Salon Contemporary is offering emerging, innovative and passionate artists out there a chance to display their work in the creative hub of Notting Hill!‘Artist of the Week’ is a new and exciting competition, with the opportunity for one selected artist each week to have their work featured on our website in the run up to our AoW Christmas Exhibition. The winning candidate will then be offered a residency in London’s West End!We’re calling on artists from all fields including the visual arts, performance, dance, film, theatre, animation and music!
VIEW THEIR WORKS, VOTE FOR YOUR FAVOURITE AND COME SEE THE SPECTACULAR EXHIBITION, OPENING DECEMBER 1ST!!!
Artist of The Week love the lucid images created by Irish visual artist, Aoife O'Donnell. Art & science collide in her Micro Portraits.
Removed from their usual context of the laboratory, these new genetic portraits seek to interrupt the traditional notion of the family portrait in photography prompting the viewer to consider the transformations and changes occurring inside the body on a cellular level,and questions when the alternative portrait produced by scientific imaging moves from the generic to the personal. The photographer provides a privileged opportunity for the viewer to get up close and personal with elements of the body which may previously have eluded recognition.
Based in New York City and specializing in photomicrography, O'Donnell completed a B.A. in photography at the Dublin Institute of Technology and has previously studied at Columbia College Chicago during 2008. Upon graduating she was awarded the Dublin Institute of Technology Medal for exceptional performance. Having exhibited her current body of work entitled Micro Portraits at the Gallery of Photography, she was selected to exhibit at the Photo Ireland Festival and at RUA RED's summer exhibition 2010. Her work has also been exhibited at Filmbase, The Joinery, The Back Loft, The Homeless Gallery and The Complex. It has been reviewed in the Irish Arts Review autumn edition 2010. O'Donnell has contributed to various companies including Merc London, Red Stripe UK and Starchild Chicago. She currently divides her time working at Griffin Editions, The International Center of Photography and Rick Wester Fine Art. Micro Portraits will be exhibited at Raandesk Gallery, New York City in October 2011.
"Most philosophy involving the human body has dealt with gender as one of its key concepts, from Freudian to Lacanian theories concerning Dualism and binary oppositions women have always been placed second to man, identified as inferior and ‘other’, women’s existence has been placed at the bottom of a hierarchical structure predominantly created by man. What my practice involves is challenging these theories, creating paintings which attempt to tackle issues relating to the representation of women."
Fine Artist from Loughborough School of Fine Art, Rashmi Patel has a strong sense of her practice. The content appears in a true and considered light through lively distinctive paintings.
Hurley explores the perception of Art and the identity of the Artist through Present History and Contemporary Society. She intends to use text as the subject of her work over a number of years of study and exploration. The texts are chosen from Artists throughout history and contemporary art and looked at as objects, like a still life set up, a figure or a landscape. In an attempt to reproduce a new form from the past art events, in the presence of the audience without analysis or dilution.
Recently completing an MA in Art & Space, Iranian born Sara Hurley has exhibited at the Wooloo.org One of All exhibition last year through a virtual installation and we look forward to seeing what she comes up with next!
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Technicolour characters stumble through their very existence, confused and bemused. Outsized limbs are dragged Neanderthal like behind pin headed gooks. Lost souls clumsily grip teddy bears. Others teeter in Day-Glo trainers whilst stubbornly trying to fit in, to knock on doors, to be accepted. Artist of The Week implores this distinctive and passion driven artist, Craig Hudson.
Pursuing his artistic career after years of retail employment, Suffolk born artist, Craig Hudson, has exhibited extensively in Ipswich where he studies.
A vibrant communication through wax and bronze - Hudson employs a love of comics, tattoos, and film, a fascination with disease and mutilation, the love of my family and friends, and interrogation to the process’s of making things.
Hudson explains that it is his relentless brutal honesty which helps evolve his figurative language, which can be taken as a metaphor, for the dysfunction of our contemporary society. Like a Nike advertisement sucked from the television screen and pumped out as sculptural aesthetic tropical fruit juice, the relationship with today could not be more appealing.
Interview:
Who most influenced your decision to become an artist and at what age?
I think I was probably at the age of 3 or 4. My granddad was a draftsman and had always influenced with drawing. He would sit down with me and show me how to draw houses etc, so I suppose it developed from there.
What's your most prized possession you would not share with anyone?
That's easy, even though it probably cant be called a possession. My daughter.
What's your favourite Website?
The only web site that I visit regularly is wrestlinginc.com, sounds a bit strange for an artist doesn't it?
What's your least favourite word?
That would have to be semiotics, but not for the word itself but what the word entails.
What is the most important invention or innovation that has happened during your life-time?
That has to be my iPhone 4.
What three things you regret not learning to do?
I like to think that I have no regrets and live for today.
What period in art most influences your work?
I think that the Bronze Age has been the most influential for me to arrive at this destination.
Nicolas Willam Hughes deals with the contemporary relationship between man and nature and contemporary anthropology. Intrigued by the exponential growth of population and the ongoing shift to urban environments he explores notions of our changing society and self developed post-culture fictions using photography, video, installation, performance and participatory projects..
