The Museletter 2024 by The Muse Gallery

2024

About...

Here at The Musletter we try and keep it interesting and our spelling immaculate. Our digital version, published on ISSU, explores multimedia content including: art, performance, sound art,VR, and film. In our printed version, we focus on partner organisations, guest artists and residents featuring high resolution work, good enough to cut out and frame. In these editions, more portable and practical periodicals we preview ‘what is going on’.The highlights of our programme and community outreach as well as all manor of counter-culture to be found in North Kensington.

The Muse was founded in 2003 to balance purist commercial and creative manifestos, with as little compromise and homogeny as possible. We are an artist led organisation devised to subsidise space and lower commissions, now run as a charity supporting all facets of arts, culture and community. Our gallery is located in the heart of North Kensington, a Georgian house nestled in the heart of Portobello Market. We still offer an annual residency program providing subsidised studio space for recent graduates to showcase their work and rub shoulders with established professionals exhibiting every month in the gallery. We curate the year with a diverse selection of emerging and established talent, alongside a calendar of events and performances.

ARTMARKET MUSELETTER

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)

Cover : Catriona Robertson

Margarita Frančeska Loze

Residency 2024 Winter Group Show

James Grossman - Margarita Loze - Romi Thornton

18 January - 4 February

James Grossman

For the first show of 2024, we are immensely proud to welcome the Muse’s three brand new Residents: James Grossman,Margarita Franceska Loze, and Romi Thornton. At the core of our work is the residency programme, six months of subsidised space with the chance to interact with gallery clientele, learn from professional technicians, and curators and earn from invigilating shows. Our residents will be setting up their studios and collaborating on a group show, kicking off our residency program in January, leading to a final exhibition in June. We urge you to visit the exhibition and support these emerging artists as they transition to independent careers beyond graduation.

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.

Margarita Frančeska Loze

Margarita Frančeska Loze 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 and in year 2022, she was selected for the Venice Biennale Fellowship programme. The work of Margarita is a celebration of the poetics of the ordinary. Her recent work combines textile production with the use of found objects. By using a variety of mediums, such as hand-drawn stop motion, writing, embroidery and sculpture, she attempts to capture the transient nature of life and create a tangible connection to universal and personal memories. Through her experimental narrative approach, Margarita makes a dreamlike ontology, to capture the nuances of spatial, temporal and poetic navigation.

Romi Thornton

As a multimedia artist, Romi investigates the profound impact consumerism has on our sense of self. Through installation, she navigates the false promises and facades maintained by corporations. Her practice aims 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. One integral aspect of her work is the spurious brand Infinitech, founded by the unprincipled CEO Rosemary Barbara Thompson. The narratives embody the ergonomically alluring, yet illusory promises tech companies offer us. The spaces she creates 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 experience with customer service - simulations are revealed, and pretences are broken.

‘I was honoured to work with these artists in India, a meeting of minds to collaborate on a cross cultural programme. A project amalgam of academia and vocational arts almost a decade ago; in the Gujarati states of India amidst the echelons of academia and cross-cultural exchange. Our like minds gravitated, as a small team of professional artists working in practice and promotion, education and outreach.

We found mutual interests in celebrating the power of visual language and the ubiquity of arts as means to connect and galvanise local and international communities. We became a transient, albeit project based, community bridging the cultural, sociopolitical and geographical divides. A living testament to the commissioning brief of the programme we ran and philosophy that supported. These artists and teachers operated on a frequency that was familiar to me and my team. Their ideas and sensibilities were accessible and resonant of our work in the U.K., even though we had never met, even though they came from thousands of miles away. — ubiquity was evident.

With whiffs of a collective consciousness hanging in the air, we delivered several programmes and began a relationship that led us here. Back home to the UK, to where it all began, deep in the market streets of West London, Portobello and Colville. These shows are the product of almost a decade of inspiration, faith, trust and respect. It is a refreshing reminder of connectivity through the arts and the power of visual language that brought us together.

With thanks to Veer Narmad South Gujarat University in 2016 - 2019. Krushnapriya, Naishadh, Rajarshi, Bhrigu and Preksha and the rest of their team. It is a great pleasure to be able to support these international artists in the UK.’

Damian Rayne Director The Muse Gallery

Naishadh Jani - Urban Narratives

20 February - 1 March

Being an Art Historian, I look at things through an historical lense. This series of my work discusses Urban Narratives and how objects change the meaning of our lives.

My perception of the urban state is reflected through objects, or what I see as ‘urban interventions’.

This concept of ‘urban’ is a rejection of tradition to me, dis-harmony, an unnatural hierarchy, where conventional objects are simply left juxtaposed to their environment.

