Jay Erker / John Mills / James Irwin / Lisa Penny / Bern Roche Farrelly

7 - 30 March 2013
Preview: Thursday 6 March, 6-9pm

   Bern Roche Farrelly

Head Grammar is the first of two collaborative exhibitions between Transition Gallery, London and Weekend, Los Angeles. Each show is co-curated by the galleries and includes both LA and London based artists.

Head Grammar explores linguistic tropes in art that transform, diffuse, layer, and expand notions of identity and consciousness. Using painting, sculpture, video, installation and performance, Head Grammar offers a revelatory and complex collection of works that construct a perceptual prism through which to see the world.

Jay Erker

 
During the private view Jay Erker will Skype from Weekend in Los Angeles in order to conduct a dialogue experiment with attendees of the opening in London, exploring notions of language, culture and geography to create new connections and potentialities within each exchange. A recording of the conversations will play during the run of the exhibition

James Irwin presents a series of mirrored panels, which make the viewers part of the work, drawing attention to the information they receive and their relationship to it. The panels incorporate text and visual pattern, and include motifs reworked from Carsten Nicolai’s Grid Index.

James Irwin

John Mills’ paintings emphasise various kinds of line and mark making, freeform and mediated, tactile and thin, touching upon notation systems both archaic and contemporary.

John Mills                                                   Lisa Penny

Lisa Penny’s playful works combine items of clothing and various languages of painting and representation to create a form of social diagram.

Bern Roche Farrelly has constructed his own alphabet of symbols, evolved through an elaborate layering of autobiography and shared cultural narratives. For Head Grammar his work takes in references as diverse as Tatlin’s Tower, Great Ormond Street Hospital and lipstick kisses on Oscar Wilde’s grave.