Gratuitous Little Weight

Artists Madeline Djerejian, Nayan Kulkarni, Clement Page

02.Mar.07 - 31.Mar.07
Wed-Sat 12-6
£ Free advance

Private View, 01.Mar.07, 6-9pm
Artist Talk, 15.Mar.07, 6:30 pm

Curators Berit Fischer

Standpoint Gallery
45 Coronet St
London N1 6HD
020 7739 4921
standpointgallery@btconnect.com
www.standpointlondon.co.uk
Tube Old Street, Liverpool Street, Shoreditch / Hoxton

Gratuitous Little Weight
How can we conceive of space as a stage for men and not merely a somewhat nostalgic object of contemplation?
Paul Virilio

Gratuitous Little Weight responds to Paul Virilio’s urbanist vision of history as an event landscape in which the persistence of material moves to the cognitive persistence of vision. Calling upon the mechanisms of memory and documentation, the tension between what an image reveals and what we know about it, Gratuitous Little Weight is a photographic investigation on the aesthetics of disappearance, the elusive and ephemeral world of the finite.

Madeline Djerejian
Guardians & Sentries, 2001/2006 Djerejian’s photographic series portrays poetically uncanny landscapes, some of ominous architectural remnants and others of mysterious physiography. However the alluring landscapes represent imprints of a rather un-poetic historic past, namely battlefields, pillboxes or bunkers in Normandy or Verdun. As the viewer you are drawn into a tension between the eerie yet intriguing aesthetic of the image, and the callous reality of its content.

Madeline Djerejian lives and works in New York and Wales. Her works have been widely exhibited in the US, Germany and the UK and are most recently included in the publication Frozen Tears 3 (UK).

Nayan Kulkarni
Still Places Series, 2004/2006 examines the viewing process as an experience, created through slight digital anamorphosis of the photographic images, in which the single vanishing point is exaggerated through strong converging linear compositions. Sites of barren richness inform the photographic approach. The landscapes are sites with strong signs of historical human interaction, like SSSI (Site of Special Scientific Interest) preservation areas, traces of former military defence zones or pole marks of ancient pilgrims way for safe passage. “They expose a kind of emotional atrophy or sublimation of the body into their expanse”. (NK)

Nayan Kulkarni is a British artist who graduated from The Slade. His diverse practice includes photography, video installation and project based works in the public realm.

Clement Page
Topologies, 2003 is a series of photographic investigations into cityscapes of areas of London that were heavily bombed during World War II, and that have since become marginalized or partly ghettoized zones. These historically loaded areas are photographically captured when the former architecture and usage are on the verge of complete disappearance through new development. “These zones become the architectural and historical unconscious of the city”. (CP) The use of long exposures and very slow film allow the viewer to investigate, in the sharpest detail, an uncanny Topology of urban history.

Clement Page works with film, painting and photography and has shown extensively internationally as well as nationally at Lisson Gallery, VTO and Cell Projects.