The Museletter - June 2023

MUSELETTER

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

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)

Opening hours: Thursday/Friday /Saturday/Sunday 12-6pm

Please check our website for up to date information

THE MUSE RESIDENCY COMPETITION 2023

Since 2004 The Muse / Gallery & Studio has supported a residency program, offering recent graduates subsidised studio space, a gallery to show and the means to cultivate both client and industry connections. Each year we host a group competition show, awarding the residency positions to a few successful artists; we appeal to all disciplines, with a BA minimum qualification from the previous two years. Artwork is then reviewed by our panel of esteemed industry professionals, curators and collectors, with an emphasis on professionalism from the onset.

For applications, we require: a short statement (no more than 400 words), a CV and 10-15 images as JPEGs. All work is to be submitted as a linked folder (Dropbox, Google Drive etc.). Although websites are appreciated, simple URL’s will not be accepted as applications.

The deadline for submissions will be 29th June 2023. Selected artists will be informed of the decision on the 6th of July, with final confirmation required by the 12th July.

All applications need to be sent to: info@themuseat269.com

Email subject: [insert name] / Residency Program 2024

To view previous residents, check our website and social media:

Website: www.themuseat269.com

Instagram: @muse_at_269

Facebook : www.facebook.com/TheMuseGallery

ARTIST LED

· Residents will benefit from shared resources and experience, working alongside more established artists throughout the year.

· Intermittently, we also open our doors to community arts projects, musicians, film makers and live performers, to fill the calendar with events from ‘Sound art’ to ‘Counter-culture’ film screenings and associated seminars.

· Our residency program continues to offer a subsidised platform for candidates, along with two group shows during their time with us.

· Our residency is a grace period to continue the momentum of university with less financial liabilities.

· We subsidise space and sales, for arts practices to be the focus without excessive commercial pressure.

· We work to maintain a full programme and experiential insight into independent industry models and begin a dialogue with one of the most vibrant melt pots on planet earth.

· We also offer paid invigilation and experience in event management; all work sold is subject to zero-commission for our residents.

FROM COMPETITION TO RESIDENT

· Based on the work submitted for the group show, our curators will then award three or four artists with a residency from 8th January to the 30th June 2024.

· The residency will begin with a group show in January 2024 and conclude with a second group show in June 2024.

· Further to the residency program, a chosen artist will be awarded a three-week solo show during our 2025 calendar year.

· Although the residency is open to those from all disciplines, we urge applicants working on larger installations to assess the practicality of the working environment by visiting the gallery prior to submissions.

· The Muse / Gallery & Studio will provide studio space, technical support, curating and mentorship for all exhibitions, with further professional development, network and marketing resources available through our extended network of arts professionals.

· We also support final group shows with curation consultancy, technical support, limited materials and catering budgets and marketing resources.

For further information or simply to start a conversation with someone in the know, please contact us at:

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

info@themuseat269.com

or better still, pop by at 269 Portobello Road, London W11 1LR (nearest Tube Ladbroke Grove).

Contributors : Damian Rayne | Gosia Malawska

Front cover: Eleni Maragaki, Four Landscapes, linocut on Japanese paper, 30x60x45

MATTHEW DARDART

Residency 2023 Group Show

22 June - 9 July 2023

Matthew Dardart

Lauren Goldie

Khrystyna Khmil

Eleni Maragaki

LAUREN GOLDIE

Untitled, 1.5x1.5m, plaster and textile ink

Repurposed (2023) graphite drawing, sand, resin, 84 x 119cm

KHRYSTYNA KHMIL

I am grateful to have had this opportunity to be a resident of Muse for six months. It’s hard to believe that four months have passed since then, but this is one of the best things that has happened to me in the last year. A safe relaxed and liberated environment.

This residency has provided me with interesting interactions between visitors, alongside artists creating with me during the residency and artists who present their work in the gallery. They have organised interesting group trips to other galleries. It was especially interesting to take a trip on an old bus to artist workshops and underground galleries.

The most valuable aspect for me is the opportunity to work on my practice together with my two sons. The openness of artists during dialogue and collaboration, creating small joint practices.

Dialogue with colleagues and visitors during the process of creating a picture and before its completion was interesting and new for me. The first work I produced at the Muse gallery was a collaboration with Eleni Maragaki, she created an impression of a landscape and I complimented them with images of a person who freely, easily and naturally interacted with the landscapes.

The second work is a painting based on a planned yellow-blue sketch about freedom, on a 100 x 150cm sheet. In the process of creating this picture, I relied on my intuition and tried to convey the definition of freedom through images. I worked only with ultramarine and it completely absorbed me.

