More than extra-ordinary

This show is beautifully put together - Rosalind Davis and Jane Boyer have earned their gilded curator's caps. They have created an ancestral portrait gallery where the boundaries between three artists' work are temporarily suspended. The space seems homely and expansive. Everything breathes. Lean in for whispered conversations and you'll find your lips moving to the pulse of your own well-kept secrets. A fresh wind will sweep dark corners.
Or do you enter with breath held, anxious to find yourself growing beak and feathers or an extra limb? Maybe the content of head and heart will sprout from your scalp like Medusa's serpent hair? Try to turn your back and go: part of yourself will stay behind, in a tiny image where a furry, blurry fleece will spread across your face, and in time, your neck and chest and up from downdowndown. The eye will see - it never sleeps. Best to take time to dance with the three-legged girl (is that you, sweetheart?) or sail away a while in the black boat of father's shoes.

Excellent exibition, even if I say so myself. Exhausted. Exhilarated. In exile again. Or is it home?

Image borrowed from Chantelle Purcell's interview with the artists. Read it!

Go see:
Extra-Ordinary at Core Gallery
Alyson Helyer, Marion Michell and Tom Butler
Curated by Jane Boyer and Rosalind Davis

23rd April-7th May, Friday - Sunday 12-6 or by appointment_
South London Art Map late night opening, 29th April 6.30-8.30pm

Core Gallery, Cor Blimey Arts
C101 Faircharm Trading Estate
8-12 Creekside
Deptford
London SE8 3DX
0208 692 2783

Extra-Ordinary

Alyson Helyer, Marion Michell and Tom Butler
Curated by Jane Boyer and Rosalind Davis

Preview 22nd April 6.30pm-8.30pm
23rd April-7th May, Friday - Sunday 12-6 or by appointment_
South London Art Map late night opening, 29th April 6.30-8.30pm

From the press-release:
"Tom Butler, Alyson Helyer and Marion Michell create a disjointed world of macabre coexistence that holds humour, ambiguity, intensity and contradiction.
Originally selected from over 250 artists from the Core Gallery 2010 Open Submission competition by Matt Roberts, Kate Jones and Graham Crowley as part of the Deptford X festival.
Each artist explores identity and the psyche, the real and the unreal, showing us places, where, if we look, we may feel discomfort, anxiety and self-consciousness. The anguish of memory resurfaces as a physical representation via paint, crochet, paper sculptures, altered photographs and drawing.
The works inter-connect through the subversion of media, explorations of the potency of hair, domesticity, family and deformity creating a world of memento mori that contradictorily holds vitality; it is a vitality which draws strength and force from ‘the other’. But there is a symbolic death in these works; the death of mortification, the death of being other, the death of being bound, isolated and invisible, the death of assimilation (at any cost)."
Core Gallery, Cor Blimey Arts, C101 Faircharm Trading Estate, 8-12 Creekside, London SE8 3DX