Loose Booty
Alexandre Bianchini
Jeff McMillan
Sylvie Rodriguez
Pascal Rousson
Guy Sherwin
Eileen Simpson & Ben White
Curated by Pascal Rousson and Jeff McMillan
Combining artists based in London and Geneva, Loose Booty presents a wide variety of works made mostly from material borrowed or simply taken in order to create the new. Set adjacent to Brick Lane, the exhibition uses the vernacular of the street market as a mode of presenting seven artists who source, then manipulate their material surroundings.
Participating are Alexandre Bianchini, Jeff McMillan, Sylvie Rodriguez, Pascal Rousson, Guy Sherwin, Eileen Simpson & Ben White.
Swiss artist Sylvie Rodriguez’s work combine makeshift construction with scavenged images and text to suggest a narrative based in both fact and fiction. Sylvie has recently participated in exhibitions at Galerie Mars, Moscow and L’Hermitage, St Petersburg and at the District Museum of Bamako.
Fellow Geneva-based artist Alexandre Bianchini has created a new installation that combines images transferred to glass as well as on canvas for this occasion. Bianchini has recently held solo exhibitions at Ganga International Gallery, Bogota, Colombia and participated in Conversation Pieces, Centre d’art Contemporain, Geneva.
Pascal Rousson presents new retouched paintings, ceramics and various objects found in flea markets along with new canvases based on 1960’s DIY manuals which merge the handyman to modernism, recreating a so-called museum for the dispossessed. Rousson graduated from the School of Visual Arts Geneva in1991 and now lives and works in London. He recently showed in
Write Off at Corsica Arts Club, London.
Loose Booty allows a rare gallery viewing from Guy Sherwin’s classic silent black & white 16mm ‘Short Film Series’. The presentation of an existing work has been subtly altered to make Re-Cycle, a loop that concentrates vision through particular positioning of the camera. Sherwin was part of the influential London Filmmakers Co-op and his films have been widely screened in Europe and the US. Recent solo film programmes have been screened at Cinema de Balie, Amsterdam, Les Voutes, Paris, and Ocularis, New York.
Jeff McMillan alters objects and second-hand artworks through a simple but decisive use of paint. He is showing a selection of dipped cardboard boxes along with a visual mashup of found paint-by-number paintings. He will soon exhibit work at ArtFutures, Bloomberg and at La Culpable, Lima, Peru.
Eileen Simpson & Ben White source out-of-copyright 78rpm recordings, digitize them, and distribute them via their Open Music Archive website (www.openmusicarchive.org). The pair has brought together several ‘cover’ versions of a song from the archive, Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie, originally written by Clarence ‘Pinetop’ Smith of Chicago (d. 1929). These versions will be offered free on cd as a way of disseminating these materials back into the public domain. Simpson & White’s recent projects include Free-To-Air, Cornerhouse, Manchester, Open Congress, Tate Britain, and Screen Tests, BALTIC, Newcastle.
A publication with a text by Joel Vacheron accompanies the exhibition. Pro Helvetia and the Swiss Cultural Fund in Britain have provided support. The exhibition is curated by Jeff McMillan and Pascal Rousson.
Loose Booty will travel to Freestudios, Geneva, 13 – 24 March 2008.