I felt this process was a state of freedom. However, since I had a planned sketch, I decided to give in to logic and follow it. I added a large female silhouette and yellow colour to the vibrating energy that surrounded the silhouette.

At this stage, I stopped because the work became difficult for me and not as easy as I thought. I realised that I had managed to convey the state of freedom of Ukraine, which is now actively fighting for independence and not the state of human freedom as I wanted from the very beginning. This is why I started working on the third canvas and completely devoted myself to the experimentation and to my own intuition.

ELENI MARAGAKI

Four Landscapes, linocut on Japanese paper, 30x60x45

SCARS

1 – 18 June

Joanna Ciechanowska

Caroline Gregory

Gosia Łapsa-Malawska

Ania Sabet

Danuta Sołowiej

Rory Watson

Natalia Zagórska - Thomas

Joanna Ciechanowska

‘Broken Toys, Small Life Gone’.

Warsaw, a long time ago. Imagine, a little girl playing with her cousins. A man walks into the room to help them with their game and rolls up his sleeves. She sees a strange number on his arm… ‘What’s that?’ she asks. ‘Nothing..’ the sleeve comes down. Her cousin whispers; ‘He got it in the camp…’ Oh, the camp...She dreams of a fire, baking potatoes, the forrest, the fun, the scouts, games, the summer camp… So, she tattoos all her dolls. Her mother throws them out. She is left with one doll she couldn’t tattoo, the black one. Years later, at the funeral of a man with a tattoo who was family member, she learns that he was one of the children dr.Mengele experimented on, in Auschwitz. His twin brother died in the camp. He survived with one lung. ‘This pastel was created when my daughter was diagnosed with a genetic illness SMA1 and died at the age of 2,5.

‘Offering’.

The trauma never leaves you, one lives in a shadow. Sometimes I wonder what I could offer to God, if I had a choice, to save a child’s life.

Remembering the film ‘Sophie’s Choice’ and CS Lewis ‘A grief observed’.

Caroline Gregory

‘Flesh Blood Felt and lycra’

Sensing through skin, history swathes, whispers, feels, a longing from inside, clothed in trauma, reaching, stretching, hanging and trailing and dragging through generations.

Natalia Zagorska - Thomas

A scene from the movie Shirley Valentine: a handsome Greek fisherman is undressing Shirley as the waves rock his boat gently to and fro. Removing her dress he says something like ”a woman should never be ashamed of her scars and stretch marks, they are beautiful, they say that she has really lived, that she has survived…” Shirley looks directly at the camera: “Don’t men talk a lot of crap?!”

Well, that’s as it may be but scars are beautiful. They are a form of cartography, a detailed, living map of a uniquely personal journey drawn directly onto the skin.

Rory Watson

Rory Watson’s paintings operate in the space between abstraction and figuration. Behind a curtain of colour-blindness, faces are deconstructed, unmasking the figure underneath. As Order meets chaos, paint battles and blends over the canvas, attempting to portray the emotional expression under the skin.

Danuta Sołowiej

Scars bear the traces of interventions, for better or worse. Some are inflicted, others self-imposed. We can choose to show them off or to camouflage. They can be seen as a marker of time but they are not constant. Attempts at capturing these transformative moments lie behind my work in this exhibition.

Ania Sabet

Memory is flickering.

It was a dream with glistening beaches, multicolour seas and weird creatures. until we were woken up by the sound of a single gun shot. Black volume, war, chaos, tear gas, and death filled the air that then froze and stayed. The air we breathed replaced sense with non-sense….and the more I tried to untangle myself the more lost I was.

I run in all directions, so many directions…but the only space I could find to hide were the clouds of my mind….no one could imprison me there…so I stayed.

They said Art is not in this new nonsensicalness. At least the art that bites the absurd shape of their reality.

Perhaps beyond the black veils there is another universe. I searched, climbed, tumbled and nearly drowned to get there.

Remember! Art is not…is not….not…..no

But medicine might be if only as a way to heal myself. Many years went by until I picked up a brush and realised Art is.

In all its contours, configurations and angels….In all its is and is nots Art is.

Everything finally made sense.

I was free again.

Gosia Łapsa-Malawska

Perfect imperfections. Finding beauty in fractures life bring us. Mentally and physically… we must celebrate the scars of life, embrace our imperfections, and observe the beauty that they reveal by their own. Scars … silence and manifest. Marking painful incident in a beautiful way. Drawing a story of your life.

“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”

Ernest Hemingway ‘A farewell to Arms’

www.themuseat269.com