

In a series of large-scale photographs, Esther Teichmann (www.estherteichmann.com) explores the human psyche.  The figures in her work seem to be encapsulated within a separate world, close enough to touch, yet unaware of anything outside of themselves.  They have quite literally turned their backs on civilization, choosing instead to exist in an alternative world of intimacy and enlightenment.  The neo romantic settings range from northern Europe to the tropics, and evoke a sense of comfort, as well as a yearning to remain within this ambiguous landscape of the soul.  And yet they also convey to us a certain fragility and awkwardness, for although the figures have reached momentary unity with this counter world, they are nevertheless aware of its impermanency.

Inspired by the white and desolate landscapes of Norway, Julia Davenne’s installation incorporates a series of delicate, ethereal drawings on gessoed paper, together with dark, earthy mountains of peat, to create a metaphorical landscape.

A sculpture by Paul Cade (www.paulcade.com) embodies the “lightness of being” that comes to those who have had a positive response to serious illness and adversity.  He uses a cast of his own body, coupled with fibre optic cables, to revisit a transformational episode in his life. 
Supported by Arts Council England, South East.

There will be five City Runs in total,
each one adding to a show that will
grow over the five weeks.

There will be an exhibition preview at 2:00 am after each run.

The exhibition is open from:
Apr 29 – Jun 10
Tuesdays – Saturdays, 11 am – 5 pm.

Related Talks/Performances:
6pm, Tuesdays and Thursdays


Greg Daville, Curator of City Running...

"I first thought of the idea for City Running on a Summer evening last year after an opening at the Permanent Gallery. We had all retired to the Pub and it struck me how many talented people were gathered there. It may have been the sunshine, or it may have been the booze, but I was overcome by a sense of celebration, and the idea that it would be great to do a one-off project involving those present, and maybe others who worked creatively outside of the visual arts. I wanted to set up a situation where we could all make a spontaneous gesture or piece of work; much like I remembered it being when I made drawings as a child. In other words being creative for the pleasure of doing it.

I had just seen one of the B.B.C. documentaries on ‘Parkour’ (or free running) and found the spectacle of the runners dancing over and flying through their urban environment full with social commentary and very, very beautiful. It seemed to be art without being ‘art’. A lot of my own work is about architecture, the urban, and the idea of dystopia. Parkour seems to be both with and against the modern city environment; I recall Architect Will Alsop gleefully commenting on it being ‘a perversion of architecture’. For me this had a resonance with Guy Debord’s idea of ‘La Derive’, where one might drift through the less obviously travelled parts of a city as an activity in its own right.

Add to all the above the cross disciplinary idea of the Bauhaus and I came up with City Running. I wanted it to retain a simplicity, (romantically, even an innocence) that did not involve the accepted trappings of getting your art out there’; I was determined to keep it free of the parameters of art-funding and established gallery spaces.

So I find myself six months later with an Arts Council grant, some sponsorship, and the Phoenix Gallery to exhibit the whole thing in. I never was a very good Purist. But I do believe that the work that will be produced on the City Runs will be just that. I hope you enjoy these spontaneous reactions to your City."

Visual artists, writers and performers respond to Brighton’s urban landscape, resulting in an evolving exhibition and series of events, performances and discussions in the gallery.

Each Saturday night during Brighton Festival there will be a City Run. At 11 pm, ten artists will leave Phoenix Gallery and individually undertake a reconnaissance of Brighton City, observing and collecting subject matter according to their respective creative disciplines. They will then return to Phoenix, make new work and exhibit it in the gallery.

Provisional list of participants...

Julie Marsh
Charlotte White
Cecilia Järdemar

As the fixed camera’s lens slowly revolves about a central point, couples seem to magically waltz into the frame, and then disappear out of sight. The warm glow of ballroom light illuminates the gliding forms, creating transient currents of colour and movement. In this installation (Pavilion), Julie Marsh pushes the boundaries of traditional video by projecting images into a three dimensional space. A large circular screen allows viewers to stand either inside or outside the piece as a rotating projector traces a 360-degree circuit around the gallery. The viewer becomes a voyeur, observing the movements and interactions of the couples, while the camera situated in the centre of the dance floor objectively records everything that passes before the lens.

Based upon a series of statistics ranging from levels of tea consumption in the UK, to numbers of deaths by starvation in Africa, Charlotte White has created a sound installation that presents such information in aural form. Issuing forth from a circle of eight speakers, a cacophony of voices reads out nearly 100 of these "facts", and the resulting effect is created by the random selection of sound samples, triggered at various intervals by a computer. The rhythms created are generated by chance and time. The piece offers an infinite number of possibilities -- it will never sound exactly the same twice. Patterns and shapes can be derived from data forms that are simple yet seductively beautiful, and the effect can be at times hypnotic.

