The Museletter - December 2023

Edition XXIII DECEMBER 2023 Contributors : Damian Rayne Gosia Malawska Eleni Maragaki

About...

In our online version, we focus on partner organisations, guest artists and residents to bring you a preview of ‘what is’, and ‘what’s to be expected’. We also have links to a wealth of online content this month, including: sound art files for music producers, virtual tours and interviews with our partner organisation (The Galleries Association), and a cross-section of counter-culture to be found in West London.

The Muse was founded in 2003 by artists, with the aim of providing support for both gallery and studio activities. Our gallery is located in the heart of North Kensington, surrounded by Georgian houses in Portobello Market. We offer an annual residency program that provides subsidized studio space and opportunities for recent graduates to showcase their work.Throughout the year, we welcome artists to exhibit their work, curating a diverse selection of emerging and established professionals. In 2020, we supported three new residents and featured a varied group of national and international artists. We hope you enjoy this collection of artwork in our periodical, which includes collectable images accessible to our readership both in digital and print format.

ARTMARKET We are an artist-led initiative that supports creative endeavors through affordable and accessible reproductions of artwork. Our model dramatically reduces the cost of digital reproductions, making art accessible to everyone regardless of their background or status.

If you admire a piece, you can now afford to purchase it. For artists, our initiative generates revenue that helps bridge the gap between exhibitions, whether they are emerging or established in the art world.

‘I love it, but I’m not going to re-mortgage…’ (no more)

The MUSE Gallery (UK Charity for the arts No.1162300) 269, Portobello Rd. London W11 1LR www.themuseat269.com info@themuseat269.com Twitter: Muse_Gallery Instagram: Muse_at_269

Rob Birch, Untitled, digital print on 300gsm paper, A3 £45.00

Opening hours: Thursday/Friday /Saturday/Sunday 12-6pm Please check our website for up to date information

Front cover: Louisa Crispin Chrysanthemum VI, graphite, 62x50cm

The Muse Group Theatre Company @themusegrouptheatrecompany An in-house theatre company founded in 2022. An artist-led group working to support emerging talent. We strive to create powerful theatre, and raise funds for charities who support the causes that are aligned with each production.

The Gallery Association (TGA) @tga_artbus

musetheatre.london

TGA works to build community through events, connecting performers, artists, managers and galleries throughout London. We are an industry network resource, supported by independent galleries and artist’s studios. Our Red Routemaster Double Deck Bus tours take local talent, enthusiasts and management to remote locations and studios for studio visits and performances.

was established as a platform based on annual Scratchdays events, where we hosted theatre groups and writers to showcase new material to live audiences.

Curated and presented by Portobello Radio and resident cultural attaches, the tours explore music and art in a chaotic synesthesia of sound and light.

It’s FREE and monthly from February 2024, see you in the next ART BUS tour!

Piers, what’s on your mind?

Well, I suppose I have to admit that Christmas is beginning to be on my mind. We just finished the Friday Show here at the Muse and Latoya came in from the West Way Trust and she was here to promote the Portobello Parade, which we’re all going to be part of on the 17th of December. A lot of the community organizations from Tribo Band to, 24 Hearts, Renegade Theatre, the Portobello Live Choir and us, we’ll be parading from Trellick down to the Canopy by Portobello Green. So that should be quite an event and quite a day. It will start at Trellick Tower at 3pm that day. These things like the Travistock Festival, the Summer Festival, the Westway Trust are really great for the area. The summer ones have always work except from one particularly rainy occasion. But winter is always a bit more difficult because everything is so cold. I think it’s a great idea to have an event that keeps everyone moving.

What are your plans for Christmas?

I love Christmas. I go to my mom’s who is still going strong at 95, shows no signs of age at all. Then we have the full turkey spread.

When are you going to wrap up Portobello Radio for the festive period?

Portobello Radio is closing on the 23rd and opening in the new year.

Back at the Muse, first week of January. That’s something to look forward to. 2024 is shaping up with lots going on, everyone is finally shaken off the long covid we all felt. With no disrespect to people who actually got long covid. Things will be moving again.

Portobello Radio @portobello.radio Representing the rich sound and cultural diversity of West London since 2015.

