Rosanna Greaves and Richard Stone

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Exhibition dates: 3-14 March 2010 Opening times: Thursday-Sunday 12-6pm First Thursdays late opening: Thursday 4th March 6-9pm Artists' talk: 2pm, Saturday 13th March, 2010 Curated by Patrick Michalopoulos and Ismail Erbil Schwartz Gallery presents the work of Rosanna Greaves and Richard Stone as part of its new series of two-person shows for 2010 questioning exhibition-making practice. The programme aims to create an innovative platform for dialogue between the work of contemporary artists while not being a collaboration. Greaves and Stone work with sound site-specifically and site-specific installation respectively. The empty Schwartz Gallery space formed the starting point for their two-person show both artists being struck by the space in its vacant state which seemed to expose clues to historic narratives that are now interwoven in its present state as a gallery. Rosanna Greaves uses sound recordings she makes to delve into a building's architectural identity, sense of place and accumulated histories of use and occupation. For her two-person show at Schwartz Gallery Greaves made a number of site recordings during a research visit to Schwartz Printing, a factory owned by Mr. Stewart Schwartz which was previously located on the site of Schwartz Gallery. Concentrating on the rhythm and musicality of the sounds of the machinery the recordings are re-assembled and re-installed into the gallery. The effect produced is of excavating the space, exposing what was there; using the invisibility of sound to conjure up an image in the viewers mind of what is missing or an apparition, ghost-like and mechanical in its presence.The composed sound of the absent printers circulates the gallery positioning the viewer in an active yet undefined role of visually tying together traces left by the very same machines on the gallery floor and the augmented architectural features of the space in its current form with the structures of the sounds that Greaves has resurrected within the space. Documentation from an interview held with Mr. Stewart Schwartz on route to the Schwartz Printing factory is also included and informed the sound composition. For a movie sketch made at the factory visited by Greaves please visit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GStYuYJBPgs Stone uses the vacant gallery space as the subject of his site-specific installations. The two recesses in the rear wall of the gallery space on either side of the columns running down its centre are concealed behind heavy dark monochrome curtains that dynamically and metaphorically amplify this focal point in the visitor's field of vision. In a linking to Greaves' work Stone deposits mounds of earth in and around the marks made by the printing machinery previously on the gallery floor symbolically intertwining ideas of territory with those of memory. Using a seductive layering of materials to enhance his process of working and interpretative scope Stone evokes a new transience in the space; a quasi-archeological enquiry in flux and metamorphosis. The works together are ultimately envisaged as sites that fall somewhere between excavation and burial. Stone works with the architecture of the space in a conceptually layered strategy that mischievously re-casts the dimensions and structural details of the gallery in a poetic light. Rosanna Greaves completed her BA at Middlesex University in 2003. Recent works include ‘Jenny' for o p e n e n d e d 3 Curated by Maeve Rendle, Ducie House, Manchester 2009, ‘Foot work' for Nothing Works Curated by Michael Czerwinski and Amanprit Sandhu, as part of Open House. Shoreditch Town Hall, London 2008 and ‘Everybody wants to be a milk man' for Diary of a Derelict Dairy in collaboration with the exhibitions curator Minnie Weisz, as part of london festival of architecture. The Old Express Depot, Bloomsbury, London 2008. Rosanna has also been a visiting Lecturer at Cambridge School of Art, Anglia Ruskin University since 2005. http://www.richardstoneprojects.com/intro Richard Stone completed his MA Fine Art at Central Saint Martin's, London in 2000. Recent solo exhibitions include; ‘reenactment of a memorial', Madame Lillie's Gallery, London; ‘the parlour', Amwell Street, London. Group exhibitions include: ‘loadbearing', Ada Street Gallery, London; ‘and it's time, time, time that you love', Terrace Studios, London; ‘responses from two islands', Pinter Room, Hackney Empire, London; and ‘no place' St Pancras Crypt, London. http://www.re-title.com/artists/rosanna-greaves.asp Copyright 2008-2010 Schwartz Gallery