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About

The solid yet crumbling confines of this former factory turned art gallery plays stage to five London and Berlin based artists. Through painting, photography, sculptural and video installation, the artists are all linked by an interest in particular sites - from the intimate bed to the public shop front. With focuses ranging from the formal to the metaphysical, readings and resonances are both questioned and heightened within and between the works and their surroundings.

Russell Chater: Inspired by shop window display, Chater presents a recent series of photographs. Through careful cropping and masking of the products and brand names the spaces are designed to showcase, these staged worlds lose both their context and purpose and are left to stand alone as theatrical installations and abstract compositions. Meanwhile, a new series of works further play with window display, with resulting pieces lying somewhere between minimalist art installation, empty stage set, designer interior and box of Christmas decorations. Clean, contained, kitsch and minimal, the works play off against their surroundings.

Chris Koning: Painting can be a vehicle for personal investigation and visual confirmation. These are portraits of the space that bears the weight of my life - illness, love and loss - rest and restlessness, sanctuary and battlefield. But they stand on their own as paint on canvas - intimate small interiors hung on the wall in an anonymous room, the essence of which is in its past.

Helen Scalway: This work brings together Scalway's long held interests in architecture and in the processes of archiving, in systems for remembering, repressing and forgetting. The means used produce meaning: the work is created by paring away office filing boxes and library containers until these structures, part architectural models, part drawing, evoke another kind of place, fragile and dysfunctional, full of forgetfulness.

Christopher Steadman: With the four-channel video installation, 'I am writing this with my left hand although I am strongly right-handed?; Steadman continues to work with issues around solitude. The source material was filmed in an abandoned psychiatric ward that was built in the 1800's in former East Germany, and follows the trace of footsteps ? or is followed by them. An intense study of the evocations and resonances of the site, the work explores ongoing interests around isolation and alienation - be it in a domestic space, a social situation, or an urban landscape. The soundtrack (composed by the artist himself) further aids these readings - alternating as it does between stretches of silence and periods of eerie noise and spoken word.

Richard Stone: Stone shows new works exploring transience - simultaneously excavating traditional and contemporary notions of weight around memory, loss and absence. Focusing on the domestic and funereal through associated materials and artefacts, this new work is underpinned by Stone's concurrent interests in monumentality and the memento mori in art practice. Poetic resonance is sought through the use of related found objects or existing materials where transformation as a process and process as a methodology is key.

Artist links:

http://www.re-title.com/artists/russell-chater.asp
http://www.chriskoning.com
http://www.re-title.com/artists/helen-scalway.asp
http://www.re-title.com/artists/richard-stone.asp
http://www.christophersteadman.com