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A small corner
of East London comes under the magnifying glass, as the postal district
that the gallery happens to be in becomes the theme for this show.
Curiously this specificity becomes universal as the details that
the artists focus on could be from any urban neighbourhood. A chance
meeting in a park, street furniture, overgrown corners of wilderness.
These eclectic urban musings and jumbled city thoughts are neither
sensational, nor shocking but by their very ordinariness they connect
to something beautifully strange and profound. With this trawling
through both the badlands and the genteel gentrified areas of E9,
the exasperating, cursed tangle of this churned up city* gives up
its ghostly melancholies revealing a hinterland of hidden delights.
*The Selected Poems of William Blake – Dr Bruce Woodcock
Clive Brandon quite literally maps the E9 area by walking
around its boundaries in the manner of some miniature urban Grand
Tour. The resultant paintings and drawings are determined by a combination
of conceptual parameters and random meanderings, giving equal importance
to the banal, the ugly and the picturesque.
Tania McCormack makes numerous bus
journeys and walks, recording her experiences in trembly, scribbly,
freehand line drawings and embroideries on bus tickets, postcards
and paper. The immediacy of these direct responses, not filtered
through a photographic or pondered axis, recall the quixotic, drifting
nature of the visual experience of a journey.
Gary O’Connor is interested in
the ‘space between reality and the imaginary’. For E9
his starting point is Victoria Park - the place where his parents
first met. From here he creates a quasi-imaginary narrative work
that includes writing, sound and T-shirts and incorporates influences
from Suffragettes to Situationists.
Mike Perry’s large-scale
photographs focus on the intersection of city and wilderness by
turning their gaze to the urban brown-fields of Hackney Wick’s
canal district. The result is a series of dreamy, empty landscapes
that record this transitory area before it is swallowed up by proposed
redevelopment.
There is a publication to accompany
E9, which includes specially commissioned writing by Tony White
and visuals by the E9 artists. The price has now been reduced from £4.50 to £2.
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