Title: No understanding between the brain and the hands
Location: Kemistry Gallery
Start Time: 18:00
Date: 2009-03-05

No understanding between the brain and the hands is a collaboration between Pocko photographers and illustrators. Inspired by Metropolis, the 1927 silent science fiction film created by the famed director Fritz Lang, four of Pocko’s photographers have collaborated with nine different designers to create interpretation of the film

From strange creatures taking over the concrete jungle to our understanding of the city as a living organism, the images created as part of No understanding between the brain and the hands reinterpret Lang’s urban distopya, creating new versions of the city as we know it today. Questionning the relationship that we share with the city, the joining of photographers with illustrators has resulted in a striking collection of images which challenge our place within today metropolis.

Accompanying the exhibition is issue one of Pocko Times, a large format collection of visual accompanying short stories from the work of the Pocko Network

Pocko was founded in 1999 in London by Nicola Schwartz, a photography graduate of the Royal College of Art. It has rapidly become an internationally known company working with contemporary artists and with forward thinking brands.

Kemistry Gallery
43 Charlotte Road, Shoreditch
London EC2A 3PD
kemistrygallery.co.uk

Title: Rodchenko and Popova: Defining Constructivism 12 February – 17 May 2009
Location: Tate Modern
Description: The Russian Revolution was accompanied by a remarkable period of artistic experiment known as Constructivism, which questioned the fundamental properties of art and asked what its place should be in a new society. The Constructivists challenged the idea of the work of art as a unique commodity, explored more collective ways of working, and looked at how they could contribute to everyday life through design, architecture, industrial production, theatre and film.

Liubov Popova (1889-1924) and Aleksandr Rodchenko (1891-1956) were pivotal figures in the debates and discussions that defined Constructivism. Rodchenko, whose wife Varvara Stepanova was a major artist in her own right, energetically embraced almost all of its manifestations, from advertising to photography and film. Popova’s achievements in painting, theatre, and graphic and textile design took place in spite of ill health and tragedy: her husband died of typhoid in 1919, and she spent a year recuperating from the illness herself. In 1924 she and her son both died of scarlet fever.

The Constructivists compared the artist to an engineer, arranging materials scientifically and objectively, and producing art works as rationally as any other manufactured object. This was, in theory, an art that transcended gender differences. The equality of the sexes was an important Communist principle, and this was one of the first periods in history when female artists were valued as highly as their male counterparts.
Date: 2009-02-15

Title: Le Gun #4
Location: Club Row, Rochelle School

Description: Issue #4 of the narrative art annual LE GUN will be distributed worldwide from September 2008. The launch will coincide with an exhibition and temporary arts club taking place at the Rochelle School in Arnold Circus, Shoreditch titled
LE GUN ‘The Family’

‘Dear patrons, please charge your glasses and drink heartily 
for tomorrow you may die’

In the exhibition, the warped collective imagination of LE GUN presents a dysfunctional family of many generations, including a man with a crab on his head, the leopard walking heiress Marchesa Casati, and the original fat boy actor Joe Cobb. Raised on the the streets of parallel metropolis Legundon, an eccentrically Anglo-Saxon place of loose women, gin and cream cakes, and Francis Bacon’s butchers shop, they are an unusual dynasty. LE GUN’s gigantic black and white ink drawings record the families journey from their home cities murky streets and dens of vice, across a wild unchartered ocean to an outlandish Interzone of mind bending intoxicants and bordellos, and the jungle funeral of unloved street urchin Caliper Boy.

http://www.legun.co.uk/le_gun_news_article.php?nw_ida=121
Start Time: 17:00
Date: 2008-08-27