Works projects

works projects is the new gallery established by the independent curator Simon Morrissey. works projects presents a programme of exhibitions, talks and events in Bristol and represents a small stable of distinctive British artists, both emerging and established, including Edwina Ashton, Michael Dean, Sarah Dobai, Andy Holden, David Mackintosh, Richard Wilson and Richard Woods.

works projects is located on Sydney Row in Bristol’s harbourside, which has steadily developed into the centre for visual arts in the city. The gallery is located on the same block as both Spike Island and Picture This and is only 10 minutes walk from Arnolfini.

works projects is open Thursday to Sunday 12 noon - 6pm during exhibitions or by appointment.

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CURRENT:

Richard Wilson is one of Britain’s most inventive sculptors. Drawing inspiration from the worlds of engineering and construction he transforms architectural space and objects on a grand scale. Whether flooding gallery spaces with reflective sump oil, crushing planes then unfurling them by hand or creating a form of architectural ballet by causing a large section of a derelict building to gracefully revolve, Wilson unsettles our environment and challenges our perception of how buildings and machines should function in a compelling sculptural choreography.

Wilson’s first exhibition with works projects provides a unique occasion to explore the development of Wilson’s recent landmark works through the artist’s preparatory works. Force Quit features the artist’s drawings and models from significant recent projects including works detailing recent versions of his most famous work 20:50, a room half-filled with highly reflective sump oil to create a disorientating symmetrical plane, and Turning the Place Over, a 10 metre wide motorized disk in the façade of an abandoned building which elegantly illustrates Wilson’s view of the architecture and engineering as ‘a slow event’ open to unexpected transformation.

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Supported by University of the West of England

Supported by Spike Island

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PAST:

Andy Holden’s work incorporates monumental outdoor structures, plaster and bronze sculpture, film, painting, recorded music and musical performances. Often showing these diverse media together, his work builds a fragmented yet richly textured collision of ideas, references and forms.

For his first exhibition at works projects Andy Holden presents a collection of works that form a mental journey of influence and a type of travel writing - an attempt to negotiate a response to a road-trip through California inspired by advice from the late Jason Rhoades to spend some time in the desert to reassess his idea of scale.

In a display simultaneously reminiscent of small town American museums and the eccentric charm of the British amateur handyman, the artist presents a collection of souvenirs which attempt to question how narrative attaches itself to objects - bronze casts of plastic soft drinks lids and straws, enlarged ceramic pistachio nuts, paintings of casino carpets, gramophone records melted into bowls and decorated with abstract patterns and repeated images of Charlie Brown, plaster slices that look like the candy coloured strata of Arizona rock faces. They are a procession of propositions, fragments and clauses that attempt to negotiate influence (after beat poetry, after Hunter S. Thompson, after Ed Ruscha, after Roadrunner, after Tom Waits, after Charles M. Schulz, after Claus Oldenburg…). This ensemble of fragments, are works both conceived after the landscape and works that attempt to pre-empt the landscape. And then there is still the question of scale….

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Supported by University of the West of England

Supported by Spike Island

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Sarah Dobai's new body of works, Studio/Location Photographs, consists of more than a dozen photographs that explore the nature of public space in the city. The new work positions public space as a force that de-stabilises the separation of the mainstream from the marginal and the theatrical from the everyday.

The new series focuses on the image of the shopping mall, juxtaposing photographs of un-peopled sites shot in and around malls, with images of actor/models taken in the studio. In the studio the models are pictured in a sets whose construction intentionally echoes the architectural qualities of the urban spaces photographed. The demeanour of the actor/models in the studio photographs moves between the enacted and un-posed, drawing parallels between people’s uneasy relation to public space in everyday life and how a model finds ‘a way to be’ in the theatrical context of the photo-shoot.

In Studio/Location Photographs, with its focus on the highly constructed quality of urban settings, the distinction between documentary and studio-based approaches to photography becomes fluid and hard to determine. Within this slippage, the new works create a subtle tension between echoes of the glamour of high fashion and suggestions of urban neglect and social isolation that is seductive and unsettling in equal measure.

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In recent years Michael Dean’s work has combined archetypal images of natural phenomena with a hermetic vocabulary of typographical decisions to create autonomous objects of attraction.

