‘Daydreaming is really underrated’ – ArtAttack interviews the duo behind ‘Flood House’

This Saturday, 30th April, sees the launch of another event in the Radical Essex programme, ‘Flood House,’ an architectural design project conceived by Matthew Butcher with accompanying events/commissions curated by Jes Fernie in collaboration with Focal Point Gallery. 

The structure itself is an investigation into the living conditions of the seasonally flooded landscape it will inhabit, a floating collaboration of art and architecture that is both a projected dwelling for a floating habitat, as well as a labaratory to monitor local environmental conditions.

The exciting commissions to be presented include an artwork by Ruth Ewan entitled ‘All Distinctions Levelled,’ which is a weathervane attached to the ‘Flood House’ itself.

ArtAttack had the chance to speak with both designer, Matthew, and curator, Jes, to get some more insight into this exciting and evocative project.

Photo Brotherton-Lock

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SOLO Award 2016: Call for Entries

Attention Artists: You have just 3 days left to submit for WW Gallery‘s prestigious SOLO Award!

The SOLO Award is an annual contemporary art prize established by WW gallery in 2012, which recognises independent thinking, going it alone and taking risks. It is open to artists of any age, working in any medium. The winner receives a cash prize and a solo exhibition at the London Art Fair. The selection panel looks for artists who are not afraid to stand out from the crowd, artists with the strength and foresight to buck the trend and create work that is truly avant-garde.

‘My work explores the anti, unfixed and impermanent’ – ArtAttack Meets HelenA Pritchard

TJ Boulting presents the gallery’s first solo show with South African artist HelenA Pritchard.

Untitled Encounters, 2016 | © HelenA Pritchard. Courtesy the artist and TJ Boulting

A 2011 graduate from the Royal College of Art MA in Painting, since then her work has expanded beyond the realms of painting into the sculptural, the object and most recently beyond that into the extra dimension of light. The common thread between them all being her utilisation of form, colour and material.

I had the chance to speak with Helen about her artistic practise and upcoming exhibition.

‘I am just fascinated by what makes humans behave’ – ArtAttack meets Teresa Wells

Teresa Wells is a prolific award-winning sculptor, who also uses drawing in her installation work. Inspired by a moral upbringing, she possesses a fascination for the question, ‘How do humans behave?’

Teresa Wells, House of Cards | Image Courtesy Artist

Her work is made to reflect the consciousness of all humans regardless of nationality, and use of text illustrates her intrigue with human stories. After working on large scale installations / sculptures up to 4metres in length, Teresa has recently moved to a more intimate scale, 50 cm in length, where she explores domestic scenarios and disconcerted connections in human relationships.

I had the chance to speak to Teresa about her artistic practise and recent exhibition at the 2016 Art Rooms Fair.

ArtAttack ArtCalendar: Our Top 6 London Art Shows for February, 2016

Tate Modern: The EY Exhibition ‘The World Goes Pop’ & ‘Blindly’

 

ArtAttack visited the Tate Modern today and experienced a rollercoaster of emotions. On the one hand, we viewed an exhibition everyone should see, ‘The EY Exhibition: The World Goes Pop,.’ to develop their minds on traditional Pop Art and its’ relationship with politics, culture and feminism. In complete contrast we were privileged to view an artists’ experiment ‘Blindly,’  a painting workshop with a small group of visually impaired participants. 

The Broad: Making LA An Art Town

When I think of my hometown, Los Angeles, California, palm trees, expansive beaches and rainbow sunsets come to mind. I start to crave In n’Out Burger, hot pilates and early morning hikes in Runyon Canyon, $20 Juice Served Here smoothies (worth it, I swear) and the ever perfect ‘Trust Me’ menu at Sugarfish. I think of lazy strolls on Abbot Kinney, movie premieres taking over Hollywood Boulevard, hip hop nights at the club and performers on the Venice boardwalk. What I do not think of however, is art.

Now, before you go telling me how LA has a “killer art scene,” yes, of course I realize there is art in LA. From street art on every major boulevard, to Renaissance masterpieces at the Getty, and gallery private views with drinks flowing almost every weekend, by no stretch of the imagination is the City of Angels not a City of Art as well. However, living in London currently and having lived in New York, I never thought of my city as quite up to par with my adopted homes art-wise, at least not until The Broad.

The Broad, exterior

The Broad has changed everything.

Marketed, quite accurately, as ‘LA’s new contemporary art museum,’ the building, by design firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro, is a piece of art in itself gracing the skyline of Downtown LA. Inside, the vast-beyond-comprehenstion postwar and contemporary collection of philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad awaits. Just to be transparent, that’s 2,000 works of art collected over the course of 50 years, and including the likes of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Cy Twombly, Keith Haring, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Takashi Murakami, Ed Ruscha, Damien Hirst, Cindy Sherman and Christopher Wool, to name but a few.

Connecting with Nature — Yiming Min’s UK Debut

Renowned Chinese artist, Yiming Min, will make his UK debut next week with a sculpture and painting exhibition entitled ‘Therefore‘ presented by Very Art Space. The show will usher viewers into a machine-made yet natural world including a large-scale installation, sculptures and a suite of oil paintings.

The inspiration for the works is Yiming’s studio in Xiamen, China, which is located within a natural oasis of trees and wildlife, whilst still only 100 metres away from a bustling port city — the juxtaposition between man and nature informs the work. In his own words, Yiming seeks to examine the “coherence of perception between humanity and the natural world.”

ArtAttack ArtCalendar: Our Top 4 Must-See Art Shows for October 2015!