We celebrate the rich cultural diversity that is the Portobello Road and serve as a hub of the community, streaming its events, offers, news, views and developments. We offer air time to all communities, a regular Latin American show, a Spanish hour, Moroccan, African, Caribbean, Irish & more join the Portobello Radio Melting Pot. By giving airtime to all of Portobello’s varied residents we wish to bring the community together, entertain, inform and enthuse.

We will be supporting productions from February 2024 including ACTrophy, an actors run production vehicle using industrial spaces in West London. www.musetheatre.london

Piers What’s on your mind?

James Grossman

James Grossman is a Multidisciplinary Designer Maker, who combines his background in Product Design with his love of form and sculpture. Exploring the relationships between organic forms in the natural and digital realms. The formulation of his designs is primarily constructed through simulations and digital craftsmanship to create works incorporating themes of tactility, connection, and containment. He aims to capture obscure movement across a variety of mediums, by experimenting with advanced technologies. By doing so he plans to investigate speculative futures and inspire his audience to consider unexplored questions.

(image right) James Grossman, Merge metal red 27 x 81 x 0.15cm

Margarita Franceska Loze

Margarita Frančeska Loze (b. 1997, Latvia) is a multidisciplinary artist currently based between London and Riga. She is a recent graduate of MFA Fine Art from Kingston School of Art and is a co-founder of Conch Collective. She has been nominated for The Muse Residency 2024 in Notting Hill, and is a member of the Art/Work Association at the artist-run organisation Auto Italia and ACS Society. In the year 2022, she was selected for the Venice Biennale Fellowship programme.

The work of Margarita is a celebration of the poetics of the ordinary. Margarita’s research focuses on experimental stop motion, movement, atmospheric optics, and phenomena such as déjà vu. Through her experimental narrative approach in hand-drawn stop-motion animation work, Margarita makes a dreamlike ontology, to capture the nuances of spatial, temporal and poetic navigation. Her recent work also combines textile production with the use of found objects. Loze seeks objects with defined functions, such as photo albums and frames, or peculiar objects with odd forms and holes. Although she directly works on these materials, adding new marks with threads, she retains details of their original shapes and imperfections. By blending these derelict objects’ ephemeral qualities with her memories and imagined worlds, she questions the function of the objects and the phenomenology of appearance.

(image right) Margarita Frančeska Loze, Photography Book, embroidery on fabric, lace, found object, clamshell box, 36 x 50 cm, 2022

Romi Thornton

As a multi-media artist, I investigate the profound impact consumerism has on our sense of self. Through the installation of 3D rendered animation and video, I navigate the false promises made and facades maintained by corporations. The performance and video installations aim to shed light, and provoke critical reflection on the hidden narratives in commerce by exploring the expanded role of the exhibition visitor as a quasi-consumer. Due to the performative nature of my work - involving live actors and personas - the audience are encouraged to actively participate and question their own complicity in perpetuating consumer culture and the pervasive influence of Big Tech.

One integral aspect of my work, is the creation of the spurious brand Infinitech, founded by the unprincipled CEO Rosemary Barbara Thompson. Infinitech serves as a symbol for the infiltration of technology on our lives. The narrative embodies the ergonomically alluring, yet illusory promises tech companies offer us.

The carefully curated characters aim to blur the viewer’s distinction of reality whilst testing the conventions of our daily social interactions. The spaces I create suggest order and control. But, in leaving easter eggs for the viewer within the curations, and by recreating the peculiar and slightly-off moments we have with customer service, illusions are revealed and pretences are broken.

(image right) Romi Thornton, IF YOU CAN’T APPRECIATE WHAT YOU’VE GOT, YOU’D BETTER GET WHAT YOU CAN APPRECIATE: THE PYGMALIONPRO XPO, video and performance installation, 2023

Collapsing New People 28 September - 22 October 2023

There is a crisis in human capital, the social, the economy and the environment and as a result there is a crisis what it takes to be human.This crisis is driven by the fragmentation of our identity and who or what we think we are. “Collapsing New People” is a series of digital collage portrait images that examine the form, nature and content of that crisis.These are portraits that are shorn of the oppressive tropes of representation, so- cial status, kudos and binary notions of self.These are rejected as outdated and representative of a colonial, racialised, patriarchal, and socio-political hierarchies framed withing a capitalist paradigm. This is one that is riven violence and no longer fit for purpose.