As urbanisation invades our existence, so do our aesthetics change.

By using banana paper fibre, water colour washes within an urban aesthetic, I look to create a modern miniature, a microcosmic paradox of craft and technique to contextualise the status quo.

Krushnapriya Smart Woven Odyssey

6-18 February

Krushnapriya Smart, an artist and educator well-versed in Art History and Aesthetics, stands out through captivating exhibitions and engaging workshops. Her passion encompasses teaching and curating, blending various art forms and cultural stories together.

Her “Woven Odyssey” is an immersive exhibition that delves deep into the profound and intimate journey of motherhood. Through evocative and heartfelt artistic expressions, she navigates the multifaceted experiences, emotions, and transformations that encapsulate the miraculous journey of bringing new life into the world.

Her artworks intricately weave together raw and personal moments encountered during the pivotal nine-month odyssey of pregnancy and beyond. Each piece serves as a window into the artist’s soul, capturing the intricate tapestry of emotions, physical changes, and the spiritual connection that defines the essence of motherhood.

The exhibition unveils a series of captivating artworks that portray Krushnapriya’s first-hand experiences during pregnancy.Vividly depicted are the warming moments of discovering the heartbeat, feeling the initial movements, and the overwhelming rush of emotions accompanying this miraculous period. These artworks serve as a testament to the unique and incomparable bond between a mother and her child.

One of the exhibition’s highlights is the “Journey from Dot to Marks,” a striking portrayal that illustrates the physical and emotional metamorphosis undergone during and after childbirth. This series beautifully contains the nuances of joy and pain conveyed through symbolic representation in the artworks—each telling a profound story of maternal love.

The exhibition also delves into the uncharted territory of the postpartum period, shedding light on the rollercoaster of emotions, the delicate balance between selfcare and nurturing a new-born, and the beautifully chaotic journey that defines early motherhood. The artworks here mirror her personal journey of adapting to a new routine while navigating through a whirlwind of emotions.

Moreover, she ingeniously explores the universal emotions experienced by everyone through a series of alluring cloud formations that embody love, anger, neutrality, worry, and joy—a testament to the shared emotional spectrum that unites us all.

She also portrays a touching depiction of her daughter, Kairavini, capturing the tender moments of her first attempts at communication. Those undiscovered words and letters are represented through vibrant and organic shapes. In a continuation of that artwork lies the beauty of the evolving mother-child relationship, especially in the gradual discovery of language and the heartfelt joy of being called ‘Ma,’ ‘Mumma,’ or ‘Mummy,’ presented through mesmerizing sound waves.

“Woven Odyssey” is not just an exhibition but a profound and evocative narrative that invites visitors to dive into a deeply personal and emotional voyage—a celebration of the sacred and extraordinary bond between a mother and her child, immortalized through the artist’s unparalleled creative expression using lines, dots, abstract shapes, and a variety of thread colours.

- Mudita Choudhary

@krushnapriyasmart

Ann Churchill

Trip the Light

Ann Churchill - Coral Churchill - Fearon Gold - Gosia Łapsa-Malawska

- Caroline Mackenzie - Damian Rayne

7 - 24 March 2024

This is an exhibition of dreamlands and inner worlds, of representation, symbolism and abstraction. Works by six artists share their subjective and fantastical experiences of worlds as they visualise them. The nature of the triptych form allows multiple perspectives to exist simultaneously in one moment. This trinity shapes the works in the exhibition along with a reference to a much evolved but often quoted line from John Milton’s (1608-1674), L’Allegro (1645) “Com, and trip it as ye go, On the light fantastick toe.” To trip the light here is taken as to dance lightly through the world. In the exhibition, the relationship of image and form to sound, rhythm and movement is used as a playful foil to consider the borderlands of external to internal, the place where the body encounters it’s environment and the porousness of this threshold. A lightness of touch, or approach, is achieved by each of the artists as they seek out and celebrate the possibilities of creativity to communicate the invisible or the spiritual.

Coral Churchill

“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.1

Annemarie Dzendrowskyj Shadows of Perception

28 March - 21 April 2024

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.

Indiscernable zones and spaces have been at the heart of Dzendrowskyj's life experiences which act as a catalyst for her work. What is seen underwater is affected by interferencemovement, light, weather conditions and in this sense, nothing appears clearly defined. This is reflected in her work which presents the emergence and dissolution of forms and settings, employing a process of creation and erasure, concealing and revealing. Exploring the tension between figuration and abstraction, inviting the viewer to challenge their perception of time, place and space. She allows for empirical perception, remembrance and imagination to merge to evoke a kind of netherworld that conflates time, place vision, and memory, a 'space between'.

