Saatchi Magazine Interview: Margaret Harrison & The Girls at Payne Shurvell

Feminism was a dirty word, or at least made for some obscene art, when Margaret Harrison put on a one woman show in 1971. Her beautifully rendered drawings of Captain America complete with boobs and stockings and Hugh Hefner dressed as one of the bunnies he so adores were deemed indecent by the police and promptly whipped off the walls. With forty years between then and now, Harrison is showing these works again along with new pieces, joined by The Girls (Andrea Blood and Zoe Sinclair) with a new static performance piece. Bridging the revealingly narrow gap between second wave feminism and contemporary feminist issues, Harrison and The Girls bring the f-word out of the annals of history to the pole-dancing-as-liberation generation. Together they sat down to discuss their work and inspiration…

Margaret Harrison: I’d been invited by a gallery to show some work and actually they gave me a little stipend, which was amazing because the market wasn’t great. They didn’t see all of my work until the show was put together, but it was fine except that the police apparently went into the gallery the day after it opened and warned the gallery director that it should come down otherwise they would take it down. By the time I arrived it was down, I couldn’t believe it... (read more)

Dazed Digital Interview: Sam Holden at Moves 11

As someone well acquainted with the slick imagery of newspaper supplements and style mag spreads, photographer Sam Holden knows exactly which is your good side. But glossy falsity held no lasting fascination for Holden, whose work as a video artist deliberately deconstructs the premeditated pose, taking portraiture into the moving image and seeing how it, and we react. Holden’s film Focus No.1 has been selected for Moves 11 in Liverpool this April and May; a festival that brings together the most exciting video art and experimental film in a challenging and boundary-pushing programme. Ahead of the festival, Dazed caught up with Holden to talk about his work… (read interview)

ArtSlant Review: Nancy Fouts at Pertwee Anderson & Gold

Reminiscent of a 16^th century cabinet of curiosities, Nancy Fouts’ Un-think presents a collection of curios manufactured by the artist to throw our ingrained view of everyday things, especially those from nature, thoroughly off kilter.

Taking us back to a time when collectors would gather stuffed exotic birds, pictures of deformed people or strange foreign artifacts to delight at the freakishness and strange, Fouts re-invokes a sense of the uncanny as she rolls out this plethora of whimsical and darkly humorous pieces. As the exhibition unfolds, it’s hard not to entertain a macabre, excited anticipation of what’s going to happen next... (read more)

ArtSlant Review: Wim Wenders at The Haunch of Venison

Wim Wenders’ photographs are like establishing shots; the wide angle images at the beginning of film scenes that locate the action to follow. This is no surprise since they were taken as the filmmaker scouted for locations in countries including Brazil, Japan, Italy, Germany and the US, taking the roads less traveled to seek out the enigmatic, evocative places that haunt these large scale images.

The forty photos, spanning 1983 to 2011, play out over the walls of the Haunch of Venison like a road movie, taking in a vast Japanese urban sunset in Onomichi Sunset (2005), a corner of contemporary America that still looks like an Edward Hopper painting in Street Corner in Butte, Montana (2003), and an empty al fresco cinema with bright orange rows of unoccupied seats in Open Air Screen (2007)... (read more)

ArtSlant Review: Hybridity & Mutation at The Old Truman Brewery

This vibrant gathering of works from 13 emerging and mid-career artists addresses the very prescient fact that change is the only constant. Taking a quote from Ovid’s Metamorphoses as a springboard – “nothing in the entire universe every perishes… but things vary, and adopt a new form” – the show investigates how this state of continual flux and the rethinking that ensues can be captured and articulated through the form and context of art.

The responses here come more in the form of installation, sculpture and video rather than painting or drawing, with many of the artists taking a biological stance on the subject... (read more)

The Old Truman Brewery, 4 Wilkes Street, London E1 6QL
March 29 to April 17 2011

ArtSlant Review: Ida Applebroog at Hauser & Wirth

When she paints, Ida Applebroog treats the canvas like a three-dimensional object, a structure that she annotates with her distinctive monochromatic paintings. These canvases stand freely around the gallery, sometimes in groups, sometimes physically bolted together, other times jutting out from a wall, telling a story across the room like a three dimensional graphic novel.

Hauser and Wirth’s Saville Row space is cavernous enough to accommodate many of these Marginalia paintings, across which Applebroog depicts human forms with bold outlines and economical detail using oil and resin. They are everymen, -women and animals but each body is damaged or restricted – blindfolded, bandaged, handcuffed, or bound... (read more)

Hauser & Wirth, 23 Saville Row, London W1S 2ET
March 17 to April 30 2011

Little White Lies Review: Oranges and Sunshine

Wearing its social conscience well and truly on its sleeve, this theatrical debut from esteemed TV director Jim Loach (son of Ken) hardly breaks the family filmmaking mould. But that’s not to disparage the director’s talents in bringing this extraordinary tale to the screen with a measured and very subtle approach.

Oranges and Sunshine tells the personal stories behind the apologies issued by the British and Australian governments to thousands of British children in care who were systematically shipped to Australia and other Commonwealth countries over nigh-on a hundred years until the 1970s.

It was a shady little secret until the 1980s, when a Nottinghamshire social worker began to make contact with the victims, some of whom were as young as four-years-old when they were told their parents were dead before being shipped out, alone, on a boat to a ‘better place’. Not only were some of the children’s parents very much alive, but the institutions in which they were placed were more often than not physically, mentally or sexually abusive. All this in the name of saving a few pounds... (read more)