VINEspace's Page

Robert Currie
'8 Days, 17 Hours, 46 Minutes and 21 Seconds'
5 September - 19 Oct 08
Open Thu-Sun 12.00 - 18.00
Private View 4 September 2008 18.00- 21.00

Robert Currie presents an intrinsically open and ethical practice when he makes his large videotape installations. For this particular piece exploratory pencil sketches led to a simple idea – to work on the two parallel walls of the gallery. The initial process was clear, deliberate and equitable, and completely belies the ultimate conclusion and complexity with which we are finally confronted.

The two sides of the gallery extend inwards towards the centre of the room. Architecturally, it is unlike Currie’s previous installations; more Gaudi than Gropius, less pre-determined, more willful. The videotape, with its crisp slender lines and reflective surface works collectively and accumulatively to grow out from the wall, crystal-like, with an organically geometric sensibility.

The building up of lines, the hatching and shading of planes and the definition of shape are familiar methods for articulating form with pencil on paper. On the platform of installation, and of course, in three dimensions, this work concerns itself not with the articulation of form but the validity of nothingness; through woven uniformity and within interstices, voids materialize with cogent restraint. Physiological, psychological and philosophical modes of perception are a pre-occupation, and visually, an awareness of what is not there, is brought about because of what is; a perception of nothingness as a result of ‘somethingness’.

Robert Currie lives and works in London. He graduated with a BA from Manchester Metropolitan University and completed an MA at the Royal College of Art in 2000. He was selected by Sarah Kent, Gavin Turk and Jeremy Millar for ‘New Contemporaries 2000’. Group shows include; ‘Moving Parts’ Studio Voltaire, ‘Remote Control’ Angel Row Nottingham, ‘The Liminal Phase’, Holloway, ‘42’ at The Three Colts Gallery and ‘Driven’ at Fieldgate. In 2006 he completed a year-long residency at the Florence Trust.


'A One Night Stand with ....Russell Herron'
4 Sep from 6pm to 9pm
Our 'A one Night Stand With ...' programme is a curatorial difference for one-off performances, events and happenings. The latest artist to participate is Russell Herron.


Rana Begum
'Transient Symmetry'
29 May - 6 June
Open Thu-Sun 12.00-18.00
Private View 29 May 2008 18.30-21.00

In this new body of work, Rana Begum appears to capture those fleeting instances when form, colour, light and structure momentarily align in our consciousness.

Begum continues to explore her fascination with the repetition and geometry found in the vocabulary of Islamic Art and architecture; as well as how patterns and forms reoccur accidentally, randomly and chaotically within the urban environment (for example road signs, advertising and hazard markings). Using symmetry and reiteration, the work embodies how balance and harmony can emerge from chaos.

In contrast to Bell’s theory of ‘significant form’ which elevated and separated the aesthetic experience of viewing art above other aesthetic experiences (such as viewing nature), Begum’s work turns a more radical corner. It reawakens a fundamental instinct to critically engage with form and colour, whilst exploiting existing experiences of the world around us. The work teases our natural curiosity to explore visual stimuli as it juts and cuts into space, and the artist’s working processes place a high value on the slightest of very specific formal adjustments that can shift the experience of perception to something not anticipated. In this way the work is the object of emotional engagement, not a vehicle of description.

Rana Begum was born in Bangladesh in 1977 and brought up in England. She graduated with a BA from Chelsea School of Art and completed an MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2002. Solo shows include Colour Codes at The Third Line, Dubai 2007, and group shows include Monologue/Dialogue II, Bischoff/Weiss, London (2008), Repetition and Sequence Jerwood Space London (2007), Monologue/Dialogue British Council Residency, Bangkok University Gallery Bangkok (2006), Art:21 Power/Memory/Structures/Play, Art Museum of Western Virginia, Ad Infinitum: Aesthetics of Repetition Haines Gallery San Francisco (2005) and Colour My World, Riflemaker, London (2005). The artist lives and works in London.


Simon Morse
Reckoners/Reckoning

VINEspace, 25a Vyner Street, London E2 9DG
4 April - 11 May 2008
Open Thu-Sun 12.00-18.00
Private View 3 April 2008 18.30-21.00

Simon Morse’s first solo show at VINEspace presents an array of machines whose pragmatic origins and intended uses point to their − and our − tragicomic undoing.

Like the series of systemic derangements, both human and automated, in Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love the Bomb, the objects in the exhibition appear to exist and operate within entirely rational parameters. Upon closer inspection however, their potential functions describe a world in which expediency has caused the languages of control and the machineries of discourse to become kaleidoscopically self-entangled through doomed attempts to create and maintain literal and metaphorical power structures.

The work asks if it is humanly possible to imagine a way out of this situation any more. Have we indeed passed a moment of ‘peak thought’, when the perils created via our technologies, our languages, have overtaken and corralled our ability to come up with dependable solutions?

In the tradition of the great satirists, Morse uses his work to fold the crazed logic of our time back in on itself, creating an exponentially skewed reality attuned with precision to the absurdities of its context.

Simon Morse was born in Swindon, England in 1969. He studied at Liverpool Polytechnic (BA Fine Art 1989-92) and Chelsea College of Art and Design (MA Fine Art 1992-3). He has exhibited widely in the UK, and also in the US, Germany, the Netherlands, Ireland and Spain. He lives and works in London.


Jaakko Mattila and Robert Currie
feb 7th – march 13th

Robert Currie and Jaakko Mattila play with the dichotomies that result from merging the personal with the scientific, the mechanical with the handmade. Water colour has notoriously ephemeral qualities. Always respectfully handled by artists wanting to exploit its ability to behave in particular ways, it is, quite simply, a medium that will achieve much for an artist that knows how to leave it to its own devices and claim the 'happy accidents'. Jaakko Mattila refuses to settle for that. He experiments with semi-mechanical processes and repetitive patterns and lines, to inject more rigour and control into the process of painting with this medium. By narrowing down opportunities for the paint to behave in a 'freelance' manner, the resulting work fidgets intriguingly between an aesthetic defined by process and one defined by chance.

Robert Currie creates intricate worlds from a range of unusual materials such as nylon and cassette tape using exacting techniques that are both painstakingly precise and intrinsically random. He fuses a mathematical precision with a love of the uncontrollable to create intricate visions of controlled chaos. His work shows a keen awareness of the opposing hypotheses of chaos theory - the notion that order will inevitably descend into disorder - and complexity theory, which argues that order will always emerge in any sufficiently complex system.

Robert Currie lives and works in London. Jaakko Mattila currently lives and works in Finland.

(Many thanks to Pryle Behrman for his contributions on the work of Robert Currie)