Midsummer Dream 

This summer, the journalist and author, Helen Chislett, will be curating a show at the ROVE gallery Hoxton Square, courtesy of Kenny Schachter, including the work of Based Upon, Jessica Zoob, Carolyn Quartermaine, Karl Smith, Rolf Sachs and the Inchbald School of Design.

Called Midsummer Dream, the show promises to be an antidote to economic gloom uniting work by a handful of extremely diverse artists and designers working in media that range from paint and sculpture to limited-edition design and film. This multi-disciplinary concept has been woven into an entire story over the gallery’s ground and first floors.

On the ground floor, Ian Abell, founder of London atelier Based Upon, presents a new series of Based Upon sculptural tables and wall-based work, which are contextualised by a sound installation and a film made in Ugandan villages along the Nile. Part of the film shows a Ugandan woman outside her cracked mud house, possibly the dreamer of the world ‘upstairs’.

Upstairs in contrast, the oils of Jessica Zoob speak of the reflections inherent in water and the lushness of her local Sussex landscape. Sculptor Karl Smith will be exhibiting the Wishing Tree, a carved and painted full-size oak tree. Artist Carolyn Quartermaine uses her signature hand-painted silks and linens to express romance and joy. Complementing each of these will be an internal garden of meadow grasses and turf installed by Andrew Duff and Chloe Leaper of the Inchbald School of Design. The garden’s life will be captured on a short film by Rolf Sachs.

Midsummer Dream opens on 1st July - 25th July, 2009 at the ROVE gallery, 33-34 Hoxton Square, London N1 6NN


http://www.rovetv.net