Stanley Picker Gallery

The Last Man: Chapter 1 Improvement was a mass participatory experiment that saw students, staff and others to create new objects for The Last Man that focused on progression and improvement in contemporary product design.

In December 2013, Gallery visitors were invited to borrow an object from The Last Mans collection, make an improvement to it, of whatever kind, and return it the following day. The object was then available to be chosen by another participant, whose improvement could alter previous work. Exactly what constitutes improvement was the fundamental question at play. Individual contributions are anonymous, voluntary and impermanent, but each was documented.

A selection of objects have been published above  as a visual log of The Last Mans solitary yet hopeful acts of labour and imagination.

The ongoing project provides a speculative vantage point to consider issues relating to product design and consumerism, manifested through a series of experiments that call on the views, tastes and skills of multiple participants to produce objects that represent the work of The Last Man.

With thanks to all those who participated anonymously on behalf of the Last Man.

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In Goo Floor Crawl (one of the three film-works from ten Bhomer’s Material Compulsion Series, 2012) the high-heeled woman is a complex construct, one designed for, and ultimately sanctioned to, the man-made environment. When placed in alternative settings (through the narrative of a film, for example) or when forced to walk through unique substrates, a woman in heels loses her equilibrium (both physically and culturally) and begins to slip, trip, sink or tumble, thereby transforming her perceived identity.

The Material Compulsion Series featured in A Measurable Factor Sets the Conditions of its Operation, Marloes ten Bhömer’s 2013 Stanley Picker Fellowship exhibition of investigative pieces, processes, tests and trials for a new footwear collection informed by engineering principles.

In Ian Whittlesea’s short film The Demonstration of Gentleness, identical twins Helen and Kathryn Cartwright are seen demonstrating the Ju-no-Kata, a choreographed pattern of judo movement. Commissioned by Stanley Picker Gallery for No Competition! in 2012, the film references artist and judo devotee Yves Klein’s Les Fondements du Judo (The Foundations of Judo), published in 1954 and translated into English by Whittlesea himself in 2009.

Ian Whittlesea’s work is often concerned with words, and with the lives and work of other artists and writers. It assumes many forms: from painstaking text paintings that take years to make, to ephemeral posters and transient projections. In 2003 he began to learn judo and translated Yves Klein’s 1954 book Les Fondements du Judo into English. This generated a series of related events and ephemera, including recreations of Klein’s Judo Académie de Paris at Tate Modern (2009) and Cokkie Snoei Gallery, Rotterdam (2009). He has exhibited throughout the UK and internationally, including at Payne Shurvell Gallery, London (2011), The Narrows, Melbourne (2010) and The Chelsea Space, London (2009), and is represented by Marlborough Contemporary, London.

The Demonstration of Gentleness was filmed at Croydon Dojo with the support of the British Judo Association, and with a crew including Kingston University film-making students Yoyo Zhao Siyu, Henry Gray and Ella Marshall Dutt. The film was premiered at the Studio Cinema BFI Southbank in collaboration with Marlborough Contemporary. Please note: It is intended by the artist that the piece be viewed online, as it appears, in standard Vimeo format and not enlarged to full-screen.

A further Stanley Picker Gallery commission, Mazdaznan Health & Breath Culture by Ian Whittlesea consists of a publication produced with Open Editions, London and associated online gallery.

Commissioned by Stanley Picker Gallery for No Competition!, Ian Whittelsea’s Mazdaznan Health & Breath Culture relates to the exercises that Swiss artist and teacher Johannes Itten taught his students at the Bauhaus. Itten was a devout Mazdaznan and derived these exercises from the book Mazdaznan Health & Breath Culture by Dr. Otoman Zar-Adusht Ha’nish. Whittlesea has produced an illustrated and annotated edition of this book, published in collaboration with Open Editions, London, together with an online gallery depicting Kingston University Art & Design Foundation Course students performing the original Mazdaznan exercises.

Ian Whittlesea’s work is often concerned with words, and with the lives and work of other artists and writers. It assumes many forms: from painstaking text paintings that take years to make, to ephemeral posters and transient projections. In 2003 he began to learn judo and translated Yves Klein’s 1954 book Les Fondements du Judo into English. This generated a series of related events and ephemera, including recreations of Klein’s Judo Académie de Paris at Tate Modern (2009) and Cokkie Snoei Gallery, Rotterdam (2009). He has exhibited throughout the UK and internationally, including at Payne Shurvell Gallery, London (2011), The Narrows, Melbourne (2010) and The Chelsea Space, London (2009), and is represented by Marlborough Contemporary, London.

The book Mazdaznan Health & Breath Culture was launched at the Barbican Centre as part of the Bauhaus by Day/Bauhaus by Night programme accompanying the exhibition Bauhaus: Art as Life. Many thanks to Christian Breidlid, Ezzidin Alwan and Helen McCathie for their photographic assistance, and Rosie Brunning, Ivan Robirosa, Joey Phinn, Annabelle Syms, Harry Edwards, Amelia Butlin, Olivia Wills, Sophie Flanagan, Robert Hawkins, Ailis Brennan, Hamish Pearch, Jessica Dyer, Ruby Law, Molly Maher, Harvin Alert, Sophie Ray and Nettel Grellier who all took part in the workshop to practice Mazdaznan exercises.