If we are to negate these Cartesian notions of self it is understood that identity itself needs to be reframed, reappropriated and represented in ways we have yet the facility to comprehend. It is about placing our no- tions of self upon a sensorial platform, where identity is a living experience, felt rather than seen. My work uses the open grammar of collage and the potential of the digital to provide opportunities to express identity as a relational sense of self. It investigates the inherent qualities of collage and its ability to order new relation- ships of meaning from matter within a Cartesian value system and works towards the creation of a likeness based upon sensation, a sensorial likeness.

Rob Birch

‘My work has been described as visual scepticism. I use the visual as a means of challenging received notions of truth and reality. I engage in the “portrait” as a means of addressing these concepts as well as questioning the validity of notions of identity, self and beauty

My work is predicated upon the knowledge that a truth, and whatever form that may take, is reliant upon context, experience and fearlessness. “Art” is not made but found. (A) truth is always present in the real and resistant world, and it is my job, as an artist, to act as the means of bringing that truth into our conscious world’.

(image right) Rob Birch, THE NEPHEW, digital Photo Collage, 120x100cm, 2023

Cry Me a River 2 November - 26 November 2023

‘Cry Me a River’ is a solo exhibition by Emma Elliott about heartbreak, that weaves together the emotional threads of love’s labour’s lost. The center piece is an oversized human heart ved as a personal challenge after separating from a significant relationship and navigating the rollercoaster of a new one. From this car- rara marble heart a series of miniature slip cast stoneware versions evolved, dubbed the ‘Don’t Ask’ series. Each delicate heart was shattered and repaired using a modern interpretation of the ancient Japanese art of kintsugi; where broken pottery is carefully restored using gold - a symbolic representation of fracture and healing. The shattering of the hearts is recorded on film, in painstaking slow motion, echoing the fragility of the human condition. Elliott invites you in to sit on the sob sofa and rock it out to your favorite tunes.

Emma Elliott

Emma Elliott is an associate Member of the Royal Society of Sculptors whose central themes look at the backand-forth between enlightened advancements in human evolution and devolution into animalistic behaviour.

For Elliott, art is a way of exploring that which is instinctive and that which is learnt. Working primarily across sculpture, she explores relationships between the refined and the primitive and the physical and the spiritual; examining the human condition from up close and from afar, honing in on minute anatomical de- tails and broadly surveying the influences of our collective past on present behaviour, often in the same piece.

Elliott’s work hangs in the balance between the classic and the contemporary, the devastating and the ridiculous. She believes art has a duty to wrestle with society and its elements of rigidity. Elliott has exhib- ited widely, including Political Art, U-jazdowski Museum of Contemporary Art, Warsaw, 2021/22, Wander_Land, The Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens, Penzance, 2023, The Summer Exhibition, Roy- al Society of Sculptors, 2023, The Unlit PathThe Hardwick Gallery 2022. Elliott has won awards with The Chiaya Art Award, 2021: The Sunny Art Prize 2019, Passion for Freedom 2015 and Winter Pride 2014.

(image right) Emma Elliott, Don’t Ask Series, stoneware with 24 carat gold, 28x16cm, 2023

Surrender to the Rhythms 30 November - 23 December 2023

‘Fragile memory A fleeting moment captured Ephemeral touch’.

“I am beginning to develop a language of immediacy, working outside and relinquishing control to the elements and found materials: drawing with ink and grass while lying quietly in a sunny meadow, listening to nature, surrendering to the moment.

I have spent 12 years slowly developing my practice, controlling my environment and choosing pin sharp pencils, ultra-smooth paper, the right light to see and capture the things I want to share. Seducing you into my world and asking you to look a little closer at what I have noticed, always informed by my time outside as a gardener, a walker, an observer. I’m a Collector and my studio is reminiscent of an old school nature table, reminders of my walks and the things that catch my eye. Delving into my craft roots I explore tools and techniques, sometimes for the sheer joy of solving problems. These sit in the studio waiting for their moment in the spotlight, catching my eye as I work.But always I return to the quiet observations, moments in time delicately captured in graphite as the season dictates.”

