Century Gallery
ACAVA, 1-15 Cremer Street, Shoreditch, London E2 8HD
Contemporary fine art in an artist-run gallery
  

Stick 'em up!
Aug 13-23, 2003
Karen Adams, Kate Broad, Isha Bøhling, Simon Brewster, Annabel Dover, David Hall, Chris Koning, Levin Haegele, Arabella Lee, Cathy Lomax, Nichola Ollis, Srinivas Surti, Kate Terry, Pauline Thomas, Mimei Thompson, Georgia Wild | painting, photography| space 1,2
Karen Adams escapes the city for the day on a ‘country walk’ from a guide book, and comes back with three photographs that have the narrative
continuity of film.		  
  Kate Broad’s work is a contemporary interpretation of the romantic and gestural act of painting itself, underpinned with a research into the power and discipline of drawing and mark-making.
Isha Bøhling’s small paintings bring gentle disruption; colour and pattern become more playful and illogical, existing together in a perhaps conflicting manner.  
  Simon Brewster lays photographic paper over organic surfaces — lawns, bramble — and ignites gunpowder underneath it, sometimes adding washes of salt and copper sulphate solutions. Ferny crystals grow on the surfaces besides the photogram plant shadows.
Annabel Dover finds Christmas and birthday cards from people that have died still circulating car boot stalls. Why? She doesn’t know, but wants to paint them.  
  Levin Haegele highlights the overlooked.
David Hall puts brush to paper.  
  Chris Koning believes in painting.
Arabella Lee is the Creative Advisor for the Single Helix Foundation for Gastro Art.  
  Cathy Lomax’s paintings deal with the cultural markers of wanting, a knowing that the longed-for possession is ultimately unfulfilling.
Nichola Ollis, recently short-listed for the BOC Emerging Artist Award, recreates scenes from background photography in the Argos catalogue, removing the ‘outdoor and leisure’ commodities and liberating the gardens from their consumerist trappings.  
  Srinivas Surti’s current work is influenced by recent console games that try to simulate actual places, resulting in an immersive sense of freedom of movement but with an ‘unreal’ perception of time.
Kate Terry rescues functional materials from utility. Selecting materials in her favourite colours, her spatially informed installations, instructional kits, and how-to drawings flirt with lesser-respected crafts such as symmography and pom-pom making.  
  In her films, frequent prize-winner Pauline Thomas investigates what the Haiku poets describe as ‘sabi’: “The lonely quality that each thing has in its singular existence, when observed from a state of detachment”.
Mimei Thompson looks at how ‘snapshot’ time is endlessly lengthened into enigmatic painting time, addressing the unfulfillable need we have to bring something ‘real’ and ‘natural’ into our urban, simulation-ridden environment.  
 

Georgia Wild creates domestic warmth in a cold place, and brings down the house with her.

The exhibition was organised by Chris Koning.