Edition XXV OCTOBER 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 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 (UK Charity for the arts No. 1662300)
Rob Birch - Collapsing New People
Contributors : Damian Rayne | Gosia Malawska | Eleni Maragaki
Rob Birch - Collapsing New People 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, social 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 notions 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 relationships of meaning from matter within a Cartesian value system and works towards the creation of a likeness based upon sensation, a sensorial likeness.
Residency 2024 We are proud to intruduce you our new group of Residents for 2024
James Grossman James Grossman is a Multidisciplinary Artist, combining his background in Product Design with a profound passion for form and sculpture. Within his works, his artistic practice revolves around an exploration of the interplay between organic forms in the natural and digital realms. Seeking to uncover their hidden connections and shared essence. The formulation of his designs is primarily constructed through simulations and digital craftsmanship allowing him to construct works with meticulous precision, to create works incorporating themes of tactility, growth, and containment. Each piece becomes an embodiment of these concepts, inviting viewers to engage with the works on both a visual and tactile level.
Romi Thornton
As a multimedia artist, Romi Thornton investigates the profound impact consumerism and technology has on our sense of self. Through the installation of absurdist 3D-rendered animation and video, Romi navigates the false promises made and facades maintained by corporations. Due to the performative nature of my work - involving live actors and personas - she explores the expanded role of the exhibition visitor as a quasi-consumer. She is very versatile as she works across text, sculpture, video, performance, and installation. She is often influenced by a space’s form, size, and architecture, and she orchestrates ways to incorporate these into her pieces.
Margarita Frančeska Loze The work of Margarita Frančeska Ieva Loze (b. 1997, Latvia) is an exploration of the subtle beauty of life’s moments and 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 atempts to capture the transient nature of life and create a tangible connection to universal and personal memories. Through her experimental narrative approach, Margarita creates a dreamlike ontology, to capture the nuances of spatial, temporal and poetic navigation.
James Grossman
Romi Thornton
Margarita Frančeska Loze
Emma Elliott - Cry Me a River
2 - 26 November 2023
Emma Elliott - Cry Me a River
‘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 marble sculpture that Elliott carved as a personal challenge after separating from a significant relationship and navigating the rollercoaster of a new one. From this carrara 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 is an associate Member of the Royal Society of Sculptors whose central themes look at the back-and-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 details 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 exhibited widely, including Political Art, U-jazdowski Museum of Contemporary Art, Warsaw, 2021/22, Wander_Land, The Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens, Penzance, 2023, The Summer Exhibition, Royal Society of Sculptors, 2023, The Unlit Path The 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.
Louisa Crispin
30 November - 23 December 2023
www.themuseat269.com