Exhibition runs until Sunday 31st July 2011
Gallery open Thursday - Sunday 12-6pm

Benedict Drew
The Persuaders

Through the use of environmental stewardship, a single screen video will give breathing instructions that will induce a sense of calm and well being.

Sculptures will act as empathetic mascots.

Faces will greet you with a smile.

Old technology will mimic slightly newer technology.

A complaint about the world will be lodged.

Benedict Drew is an artist who's work crosses video, performance, sound and other media. Much of his work has been based in collaboration most significantly an on going project with artist Emma Hart. They have performed often in the UK and internationally including at the Rotterdam Film Festival, Kill Your Timid Notion, Dundee Contemporary Arts Centre, ICA London as part of the Nought to Sixty season, Performa 09 New York and most recently at The Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art as part of images festival where they received OCAD Off Screen Award for the installation untitled seven.

He has traveled widely presenting work in UK, Japan, USA and Europe. Benedict has also composed the soundtracks for several artists films. He has made many works for radio, most recently the series Unter Radio on Resonance FM. for many years he curated the London Musicians' Collective annual festival of experimental music.

Joshua Bilton
The Arch of Enantiodromia

Through a process of removal and re-arrangement Joshua Bilton's work considers the transformative nature of the image;

It's difficult to transpose the mimic and feel one's gut, one is inevitably trying to access a point of authenticity, and find a means of carrying this into social reality through the image to question how material can perform and interact as a living entity driven by individual intention. This carrying, is in sense, a process of removal where one is abstracting the order in which we perceive the relation between actions, individuals and institutions, and how these constructed values and feelings offer a shared idea of reality imbedded within language, architecture, aesthetics and so forth. Within this context the work considers how one negotiates a free space within a transposing culture through the creation of a belief structure that is inherently always messy.

Since graduating from the Royal College of Art Joshua has participated in exhibitions nationally and internationally including Saatchi Sensations and New Contempories. He is part of the Woodmill in Southwark and regularly exhibits as part of the collaborative project Hal Silver.

Martelli/Gibson (igloo)
VISITOR

Inspired by the artists' travels to the snow-driven mountains of the Canadian Rockies VISITOR was developed following research at The Banff Arts Centre. Vermilion Lake comprises a full-scale replica of a trapper's cabin housing an interactive virtual environment. A companion moving image piece, where the bears are sleeping, depicts monochromatic imagery of glaciers, forests and frozen lakes. In both works, either a friendly or malevolent force is suggested, evoking the hunter being hunted, the tracker being tracked. Employing techniques used in video games, bringing exterior virtual space into the physical gallery space the exhibition plays with our anticipation of different forms of reality.

Gibson & Martelli work together as igloo creating ambiguous topographies and relationships between the natural and the artificial. Re-purposing media tools and combining them with remodelled objects, prints and interrupted surfaces they simulate and reconfigure representations of the world. VISITOR is an investigation into the experience of place, figure and landscape. Real and invented panoramas depict the beauty and strangeness of the natural world. The artists' first work won them a BAFTA nomination and their installations, video works, online projects and performances have featured in international exhibitions and festivals including the 52nd Venice Biennale.

'The worlds they create are total simulacrums: there is no separation between the invented & the real, the site & the represented, the local & the imagined. It is a territory that is cohesive & singular in language, yet simultaneously is forever folding in on itself. Their work engages the particular of the site while undermining its place, the original & point of departure become one in a conceptual unravelling.'
Richard Ducker, Curator, Fieldgate Gallery 2010

VISITOR is the second work in the SwanQuake series and will tour nationally in association with artsdepot throughout 2011 into spring 2012.

VISITOR supported by: The Banff Centre, The Henry Moore Foundation & Arts Council England.

www.igloo.org.uk www.swanquake.com

VISITOR - design & concept Gibson/Martelli - igloo

igloo collaborators:
House: Greg Cox
Boat: Sam Lanyon, Pat Bond, Matty Bickerton
Sound: Adam Nash, Luke Pither
Virtual Environment: Programmer James Tan
Additional modelling: Helen Street / Alex Woolner
Video: John McMullin
Special thanks to: Pol McLernon, Tim Drage, Ridley West, Deborah Ridley, Matthew Andrews, Joseph Mattey
Banff crew in Canada: The Taylor Family, Steve Woollard & Jean, Willy Le Maitre

Gibson / Martelli exhibitions :
15 June - 11 September, WATCH-ME-MOVE: The Animation Show
Barbican Art Gallery, London, United Kingdom (touring exhibition)
www.barbican.org.uk/news/artformnews/art/barbican-art-gallery-exhibitions

Dean Kenning
A Voice in your Throathole

...

Dean Kenning is an artist and writer. He makes kinetic objects, animation, video and live performance amongst other things, often employing a combination of politics, strangeness and idiotic humour. Work includes paintings of monsters on estate agent signs for 'The Dulwich Horror: HP Lovecraft and the Crisis in British Housing' (Space Station Sixty-Five), and Metallurgy of the Subject, an animation which allegorises recent philosophical re-conceptions of 'community' as a process of sacrificial transmutation (made for the exhibition 'Commonism' at Five Years). Dean is currently working with the Whitechapel Gallery on the project Reclaim the Mural as part of the art group The Work in Progress. He teaches Fine Art at Central St Martins, and is fellow at the Contemporary Art Research Centre, Kingston University. He writes regularly for Art Monthly.