You are invited to explore Louisa’s world.

Louisa Crispin

Lost in a world of intricate observations from nature, Louisa is entranced by the cycle of growth and decay.

It’s quiet in her Kent studio and garden as she looks ever closer at the flora and fauna. Texture, shadows, silhouettes and movement created with graphite marks and tone, it’s rarely about the colour but always about the environment she inhabits. Her drawings explore the materiality of graphite media whilst considering the plight of our less popular insects. The narrative is focused on wildlife corridors: the importance of a network of routes between habitats to ensure diversity. She aims to resolve the tension between abstraction and figuration while encouraging open discussion about the plight of our wildlife. As well as membership of the Free Painters and Sculptors, the Society of Graphic Fine Art and the Wilderness Art Collective, she is a fellow of the Society of Botanical Artists. S ​ he also has links to the Royal West of England Academy, Sevenoaks Visual Arts Forum and Pure Arts Group.

(image right) Louisa Crispin, Study of a Beetle 003 ~ Stag Beetle, Graphite / embossing, 39 x 35 x 2 cm

{[Trip] the Light Fantas[tych] 7-24 March 2024

Ann Churchill Coral Churchill Fearon Gold Małgorzata Łapsa-Malawska Caroline Mackenzie Damian Rayne

An exhibition looking at the triptych form expanding on themes of symbolism through representative and abstract portrayals of surface and inner worlds.

A combination of painting, sculpture, sound, performance - differing elements connecting what it is to be human and experience this world. A starting point the foundation being a spring board to incorporate potential dance/ performance reflecting the quote from Milton - ‘trip the light fantastic’ = to dancing lightly - works in response in attempts to capture the lightness in music, synesthesia, rhythm, movement, the body as an instrument reacting, refracting, reflecting. Incorporating dance into the event.

Extensions of consciousness from the mundane to the sublime, the realms of this and other worlds, expressed in combinations of three - happiness, harmony, the concept of beauty, the possibility of utopia, nirvanas expressed through triptychs - some form of portrait looking at life stages - the journey from birth, childhood, adulthood, becoming old, how the mind moves through myriad aspects - portrayals of happiness, anger, sadness, joy, so on.

Each artist can create their own response to the concept of the triptych, it doesn’t have to be straight portraiture it can be a depiction of the self in endless forms.

info about Ann will be send this week

(image right) Ann Churchill, Homage to Duncan Grant, 2015, Watercolour on handmade paper, 56 x 110cm

In Praise of Shadows

“In a world addicted to consumption and power, art celebrates emptiness and surrender. In a world accelerating to greater and greater speed, art reminds us of the timeless.”

- J.L. Adams, Winter Music.

Annamarie Dzendrowskyj seeks to examine the indeterminate nature of ‘ways of seeing’ and ‘ways of being’. She explores the ambiguous ‘grey area’ between presence and absence by exploring fleeting moments of a world in constant flux. Moments in time she sees as suggesting a space, rather than defining a space, one that exists between what is seen and unseen, a zone of indiscernablity.

The works presented by Dzendrowskyj in this exhibition were inspired by Junichiro Tanizaki’s ‘In Praise of Shadows’.

This essay is an exploration of traditional Japanese aesthetics and culture, where beauty is found in the shadows of life, in the interplay between darkness and light, highlighting that one cannot exist without the other. Tanizaki offers ‘a gentle warning against the quest for airbrushed perfection, and reminds us that too much light can pollute and obscure our natural world.’ A message that bears critical relevance today with the concerning reality that faces the global community - climate change.

Dzendrowskyj positions the natural world as the central subject in the work, drawing upon imagery from the Blue Mountains World Heritage Area in Australia taken in 2020 a few months after the devastating 2019-2020 bushfire season . Presenting a view of the Australian landscape, highlighting both its beauty and its precarity due to climate change.

Drawing attention to our responsibility to act now to preserve the fragility of our environment for future generations and our collective responsibility in shaping a sustainable future, towards sensitivity and empathy for the natural world.