In sculpture, photography and drawing, Dean’s work communicates the logic of language, but one that refuses to provide an accessible meaning.

Dean’s sculptures and images have their roots in his own writing - a writing that memorializes what he describes as ‘moments of intensity and attraction’. Dean is not interested in communicating his own personal intimacies, however, but rather in finding a mechanism to create a mutually exclusive intimacy – one in which the viewer is confronted with an impenetrable model of language and thus projects their own meaning into it. Dean condenses his writing into abstracted typographies, the application of which then impose distinctly abstract topologies on sculpture and image alike. Distance is continually manufactured until the work is separate from its source.

The new black cement sculptures made for works projects are monumental yet mute. Like monoliths from pre-history, their formal qualities – their angled planes, their repeated structures – demonstrate language at its most basic level and in its most unknowable state. The cement surfaces have the unevenly polished quality of hewn stone rendered almost glacial in parts from the constant attention of hands tracing, or searching for, meaning. But no matter how much we force ourselves against their surfaces it cannot be secured.

The new sculptures are accompanied by photographs of abstract black surfaces that are traversed by triangular trajectories that mimic the sculptures three-dimensional planes. Articulate yet autonomous, they draw us in to read the unreadable.

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Supported by University of the West of England

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Inaugural exhibition at works projects

Following his acclaimed solo exhibitions at Milton Keynes Gallery and the Liverpool Biennial this year, Richard Woods will open works projects with an inaugural installation of new works.

Renowned for his signature architectural interventions and transformations, Woods creates encompassing installations of hand-printed wood-block printed floors, walls and exterior elevations, that fold the history of the decorative arts, functional design and graphic language into intoxicating plays with image and surface.

Housed in a former loading bay of an old tea packing factory, works projects combines preserved elements of the original industrial architecture of the building with new architectural insertions to create two spaces – gallery and office - that flow into each other within the original architectural container.

Woods’ new installation plays directly with these new alterations. Where new walls have been built Woods has clad them with bold, wood block printed surfaces that mimic the structures that are behind the walls – breezeblock and engineering brick. Wood’s intervention is at once explicitly fake but faithful in its attempt to return the space to its original appearance.

Into this restricted palette of greys and whites and real and fake bricks and blocks, Woods will insert an explosion of clashing colour and form in the shape of a new floor sculpture and wall works that reside somewhere between excessively flat sculpture and three dimensional painting. In a distinct development of his signature floorboards, Woods new works function more as independent sculptures and resemble something between a Vorticist painting and a giant game of pick-up sticks - flat cartoon renditions of three-dimensional planks piled on top of each other to create a super-flat play with perspective and mass.

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Supported by University of the West of England

Supported by Arts Council England South West

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EXCLUSIVE RICHARD WOODS EDITION LAUNCHED

Thumbs Up, 2008, Edition of 100.

In conjunction with Richard Woods inaugural exhibition, works projects is please to announce the launch of Thumbs Up, an exclusive, limited edition wood block print taken from Innovation, Investment, Progress, Woods’ acclaimed solo exhibition for this year’s Liverpool Biennial.

Innovation, Investment, Progress used repeated ‘feel-good’ logos and Woods’ distinctive hand-printed aesthetic to playfully rework the generic language of corporate communication into a form of homespun happiness.

Thumbs Up provides the perfect symbol for our contradictory times – an antidote to credit crunch consternation and a symbol of hope for the Obama generation that is as universal as it is familiar. This is an exclusive opportunity to acquire an entry-level edition from an artist whose impressive portfolio of high-profile exhibitions and major private commissions has seen his status confirmed as one of the UK’s most internationally sought-after artists.

Thumbs Up is availably exclusively from works projects.

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EDITION DETAILS: RICHARD WOODS

Thumbs Up, 2008

£350.00 unframed £500.00 framed

Edition of 100

Hand printed woodblock print in water-based gloss on 3mm mdf board. Produced by Richard Woods Studio, London. Signed, numbered and dated by the artist on the reverse. 60 x 45 cm.

Framed editions: presented in a white sprayed box frame with 12mm fillet, glazed with 2mm clear glass. Print float mounted on acid-free white museum board with a 2omm surround. Complete with split-baton hanging device.

Available for collection from Bristol or London or shipped at extra cost. Please contact the gallery for quotation for shipping.

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