Leon Chew and Andrew Curtis
New neighbours to the RCA, Dark Matter Studios is a workshop and gallery space opened by Zoe Dorelli and Dan Faine that both shows, edits and produces prints.
The opening show in this new space featured Leon Chew and Andrew Curtis (an alumni from RCA Printmaking) collaborating in ‘post industrial aesthetics’.
Concrete and discarded objects are given a wonderfully light touch in photographs which celebrate the surface textures, and architectural lines creating beautiful sculptures and narratives from things that might usually be overlooked.
Leon Chew and Andrew Curtis
Left over printing inks are poured and allowed to spread across the image giving a glow of warmth and new life.
Leon Chew and Andrew Curtis
The large scale monochrome photographs shown were taken at Le Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation of the rough cast concrete surfaces employed in this modernist utopia.
Leon Chew and Andrew Curtis
There is a dramatic blood red line that runs horizontally through each monochromatic image.
( the colour for a reason and the line for a reason I have forgotten.)
A laser level was used to mark a line around the gallery walls once the work had been hung and then the line was hand painted on so that it slices through each photograph at precisely the same height.
Leon Chew and Andrew Curtis
It’s looking close up at the materials that go into the structure that create the spectacle.
Twenty Feet From Stardom directed by Morgan Neville is a film with a similar principle. The backing singers that were the backbone of the Motown revolution have never been acknowledged for their talents until now.
The voices we thought we were hearing on the most famous popular songs were very often not the big stars but the unnamed session singer.
Finally their story (well a few of them) is told in this really moving film and it is astonishing how they were treated. Their soulful voices were used yet the soul of the person inside was ignored.
Twenty Feet From Stardom
The good news is they are back on stage, there is going to be a soundtrack album released and next year possibly even a tour which would be amazing.
These ladies took their treatment on the chin but in another festival release the unsung hero took his revenge when he felt undervalued. The film 11.6 tells the true story of security van driver Tony Musulin who executed an 11.6 million euro heist to humiliate his boss. This story isn’t over yet.
These people working behind the scenes make me think about ownership and authenticity.
Ideas explored in the exhibition at the British Museum earlier this year ‘The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman’
‘… a memorial to all the anonymous craftsmen that over the centuries have fashioned the manmade wonders of the world… The craftsman’s anonymity I find especially resonant in an age of the celebrity artist.” Grayson Perry
Susan Eyre 