A space between that offers a moment for unencumbered thinking in a world invaded by technology, social media and hyper-reality. Dzendrowskyj sees this space, not in terms of a void, but as signifying a form of refuge from the stresses of 21 Century cyber-life. A space, to allow for an alternative option for creativity of the human mind and spirit offering room for contemplation and allowing the viewer to take a moment to breathe, engage with, and respond with their own opinions, experiences and emotions.

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.'2 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.

Oliver Dorrell

Oliver Dorrell Walking After Bruegel: Paintings from Mountain Huts

25 April - 19 May

Oliver Dorrell’s paintings are made on long walks. On these walks, he carries sized silk, a collapsible stretcher frame, gum arabic and dry pigment so he can set up temporary studios in mountain huts, shelters, barns or on picnic benches. Often, the walks link two cities across a wilderness and are prompted by art history or literature. For example, in October and November 2022, he walked across the Alps from Milan to Munich. It was a walk inspired by the Alpine journey Bruegel made in 1554.

Having set up a temporary studio, his intention might be to paint something he’d seen or felt along the way; like the lonely feeling of being watched by a chamois; or the futuristic elegance of a flyover plugging into a mountain side tunnel; or an absent glacier; or the sensation of rain from under an umbrella. The intention, however, has to compete with the restrictions caused by weather — this could be the cold, or a blizzard forecast — and the exertion of walking through the landscapes, and the action of folding, carrying and re-stretching the silk support, as well as the awkwardness of making watercolours from dry pigment and silk. These antagonistic things resolve into spontaneous paintings, creased and worn by their travels, and which, framed behind glass after his walk, become fragile artifacts to the physical, more primordial way of understanding our modern world through traveling on foot.

Jean Cazals - Man of colours

23 May - 9 June

Jean Cazals is a French London based photographer living in Notting Hill for many years. He was raised in Geneva before coming to London . Jean graduated at the London College of Printing now call LCC with a BA in Visual Communication. His career was a love affair between portraiture, food and travel. Jean work across editorial, publishing (shot over 80 books), corporate and especially in hospitality .

Jean’s work primarily revolves around location based photography, characterised by a distinctive graphic approach and a keen sense of colour and space. His ability to perceive beyond the ordinary has garnered both praise and awards across his career. Jean’s approach to composition and photography is deeply rooted in concept and idea creation.

‘I saw Jama Elmi in the streets of Portobello numerous time with all his rainbow colours suits and finally approach him early 2023 to propose him to do some portraits, that he accepted straight away. In this series of portraits of Somalian born Jama Elmi, the concept was to bring forward Jama’s numerous flamboyant colours suits that he is wearing everyday for the pleasure of the public in the street and his work. I wanted to bring some quirkiness to the portraits in bringing objects or gestures. It’s all very graphic to keep the impact . The pairing of the portraits in contrast with tags and graffitis wall images shot carefully selected across London are matching the mood tones of Jama’s portraits.’

End of Residency 2024 Group Show

James Grossman - Margarita Loze - Romi Thornton

13 June - 7 July

The Muse Residency 2025 Competition

18 July - 11 August

15 - 23 August

Lee Harris - Alchemy

Sickboy - solo show

Portobello Film Festival

28 August - 22 September

Sickboy is a leading artist to emerge from Bristol’s infamous graffiti scene, Sickboy’s humorous works have cemented his place in the upper echelons of the British street art movement.

He is one of the first UK artists to use a logo in place of a tag, and his red and yellow street logo known as “The Temple” and his Save the Youth slogan can be seen on walls and wheelie bins worldwide.

Sickboy has built up one of the largest bodies of street art works in UK history, which has led to him being tipped by the leading financial press as one of the movement’s most bankable artists.

His major London solo show in 2008 and audacious stunts – including the caged heart installation dropped outside the Tate Modern last year – have landed him global recognition.

Sickboy’s work has featured in countless worldwide Graffiti books and documentary films including Banksy’s oscar-nominated exit through the gift shop, and in global and national TV, newspapers and magazines including BBC London news, the Financial Times, The Independent, I-D and many more.

Photo credit: Liam Keown

26 September - 20 October

Catriona Robertson - solo show

Lauren Goldie & Eimhim Moran

24 October - 17 November

Prototyping’

In 2022 the global space economy increased by 8%. The industry addresses issues including overpopulation, existential threats and climate change. Lauren Goldie returns to The Muse Gallery as a former artist in residence and current PhD researcher at Central Saint Martins. She explores asteroid mining, questioning its purpose to alleviate environmental impacts caused by resource extraction on Earth.Through sculpture and printmaking, Lauren examines the potential ramifications of asteroid mining practices, including disturbances to orbital patterns, resource ownership and debris.