SPACE

Slump City

Tessa Farmer ,  Laura Oldfield Ford,  Karen Russo

June 6th – June 26th 2009

As the consequences of the global recession take effect, the regeneration of the traditional home of London’s largest artist community in East London has slowed  and the promised Olympic legacy looks in doubt. It is within this context that SPACE presents ‘Slump City’, an exhibition presenting the work of three emerging artists whose visionary and haunting work combines gothic fantasy, poetic social realism and psycho-geography to imagine the urban periphery. 

Laura Oldfield Ford, recent graduate of the RCA and winner of the VABT award, had her first show at Marlborough Fine Art last Autumn, followed by exhibitions at Hales Gallery and Arnolfini in Bristol. For ‘Slump City’, Oldfield Ford will contribute a number of works to the show, including a new series of drawings that feed from her ongoing subjective exploration and psycho-geographic mapping of the neglected backwaters of the city. These relay a broken narrative centered on the clearing and sanitizing of East London for the 2012 Olympic games.

Karen Russo is known internationally for her video, drawing and sculpture and the strange and disturbing source materials which she uses to transform the everyday into contemporary surreal imagery exploring romantic notions of the sublime. For ‘Slump City’ Russo presents ‘Economy of Excess’ (2005) - a claustrophobic filmed excursion into a cramped urban sewage pipe system. Viewed through a small robot camera used to locate blockages, an ever-expanding system of sewer pipes is revealed, mapping the grotty underbelly of our city.

Tessa Farmer’s recent practice has been inspired by her 2007 residency at London’s Natural History Museum. For ‘Slump City’ she will be presenting her stuffed and reawakened ‘road kill’ arranged into fantasy scenarios where insect fairy tormentors seek revenge for all their brethren once smothered in killing jars and pinned in display case trophies. Tessa Farmer’s work was included in the 2004 edition of the ‘Bloomberg New Contemporaries’, where her installation ‘Swarm’ was spotted by Charles Saatchi and purchased for his collection. 

To compliment the context and content of Slump City SPACE will be conducting a tour of the artist enclave Hackney WIck, combining studio visits and tours of artist run spaces as part of CREATE 09, the annual arts festival hosted by the five host boroughs of the 2012 Olympic games and the Hackney Wicked festival. For details click here

In addition Slump Screenings will present an evening of artists films to accompany the exhibibition. For Details click here

Press Release available here