The Drawing Room celebrates drawing as a process, visual language and means of communication and interaction. The exhibition was curated by Phoenix, and includes selected work from artists based at Phoenix and from the local region, covering a range of media and approaches, each offering a unique angle on this universal activity. Ranging from sequential studies of the life model to a series of visual diaries; from ephemeral drawings in salt to collaboratively assembled “exquisite corpses”, the individual pieces function both on their own terms as well as in relation to one another. Many of the invited exhibitors are very involved with drawing through teaching or research, while those working primarily in other media see this activity as a complimentary and natural extension of their main studio practice.

The gallery is set up as a gathering place; a space in which the boundaries between the art and viewer merge, and visitors become part of the overall installation as they reflect, interact and participate in various drawing activities. The still-lifes can be regarded as traditional devices through which one can practice observational drawing, or as three-dimensional foils against which the image-based works can be experienced.

Rather than taking a specific theoretical position, this exhibition aims to provide a direct visual and sensory experience of drawing, and to offer opportunities for engagement with ourselves and others through activity, discussion and collaboration.

Jo Aris
Dominique Bell
Richard Billingham
Adriana Bustos
Marion Charles
Rachel Cohen
John Cull
Jane Denman
Lewis Edmunds
Louella Forrest
Jane Fox
Mary Goody
Ben Grace
Shirley Hart
Jeb Haward
Caitlin Heffernan
John Holland
Juliet Kac
Dinah Kelly
Desmond Lake
Zoe Leonard
Nelson Mella
Karen Monaghan
Pat Morgan
Sue Partington
Sophie Reason
Ruth Rix
Angela Rogers
Kate Strachan
Jonathan Swain
Sandra Twine
Jayne Wilson

Related Activities in the Exhibition:

The following activities are free, and open to everyone regardless of experience.  Any other forthcoming activities will be posted here and on the blackboard in the gallery.

PANEL DISCUSSION
Marion Charles, Rachel Cohen, Jane Fox, Jeb Haward and Angela Rogers present their ideas around the nature of drawing as a visual language, followed by discussion with the audience.
Wednesday, October 18 , 7- 9 pm 

ART MEETS SCIENCE
Join Rachel Cohen to take part in experiments and games using language and memory. 
Friday, September 22, 2 - 5 pm
Friday, October 20, 2 - 5 pm

LARGER THAN LIFE
Still-life drawings by gallery visitors will be incorporated into a large, multi-layered image drawn directly on the wall. Facilitated by  Jane Denman. Ongoing throughout the exhibition.

SHOOT FROM THE NIB
Combine photography and drawing in one picture to recreate a still-life image.  Facilitated by Jayne Wilson. Ongoing throughout the exhibition

DRAWING CONVERSATIONS
Angela Rogers invites visitors to engage in a dialogue with her, using brush, ink and paper, or with a digital pen and WACOM tablet.
Saturday, September 30, 11 am - 4 pm
Saturday, October 14,  11 am  - 4 pm

Jeff Keen: Mr. Soft Eliminator Returns to the Phoenix

Stephen Drennan
Jo Hodson
Lady Lucy
Pete Slight

From the visitors' book...

“(Jeff) After knowing you since the 60’s, will it ever end..? - great as always!”  NH

"FANTASTIC JEFF – GODFATHER OF GRAFFITTI” IM

Legendary Brighton filmmaker Jeff Keen brings together in one exhibition the prolific outpouring of over forty-six years of visual experimentation, encompassing drawings, prints, collage, assemblage, cut-outs, posters and photographs, as well as artefacts from films and his private collection.  This exhibition also features recent watercolours, a new sound piece, and moving image works created specially for this show. 

Emerging as an experimental filmmaker in the early 60’s, Keen’s distinctive approach pushes film beyond its traditional narrative limits, exploring the full graphic potential of the medium through non-linear movement and synthetic vision. Throughout his work the immense physicality and painterly quality of the imagery is in great part achieved by his hands-on approach, utilizing frequent cutting and spicing, stop-frame animation. 

His moving image work is also notable for its breakneck pace, cranked-up colour and earth-shaking soundtracks.  A self-taught artist, Keen has been inspired by cowboy films and b-movies, pulp novels, comics, and 50’s men’s magazines.  Using family, friends and himself as the cast, the settings have included his flat in Brighton, the Sussex Downs, and the local rubbish dump.  

Now in his eighties, Keen continues to generate resonant images though his copious sketchbook entries and moving images. The latest work is a return to pure animation of form, shape and colour created using (the now obsolete) video pen.

The exhibition is accompanied by three special screenings of Keen’s films, on
Saturdays, 4 & 25 November, and 2 December at 2:30 pm. 
more...

Pete Slight approaches the theme of isolation in its various guises.  Appearing comically absurd at first, yet maintaining an underlying starkness and ambivalence, the characters in his scenarios seem to raise questions and suggest stories, but no answers are given.

Lady Lucy presents a pair of drawing installations with imagery derived from ballroom dance publications and world filmography books from the 60’s.  Drawing is central to her practice, which also encompasses limited edition books, films, dvds, blogging and events.
www.beingll.com