Anne Marie Dzendrowskyj

Annamarie Dzendrowskyj originally trained as a classical ballet dancer followed by a career as a PADI Scuba Diving Instructor/Examiner. She holds a BA Hons Degree in Philosophy (Lancaster University, UK) with speciality subjects in existentialism and aesthetics, a BA in Fine Art with electives in Printmaking, Photography and Sculpture and a BA Honours Degree in Painting (National Art School, Sydney, Australia). Dzendrowskyj has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in the UK and internationally. Shortlisted for art prizes including Arte Laguna Prize (Venice) 15th, 13th, 10th Editions where she was awarded Caudan Arts Centre Exhibition, Singulart Prize, Biafarin Honours Award and Fallani Serigraphy Residency. Her work is held in both public and private collections including the National Art School Drawing Archive (Sydney, Australia), St.Vincent’s Hospital (Sydney, Australia), ICI Casa (International Cultural Institute, Venice, Italy) and the National Visual Arts Library (Dublin, Ireland).

(image right) Anne Marie Dzendrowskyj, Shadowland 1, 2023, Oil on Australian Polyester Canvas 40 x 23 cm

Oliver Dorrell

I make paintings on long walks over many days. The walks are inspirations for the work but also integral to it. I carry silk canvases, a single collapsible stretcher frame, gum Arabic and dry pigments so I can set up temporary studios in mountain huts, shelters, cabins and barns as I walk. Often these walks link two cities across a wilderness and are prompted by art history or literature.

The landscapes, people and culture of the places I travel through inform the work as much as the weather, physical exertion, and the act of folding, carrying and re-stretching the silk affects the work along the way. As I paint, I try to balance this physical act of traveling on foot with the awkwardness of making watercolours from dry pigment and silk, and the struggle to achieve the emotional response to the landscapes, people, or historical weight I am trying to express. By necessity, the silk paintings have a spontaneous style and they are mounted on wood and felt after my walk.

The spartan and briefly nomadic nature of this art practice is free from the crutches and distractions of art books, art museums and the internet’s bottomless reservoir of images. The practice therefore acts like a rarefied mirror to the more conventionally stationary, studio based life as an artist.

Education 2017/18 MA Painting. (Distinction). Wimbledon College of Arts, University of the Arts London.

2001-2004 Bsc Anthropology. University College London.

Exhibitions and Residencies Nov-Dec 2021 ‘We Are Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On’, Aleph Contemporary. Cello Factory, London Nov 2020 - ‘Art On A Postcard’ London Oct-Dec 2020- ‘Reflections’ Aleph Contemporary. London Nov 2019 - The Ethnic Cultural Centre, Makhachkala, Dagestan, Russia July 2019 -’Loop’ Blase’ London Mar 2019 -’Guerilla Warefare’, Blase’, London Apr 2019 - Vishnu Manchu Art Residency Exhibition, Turupathi, South India Mar 2019 - Vishnu Manchu Art Foundation Residency, Tirupathi, South India.

Nov 2018 -’Wrong Food’, Blasé, London Sept 2018 - Wimbledon College of Art MA Show, London May 2018 -’62 Hands’. Lewisham Art House, London

Publications https://alephcontemporary.com/blog/52-walking-after-bruegel/

(image right) Oliver Dorrell, Painted in Mountain Huts On A Walk From Milan To Munich, 2022,watercolour on silk, 46x55cm

LOCAL LEGEND LEE HARRIS 1936-2023

Lee Harris (born 1936 in Johannesburg), was a South African writer and performer who has lived and worked primarily in the United Kingdom since 1956.

He was one of the few white members of the African National Congress, where he helped with the Congress of the People and met Nelson Mandela. After moving to England at the age of 20, he acted with Orson Welles and Dame Flora Robson; wrote for the British underground press, including International Times; helped found the Arts Lab, and has been an instrumental figure in the British counterculture movement since the seventies.

He published Brainstorm Comix and Home Grown magazine in the 1970s.

In 1972 Harris opened a shop in the Portobello Road, London, called Alchemy – named after The Alchemical Wedding.

The shop sells items such as incense, postcards, pipes and smoking accessories, vaporisers as well as others. It remains a gathering point for alternative Londoners to the present day and is London’s oldest culture shop.

In 1990 Harris was sentenced to three months imprisonment for selling items such as cigarette papers and pipes ‘believed to be used for the smoking of cannabis’. The sentence was quashed on appeal, and headshops opened all over the country.