Hughes believes that within the Global mindset we are all trying to cling onto our own sense of cultural heritage, be this from the country/city or province we grew up in, our religious views, our class values, our historical roots or stories that we pick up on the way. Often this work uses humor to emphasize Hughes' view of the importance of the approachability of contemporary art. This approach often proves to create works that can be interesting and engaging to everybody and not only the creative and academic.
Hughes usually begins the process of his practice with personal reactions to the environment around him leading him to academic, non-academic and artistic research usually worked on in a playful manner. Often Hughes undertakes participatory-based research projects to inform and inspire his personal practice, which leads to the ultimate creation of work. His key interest is in the immediacy of lens based media, although his practice has diversified to a vast amount of different mediums.
Conversations with Birds Participatory Project, 2010, Video, HD 1080p, 8mins
All birds like humans have regional dialect. In fact birds regional dialect is more defined than our own, to the point that birds from different areas of the same country can not understand each other.
This project aims to query the relationship between mans understanding of birds utterances, but also the crossing of regional dialects.
4 of the most common European birds were chosen as examples and individuals were shown an illustration of each bird and asked to utter the sound of each bird as they understand it.
One word to describe you?
Absurd
Your favourite place to visit?
the beaches and woods of South Gower, South Wales.
What's it like talking to birds?
Depends which bird,
Robins are overtly territorial so playing robin song makes them agitated, they puff them selfs up ready for a fight nothing like the cute bird that adorn our christmas cards.
Starlings are hard because they are mimics so simply recording them and playing their song back does not always work.
JackDaws are great because they have such a vast array of utterances their particularly chatty towards the end of the day.
sometimes no birds want to chat I suppose much like bird watching its a waiting game,
Have you got any exhibitions on the cards?
I am awaiting feedback from a few galleries and I have a show coming up next month with 8week Gallery in Bristol.
What makes your practice unique?
To be honest in a world of 7billion people it is hard to be unique, But I guess the mixture of both academic and non academic research and the notion of absurdity that is prevalent in my work is what makes it unique.
Top three galleries?
Mission Gallery, Swansea
Arlofini, Bristol
Debut Contemporary, Notting Hill, London
Do you have advice for emerging artists like yourself?
If you love what you do it should be the driving force behind your practice. Do not be afraid to be wrong and never accept the banal.
A descendant of William Hogarth, Sally's work often engages with the exchanges, moral values and private spheres of the virtual internet society. Sally Hogarth is a Manx born artist who studied Fine Art and Art History at Goldsmiths College. In recent years she has exhibited for curators of the South London Gallery, Bob and Roberta Smith and Deptford X Art Festival . She has also received exhibition funding from Ideas Tap, The Arts Council and The John Nicholson Foundation. Last year, out of 400 applicants she received a six month ‘Big Idea Award’ selected by Kevin Spacey. In 2008 she was awarded a sculpture commission by BAA for the newly opened Heathrow Terminal Five. In 2009-2010 she completed a full year artist residency funded by the Isle of Man Arts Council culminating in an exhibition at the Sayle Gallery. She has also created a video installation at Cregneash Village in association with Manx National Heritage. She is currently taking postgraduate studies at Central Saint Martins in Fine Art. In all, her work aims to allow one to take a fresh look at the cultural landscape we live in, its values and the aspirations it presents to us.
Describe Sally Hogarth in one word?
Bolvane
Your favourite place to visit?
The Isle of Man. While I only go back occasionally now, the tranquillity, cultural history and solace you can find compares to nowhere else. I’m also reminded of a folk song we used to sing at school – ‘ And the Laxey Wheel keeps turning, turning, turning/ In Lady Isabella's memory / And while the water flows / The Laxey Wheel still goes/ And the Laxey river runs down to the sea’. I’d like to think of the lines ‘while the water flows the Laxey wheel still goes’ as a constant – wherever you are, and whatever you’re doing, certain things will stay the same.
Where did your internet fascination stem from?
It stems from an idea of the internet being simultaneously public and private.
Who do you love to hate in the art world?
Arts managers who use interns as free labour.
What is your signature identity?
My assigned identity is a Gallerina.
Top three artists?
Glen Edwards, Mark McGowan and Kirsty Buchanan
If you were going to watch a film tonight what would you put on?
Born in Athens, Greece in 1984, Anna studied Photography, Video and New Technologies in Athens and obtained her MA in Queer Studies in Arts & culture from Birmingham City University in 2010. Her work mainly deals with the relation between private / public, identities and the ways the interactions between time and space form them. Her practice spans from photography to interactive installations and she often uses ready-mades. Her work “Balloons” is an interactive game on the assigned/imposed identities of the newly-born, while “Lines” deals with notions of “home”, queer space and time and the formation of the inhabitants’ identities. Her video work “Doll” (http://annatee.co.uk/doll.html) is a comment on the performativity of femininity and the installation “Queering Blyton” investigates the different readings of each viewer.
We love the playful text and lust for exploration in these vibrant series. Visit: www.annatee.co.uk