In Andy Holden’s Chewy Cosmos (Panels to the Walls of Heaven) the splodges and smears of make-up, cut out from women’s magazines, are stop-animated to produce a hypnotically flickering display. Made from one year’s cuttings of images extracted from make-up advertising and editorial features, the work was animated entirely by hand using a flat-bed scanner and sound-tracked by Holden’s band The Grubby Mitts.

Chewy Cosmos (Panels to the Walls of Heaven) was premiered as part of Holden’s Stanley Picker Fellowship exhibition Laws of Motion in a Cartoon Landscape (Dec 2012-Feb 2013) and broadcast on Channel 4″²s Random Acts during the period of the exhibition. The exhibition presented an elaboration in space of the ideas presented in the lecture of the same name, staged by Holden with curator Tyler Woolcott, that put forward an idea that we can use the laws of physics as they appear in cartoons, to help us devise a possible way of understanding the landscape “after the end of art history…a landscape where it seems like anything might be possible, but not everything is”.

It is with much pride and fondness that we remember the architect Kenneth Wood who passed away in early January 2015. Wood’s work is reassessed in Dr Fiona Fisher’s forthcoming book, Designing the British Post-War Home: Kenneth Wood, 1948-1968, which will be published by Routledge later in 2015.

A Modernist in Suburbia is a short film, directed by Gilly Booth/Hijack written and researched by Fisher, which examines Wood’s wider career and features Stanley Picker’s impeccable late-modernist house in Kingston upon Thames.

The film was publicly premiered at the Stanley Picker Gallery in 2012 as part of The Occupants: Contemporary Perspectives on the Picker House, alongside works by artists Cullinan Richards, Matthew Darbyshire, Andy Holden, Elizabeth Price and Bridget Smith and writer/curator Tom Morton.

A fully illustrated book entitled The Picker House and Collection: A Late 1960s Home for Modern Art and Design (Philip Wilson Publishers 2012), with essays by Jonathan Black, David Falkner, Fiona Fisher, Fran Lloyd, Rebecca Preston and Penny Sparke, is available directly from the Stanley Picker Gallery at the special price of £25.

One + One was a series of staged object-scenarios developed by Daniel Eatock over the course of his 2012 Stanley Picker Fellowship. Eatock prepared an extensive series of proposals for new object-based works that each established a range of formal, practical or conceptual conceits connecting two otherwise independently existing objects. Whilst remaining firmly embedded in his wider hybrid practice, these sculptural object-scenarios originated as part of his initial developmental research for the re-branding of the national television network BBC2.

Ultimately surviving in their chosen documented form and shown both at the Stanley Picker Gallery in 2012 and at www.eatock.com. The playful combinations of the objects employed, their various juxtapositions and the differing durational nature of their new-found pairings (from static to split-second and perpetual motion) generate a set of immediate yet complex interrelationships of form, weight, colour, material, scale, structure, texture, function… by which Eatock attempts to both comprehend and complicate the world around us.

Daniel Eatock’s multiform career has been defined by a series of high-profile commercial design jobs, together with a vast body of self-instigated works that manifest themselves on multiple, often participatory, platforms, including his own website, printed material, exhibitions, and performative actions as part of his day-to-day existence.

One + One works are accompanied by a slideshow of snapshots of found-scenarios taken by Daniel and also received from contributors to his website over the past ten years. The exhibition was co-curated by Daniel Eatock with Gallery Director David Falkner, and informed by a programme of open-meetings with students and staff at the Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture, Kingston University.

Filmed on-location at Kingston University’s Dorich House Museum, Strange Attractor was specially commissioned to accompany the 2009 exhibition Dora Gordine: Artist, Sculptor, Designer, the first major retrospective of Gordine ´s work, that showed concurrently at Kingston Museum and Dorich House.

A piece that records the production of its own soundtrack, Strange Attractor explores Gordine’s former home and studio as a confined site of creativity, whilst reaching towards the larger world beyond it. The title is a term, coined by meteorologist and mathematician Edward. N. Lorenz, used to describe how chaotic dynamical systems combine and predict the effects of turbulence, or attraction, between two unfixed points; providing both a degree of predictability and an openness to ‘spill’ beyond any definable limits.

Mike Marshall was born in 1967, he lives and works in London. His works reveal scenarios and forces that seem to interconnect in ways which can’t always be predicted, and where events are linked to unknown factors that cannot be controlled or precisely defined. Through a combination of observation and staged activity, these new works appear to question the veracity of what we see and hear in the world around us.

See also Mike Marshall No Love, No Hate Stanley Picker Gallery (Feb-Apr 2009).

A Time & A Place was Davies’ first gallery exhibition of works comprising films from the previous ten years, together with a new site-specific piece and a book edition. Presenting the films together within one space focused her personal themes of navigation, narrative and retrospect, the relationship between the individual and the sub/urban landscape, the real and the performed, and her growing interest in how the spectator may come to inhabit the space of representation. Marking moments in time, there were echoes and threads between films; some visible, some lost. The whole 50-minute sequence mapped the development of Davies’s ten-year relationship with the art form.

A TIME AND A PLACE (9min 2004) charts the artist’s impressions of the walked journey from Kingston Station to Knights Park that she has taken regularly over the past nine years, and considers how performance features in the everyday and how people become part of a remembered landscape. Featuring performers from BA Live Arts and BA Fine Art, Faculty of Art, Design & Music.