Country Life
Emma Donaldson | Charles Ellis | Peter Fillingham | Paul Lewis | Maggie Smith | Pontus Stråhle
Curated by Maggie Smith
The documentary and the fictional are tested by artists who relate experience to images. Some of the works in Country Life (Charles Ellis' slide installation and Pontus Stråhle's nostalgic posters) are about relating controlled or contrived experience through sequence, choice, recall and re-presentation.
In Lewis & Stråhle's video work ICE, 2003 (of a Surrey 'cruise'), the 'artwork' is the event. In noticing editing and other choices we see Lewis & Stråhle's work. In Maggie Smith's photographs (shown joined and slightly separated, two to a frame), genre type subjects slightly conflict. These framed doubled images form further groups and suggest another, fractured type of experiential continuity. Emma Donaldson's night photographs of workers, in addition to neatly reversing the usual relations of looking at, offer a vein of romanticism that suppresses the registration of immediate physical environment. Peter Fillingham's piece God Bless, 2002-4, further internalizes experience relaying the personal and invested as symbolic and then the relations between symbolic items as equivalences. Maggie Smith also shows Man in the Mirror, 2003 (made with Matthew Arnatt), a 7 minute video. Charles Ellis graduated from Goldsmiths College last year. He was the recipient of a major scholarship to travel across the USA. Peter Fillingham had a recent solo show at Magasin 4, Kunstverein Bregenz, Austria. His curated group shows include The Museum of Christmas, Ramsgate and The Greatest Show on Earth, Metropole Gallery, Folkestone. Paul Lewis, a final year student at Goldsmiths College, showed in Boy, Oh Boy, Oh Boy, House Gallery, London (with Stråhle) and in Show Reel, Whitechapel Project Space, London. Maggie Smith showed at the Sharjah International Biennial, United Arab Emirates. Recent video screenings took place at White Window, La Malterie, Lille and Inglesia Universal, Open Air Cinema, inIVA, London. Pontus Stråhle graduated from Goldsmiths College last year and now lives in Stockholm. Recent group shows and screenings include The FedEx Young Creatives 2003, House Gallery, London and the Glue Room Screenings, Amersham Arms, London. Generously supported by The Arts Council of England
Emma Donaldson is showing a newly commissioned video work at the Triskel Arts Centre, Cork. She has recently shown at the Context Gallery, Derry and the Sharjah International Biennial, United Arab Emirates. 