Category: News

Slade Mid-Year Show 2023: ‘Slide a Glance’

Throughout January 2023, ASC Gallery will host the Slade Postgraduate mid-year show. The event offers MA/MFA Painting students in their final year the opportunity to exhibit work ahead of their degree show.

This will be the fourth time that ASC has hosted a mid-year show with the Slade, providing students a space to develop their practice in off-site projects. 

In 2018, the first link between ASC Studios and UCL’s Slade School of Fine Art was established with ‘The Field’. This exhibition featured 22 first-year MA Painting students and was initiated by ex-ASC Studios artist Sarah Tew. This relationship continued in 2019 with ‘Pulling Teeth’, also featuring first-year Fine Art MA students.

Following the Covid-19 pandemic, this link was reestablished in 2022 with an adjusted focus on final-year students across the mixed MA/MFA Fine Art in ‘Why Don’t You Dance?’. This year, we are delighted to again welcome 18 final-year Slade students to ASC with their exhibition, ‘Slide a Glance’.

Darren O’Brien, Exhibitions Director at ASC, says:

“Since 2018, ASC has been happy to host the Slade MA Painting students in ASC Gallery’s January opening show. It has worked well giving young artists a chance to curate and show in a professional setting, get a taste of what post college life is like, and push their work forwards and upwards.”

‘Slide a Glance’ will commence with a private view on Friday 13th January, 6-9pm, at the ASC Gallery. It continues until Monday 27th January with opening hours on weekdays from 10am – 5pm.

We would like to share our thanks to Slade Painting tutor Lisa Milroy for her enthusiasm in starting the relationship between ASC Studios and Slade School of Fine Art back in 2018.

 

Image from Slade MA show at ASC Gallery, January 2022, ‘Why Don’t You Dance’

ASC Hilbert: An international exchange

As our exchange with Berlin’s HilbertRaum continues with an exhibition at the ASC Gallery, we reflect on a series of ASC Hilbert projects over the past year.

ASC Hilbert is a collaborative series connecting London’s ASC Studios and Gallery with Berlin’s HilbertRaum. More than just a series of shows, ASC Hilbert is a surface of contact for the art communities of the two cities spanning the course of several years. 

The aim of this long term collaboration is to not only introduce exciting fresh art to a new audience, but also help facilitate lasting connections between art professionals in the two cities, and thus support the development of early and mid-career artists. To contribute to this aim, ASC Hilbert has begun its international exchange with a series of events across both venues in 2022.

In April 2022, the first exhibition – titled A Faint Ground – kicked off the project in Berlin at the  HilbertRaum gallery. ASC artists Karolina Albricht and Darren O’Brien travelled to Berlin and exhibited with German artists Heike Kelter, Hannah Rath and Betinna Weiss.

“Recently I was trying to remember the feeling of fresh grass under bare feet. The sensation of the grass between my toes, its delicate and earthy feeling, cool and green. To some degree looking at artworks can be like the feeling of fresh grass under bare feet. Eyes register the artwork as a whole, taking it in, searching for links, but then sense the surface, its unique detail, its thread, its pitch. With our eyes we walk the faint ground like our feet feel the fresh grass. In this age of uncertainty what is certain is the ground beneath us.” – Darren O’Brien, ASC Gallery

A Faint Ground, May 2022, HilbertRaum

Also shown at HilbertRaum was Naked Flames, an exhibition in August that presented a dialogue of disciplines in “a world where everything flows and nothing is still”.

Artists from ASC Brixton Studios – Georgios Mavridis, Ania Tomaszewska- Nelson, and Timothy Haccius – travelled from London to Berlin with their artwork to exhibit. The Berlin artists who featured in the exhibition were Jurgen Grewe, Mirka Raito, Hildergard Skowasch and Isabelle Fein.

 

Naked Flames, August 2022, HilbertRaum

The return leg of this ongoing project, ‘We Were Made in the Dark’, exhibited at ASC Gallery from late October to early November. The event received funding from Finnish organisation Frame Finland and aims to shift focus from the negatives of a post-Brexit landscape and foster pan-European connections that give opportunities to artists, and vice versa.

Berlin-based Finnish artist Niina Lehtonen Braun came to London with her art performance group, Jokaklubi, to show a new series of drawings and to take part in Jokaklubi’s ‘The Theory Show’ performance. Alongside this, Harriet Hill performed and exhibited one of her wearable sculptures. ASC artists Laura Wormell and Adam Hennessey showed new paintings and drawings.

Jokaklubi performance, We Were Made in the Dark, October 2022, ASC Gallery

ASC looks forward to continuing this exchange with HilbertRaum, and we are excited to see future iterations of events and cross-collaboration between artists through this project.

ASC Streatham Hill – Artist in Residence Awarded to Shane Sutherland

Feature image credit: D. Wiafe

Artists’ Studio Company (ASC) is delighted to announce visual artist and photographer Shane Sutherland (@shane_sutherland) as our new Artist in Residence at ASC Streatham Hill. Shane’s two-year free workspace residency begins in September 2022.

Shane is a photographic and video artist of Jamaican descent, based in the borough of Lambeth in London. Their work utilises both analogue and digital processes to regenerate power within the Black subject. Film, archival media and theoretical texts are used to explore themes of, and themes adjacent to, the nuances and intersections of Black identity and experience.

The recent introduction of VR and photogrammetry in Shane’s practice, in combination with 3D software, is a new and exciting phase. With the possible introduction of game design and AR technology in future work, we look forward to seeing how their work progresses during their time in the studio!

Shane is also co-founder of London-based charity ‘Decolonised Networking’ and has previously worked in anti-racism & decolonial advocacy within higher education. They have also recently just directed and produced an Afrofuturist Sci-Fi short film: OSUPA

In 2021 Lambeth Council agreed to help fund ASC’s purchase of its site in Streatham Hill through the Future Workspace Fund and provided a grant of £200,000 through the First Round of funding. ASC’s Artists in Residence Scheme is one of a number of new initiatives we are launching in Lambeth which have only been made possible with this purchase. We are grateful for their support.

The Artist in Residence scheme was developed to offer a Lambeth-based creative the use of a free studio space for two years, as well as the opportunity to exhibit in the ASC Gallery and Lambeth Town Hall. Shane was selected from nearly 100 applications and selected by a panel with representatives from ASC and Lambeth Council. Shane says:

“I feel so blessed to be awarded this studio residency with ASC. Having access to studio space will evolve my practice in ways I’ve not been able to previously and help me create with my community in mind.”

“We are really excited to have Shane join us for two years and are pleased to be able to offer this support. ASC’s Artists in Residence Scheme is one of a number of new initiatives we are launching in Lambeth which have only been made possible with the purchase of 47c Streatham Hill. Artists and creatives are struggling to afford to live and work in London. […] The purchase of 47c Streatham Hill has secured the workspaces of 57 local artists and protected an amazing creative community in perpetuity. This purchase was only possible with grant funding from Lambeth Council’s Future Workspace Fund.” – Peter Flack, Chief Executive, ASC

ASC is the leading charitable provider of affordable workspaces for artists and creatives in the capital, supporting thousands of innovators since it was established in 1993. Our core aims are to support artists and makers, promote the arts and educate the public in the arts. This is the charity’s third opportunity to support an artist or designer-maker in their community by providing free workspace. Textile artist Warren Reilly has just completed the first of a two-year residency and graphic artist Yoni Alter before him, both at ASC Ealing Road in Alperton, with the support of Brent Council.