exhibition

'Loose Booty'

Jeff McMillan

24.Jan.08 - 16.Feb.08
Wed-Sat 12.00 - 18.00

Private View, 23.Jan.08, 6-9pm

Vegas Gallery
64-66 Redchurch Street
London E2 7DP
07726750762 / 02077294819
hello@vegasgallery.co.uk
www.vegasgallery.co.uk
Tube Liverpool Street, Old Street, Aldgate East, Shoreditch / Hoxton

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. The artists brought together here work with a range of media but all have in common a tactile and emotive affinity for their material surroundings. Participating artists are Alexandre Bianchini, Jeff McMillan, Sylvie Rodriguez, Pascal Rousson, Guy Sherwin, Eileen Simpson & Ben White.

Swiss artist Alexandre Bianchini’s new wax sculptures bear only a vague resemblance to their innocent cartoonish genesis though they hint at something darker. Derived from children’s piggy banks these works are at once formally compelling and conceptually enigmatic. Bianchini has recently held solo exhibitions at Ganga International Gallery, Bogota, Colombia and participated in Conversation Pieces, Centre d’art Contemporain, Geneva.

Fellow Geneva-based artist Sylvie Rodriguez will create a new work in situ for this show. She anticipates using the streets of London as a source for this new installation to combine makeshift construction with scavenged images and text that suggest a narrative of both fact and fiction. She has recently participated in exhibitions at Galerie Mars, Moscow and L’Hermitage, St Petersburg.

Pascal Rousson presents a new mini-environment of ‘Sunday paintings’ he has copied from 1960’s DIY manuals displayed within a well-worn garden shed. The nature of these paintings along with their presentation suggests a utopia realized through good craftsmanship - handyman meets modernism. 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 of filmmaker Guy Sherwin’s classic silent black & white 16mm Cycle. Like others in his ongoing 'Short Film Series', Cycle concentrates on a single event where vision is intensified through particular positioning of the camera. Sherwin became part of the influential London Filmmakers Coop in the mid 1970s and his films have been widely screened in Europe and the US. Recent solo film programmes include Cinema de Balie, Amsterdam, Cinema La Clef, Paris, and Ocularis, New York.

Eileen Simpson & Ben White have meticulously sourced out-of-copyright 78rpm recordings, digitized them, and distributed them via their Open Music Archive website. For this exhibition the pair have brought together nine different ‘cover’ versions of a song from the archive, Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie, originally written by Clarence ‘Pinetop’ Smith of Chicago (d. 1929). The various versions, including those by Bing Crosby and the Johnny Parker Trio are to be burned on cds and given away for free in the exhibition as a way of disseminating these materials that are rightfully in the public domain. (also see: www.openmusicarchive.org) The artist’s recent live performances include Free-To-Air, Cornerhouse, Manchester, Open Congress, Tate Britain, and Screen Tests, BALTIC, Newcastle.

The paintings and objects of American artist Jeff McMillan operate on a ground shared by minimalism and consumerism. Secondhand paintings and foraged cardboard boxes are submerged into a pool of paint, one side at a time in search of a quotidian sublime. McMillan’s recent exhibitions include Transformer, Woburn Square Research Centre, London, ArtFutures, Bloomberg Space, London, John Moores 24, The Walker, Liverpool.

Loose Booty will be exhibited in Geneva in March 2008.