EXHIBITIONS
CURRENT
THE MINIATURES CHALLENGE
13th November - 1st December 2024
On 17th September, we launched The Miniatures Challenge. We received nearly 600 entries, which were judged by Zarina of The White Pube, Gareth Cadwalleder and Anne Ryan, who whittled them down to 60.
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“It was all very well to say "Drink me," but the wise little Alice was not going to do that in a hurry.”
But Alice did drink, and was ‘telescoped’, giving her access to Wonderland.
People have always found miniatures fascinating; from the Mughal period in India, to the ‘art of limning‘ in Mediaeval Europe, when illuminated manuscripts were painted on vellum. When the familiar is made small, it becomes alien, compelling - an entry to Wonderland.
Miniatures were the photographs of their day. You can imagine how captivated people were by perfectly rendered images of loved ones they could fish from their pockets. The ubiquity of photographs devalued that wonder. We can now fish out tiny pictorial versions of everything from the Taj Mahal to the Grand Canyon from our pockets, and don’t think twice about it.
Yet, confronted with handmade miniature painting or sculpture, we are still stopped in our tracks. We lean in. They make us pause, consider, look more closely, shift the gaze to the intimate, the delicate, and the meticulously crafted. They allow us to see a familiar thing anew. They are an invitation to Wonderland.
All art condenses truth into the material. It makes the mysterious feel like something that can be known, possessed even.
“And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.” (Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five.)
In the miniatures realm the answer is: it is 5 inches wide and 5 inches deep, and because it can be held in the palm of your hand, you can keep it all. You can take it with you like a talisman - a sacred object that's trapped a slither of magic.
But because of that, because miniatures are also a thing that came from Wonderland, their mystery remains beyond our grasp. It’s that paradox - that miniaturisation makes things simultaneously both more and less knowable - that makes them a thing of endless fascination.
Pushka, November 2024
WORLD'S STILL ON A WIRE
Curated by Scott McCracken
26th September – 6th October 2024
Worlds Still on a Wire is a continuation of and a return to a previous exhibition titled Worlds on a Wire in 2022. The title is a variation on Rainer Werner Fassbender’s 1973 television serial World on a Wire (Welt am Draht), itself an adaptation of Daniel F. Galouye’s novel Simulacron-3. A world on a wire is a precarious situation. The image of some mass entity hanging there, swinging and spinning suspended only by a single wire, acts as a metaphor for the way artists engage with making.
Being aboard a boat feels precarious in its own way; there is the potential to move off in any direction, but also of slowly sinking, of how comfortable and known it feels to be on firm ground.
Art relies on a sort of accepted artificiality. What we see is not really what we see – we are looking at a construction. But it is not simply about world-building, it is also about a world-unbuilding. A taking apart and a reassembling where parts don’t fit so neatly together, where the absurd and the quotidian, the diurnal and the nocturnal, the telescopic and the microscopic, can sit together in a kind of unifying tension. An unworlding. Paintings and sculptures have their own inherent ‘supernaturality’. A process of transformation happens in the making of the work. It never fully becomes the thing it claims or attempts to picture or show. Nor does it simply remain as material and matter. Something else is happening. A continual becoming.
The protagonist in Philip K Dick’s novel Time Out of Joint, Ragle Gumm, has a strange experience when he misremembers the light cord in his own bathroom:
“Why did I remember a light cord? he asked himself. A specific cord, hanging a specific distance down, at a specific place. I wasn’t groping around randomly. As I would in a strange bathroom. I was hunting for a light cord I had pulled many times.”
The light cord described above is itself a wire - perhaps not too dissimilar to the wires hanging in the gallery that are attached to the works - serves as a reminder of the difference between illumination and darkness, between an inside and an outside. Or more accurately between an inside and another inside.
“Artworks are insides,” Phil Ford.
SKEUOMORPH
For 'Skeuomorph' Canal Boat Contemporary headed to dry land, temporarily mooring in the Greatorex Street Gallery in Whitechapel, in order to show larger works.
Curated by Pushka
26th June - 2nd July
SKEUOMORPH - a derivative object that takes design queues from an earlier design. In a painting context this means works making specific nods to art history and the associated values of that time.
THE CANAL BOAT ART FAIR
In October 2023 six artists living aboard canal boats put on a show on their boats on the Regents Canal by Broadway Market.
Each artist curated their boat around the theme 'Moored together'.
Over the weekend we had over 300 visitors, and the gallery was born.