About
Jay Erker / John Mills / James Irwin / Lisa Penny / Bern Roche Farrelly
Head Grammar is the first of two collaborative exhibitions between Transition Gallery, London and Weekend, Los Angeles. Each show is co-curated by the galleries and includes both LA and London based artists.
Head Grammar explores linguistic tropes in art that transform, diffuse, layer, and expand notions of identity and consciousness. Using painting, sculpture, video, installation and performance, Head Grammar offers a revelatory and complex collection of works that construct a perceptual prism through which to see the world.
Jay Erker from her base in LA will use Skype to conduct a dialogue experiment with attendees of the opening in London, exploring notions of language, culture and geography to create new connections and potentialities within each exchange.
James Irwin presents a series of mirrored panels, which make the viewers part of the work, drawing attention to the information they receive and their relationship to it. The panels incorporate text and visual pattern, and include motifs reworked from Carsten Nicolai's Grid Index.
John Mills' paintings emphasise various kinds of line and mark making, freeform and mediated, tactile and thin, touching upon notation systems both archaic and contemporary.
Lisa Penny's playful works combine items of clothing and various languages of painting and representation. She collages and layers imagery and materials, creating a form of social diagram.
Bern Roche Farrelly has constructed his own alphabet of symbols, evolved through an elaborate layering of autobiography and shared cultural narratives. For Head Grammar his work will be a combination of performance, printmaking, sculpture, drawing and installation, taking in references as diverse as Tatlin's Tower, Great Ormond Street Hospital, lipstick kisses on Oscar Wilde's grave, and potato printing.
Head Grammar is one of a series of shows, under the umbrella of Project LALO, an exchange between London and Los Angeles artist-run spaces, organised by Campbell Works, London and Artra, Los Angeles. Transition Gallery are twinned with Weekend Gallery, Los Angeles, who are co-curating Head Grammar in London and Stowaway in LA. Artists Jay Erker and John Mills are the directors of Weekend Gallery.
