Art Collaboration Kyoto (ACK)

1st November - 3rd November 2024

THE SHOPHOUSE Hong Kong is pleased to participate in the 2024 edition of Art Collaboration Kyoto (ACK) at Booth GC18, featuring a body of paintings, sculptures, and ceramic works by artists Sam Creasey, Steve Harrison, Jaejun Lee, and Victor Lim Seaward.

MORE HERE

‘Panta Rhei’ Group Exhibition, Alice Amati Gallery.

Sophie Birch, Merve Ceylan, Sam Creasey, Rike Droescher, J.A Feng, Harry Grundy, Minami Kobayashi and Nicholas Marschner​

 12 July - 10 August, 2024

"Not long ago I went on a summer walk through a smiling countryside in the company of a taciturn friend and a young but already famous poet. They admired the beauty of the scene around us but felt no joy in it. He was disturbed by the thought that all this beauty was fated to extinction, that it would vanish when winter came, like all human beauty and all the beauty and splendour that man has created or may create. All that he would otherwise have loved and admired seemed to him to be shorn of its worth by the transience which was its doom."[1]

 Alice Amati is pleased to present a group exhibition including eight British and international artists reflecting on the possibility of coming to terms with the concept of change as an intrinsic and inevitable aspect of life. Drawing inspiration from the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who famously posited that we can never step into the same stream twice as "everything flows" — or "Panta Rhei" in Ancient Greek — this exhibition underscores the idea that both our surroundings and our inner selves are in a constant state of flux. It creates dialogues between artists who are concerned with this daunting yet liberating aspect of the human condition and address it from different perspectives. Responding to the ever-changing world they inhabit, each artist presented questions how, if at all, we can know our moving world and our place within it when our life is defined by change, both in our environment and within ourselves.

The realization and acceptance of the inevitable transience of what surrounds us is both the starting point and the driving force for the artists in the exhibition. Minami Kobayashi, Merve Ceylan, and Nicholas Marschner find solace in the ephemeral nature of our existence through the lasting memories of their past, building the surface of their canvases or excavating them until images of distant moments make themselves visible again. Sophie Birch looks for the traces or the aura left from the passage of all things in this world. Her painting exists in this search, embodying the changes they are trying to capture. Similarly, J.A. Feng creates richly textured surfaces on which emotional narratives of transformation emerge. Grundy and Droescher turn to elements from the natural world surrounding them, such as withering flowers or bodies of water, to offer a comforting stance on the transience of the world. Through their poetic and inquisitive works capturing the interaction between man and nature, they suggest that the time limitations on our enjoyment of the latter and its unpredictability are what make it more valuable. On the other end of the spectrum, Creasey observes the unstoppable transformation happening not only in nature but within our built urban environment. Characters inhabiting upside-down yet familiar landscapes become proxies for the artist’s own experience of coming to terms with change in his surroundings. 

Acknowledging that these artists reflect on our inherent need to capture the fleeting nature of our surroundings, and questioning whether this is achievable at all, the exhibition will not remain a static presentation. Instead, it will be restructured twice during its duration by invited curators. Kiera Blakey (Curator and Director of New Contemporaries) and Matan Daube (Curator and Director of the Igal Ahouvi Art Collection) will each intervene in the arrangement of the exhibition at different times, deciding what, if anything, should change.

 [1] Freud, S. (1916). Vergänglichkeit (A. J. Grunthaler, Trans.). In Das Land Goethes 1914-1916. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt. (Original work published 1915)

Nimby, a solo exhibition at Andrew Reed Gallery, Miami.

Jan 26th - April 20th 2024. 

Andrew Reed Gallery announces Nimby, Sam Creasey’s first solo exhibition in the United States. The London-based artist mines from his own employed life in delivery logistics as an influence bank and as a psycho-geographical adventure into the lives and localities of various microcosms of city life. ‘Nimbyism’ (not in my back yard!) is one of the most widely used acronyms for those anxious of change if it is local to them, while oblivious to it if it is not. The title for the show takes on the personality of someone who is ill-equipped for the changes in the landscape around them. Over time, places and space change and morph in waves of sprawling expansion and contraction; we are but mostly powerless to stop it. Creasey posits how the show’s change-wary protagonists grapple with this entropy.

Contributing Text By Hannah Chappell

Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:

England hath need of thee: she is a fen

Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,

Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,

Have forfeited their ancient English dower

Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;

Oh! raise us up, return to us again;

And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.

Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart:

Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:

Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,

So didst thou travel on life's common way,

In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart

The lowliest duties on herself did lay.

London, 1802

William Wordsworth

'He stomps the town dragging Kent & all her oasts behind him'

Iain Sinclair

I am trying to understand the country that founded my own. England is beautiful, grandiose, ancient, and comical. Steeped in dignity that mocks itself; mired in grievances while clutching at pride.

As a newcomer, I see my adopted home through the rose-tinted lenses of novelty, ignorance, and the privileged affection that comes from having chosen one’s nation of residence. I am quick to disparage my own homeland, but I am inescapably American, and the complex nature of contemporary Britain is fascinating and at times incomprehensible.

In Sam Creasey’s work, idealized modernity and looming uncertainty meet in the uncanny. Here is a Britain in which sleek housing developments promise bounty and fulfillment. Heavy impasto subverts the screen-like facades of a gleaming city. Architectural structures extend over ancient waterways and rub shoulders with wildlife, emanating a sickening luminosity. In A harmonious blend of cutting edge design and timeless elegance, glassy housing blocks are populated by faceless residents, their identities overpowered by the glow of newness. The figures in First time buyers and Wharf! stroll in and out of frame, but we are afforded only an aerial view: faces hidden, these city dwellers become features of the environment, part of the advertisement for the product they themselves are being sold.

And what exactly is for sale, and at what cost? Prosperity in exchange for authenticity? Novelty for the price of history? Who stands to profit? Not the people walking the canals hand in hand, nor the faces veiled by river scum in Doldrums. Perhaps the swans looming in the foreground, mauve-shadowed feathers elevated by a sculptural plaster cast, quivering off the canvas: it does not escape me that all wild swans in England are, by law, property of the Crown. Indeed, reminders of the monarchy and its cache of riches are scattered throughout Creasey’s showcase. Despatch I, nodding to the boxes used by Members of Parliament to ceremonially transport documents, is adorned with an ear stretched around an early Saxon coin, symbolic of wealth and diplomacy. Today, over a millennium after the St Edmund memorial penny was issued to appease East Anglians mourning their martyred king, these images remind us that while people across the UK contend with a cost of living crisis, the British royal family retains a net worth in the billions with a prime minister whose degree of wealth isn’t far behind.

Yet Nimby also contains threads of nostalgia–in the neighborhood watch logo that appears in Despatch II, the departing fun fair lorry in Leaving Town. These pieces are laced with fondness even as they prompt the viewer to consider the hypocrisy embedded within images emblematic of distrust, fear, and displacement.

Perhaps Britain has always struggled to reconcile its glorified past with dreams of a better future. I am reminded of Wordsworth, who, in 1802, decried that England had become a “bed of stagnant waters,” lacking “manners, virtue, freedom, power.”1 I think of J.G. Ballard and his reflections on arriving in England in 1946

I found the English attitudes towards the world utterly incomprehensible. The whole country seemed at complete variance with its situation. Everyone believed that Britain was still a world power ruling a world empire, and we had an obligation to maintain large forces at every point of the atlas [...] Everyone believed in a kind of social harmony, which was sentimentalised in Ealing comedies - whereas the reality was that the country was harshly divided.2

Perhaps this duality–the legacy of a glorified, imperialistic past set against an uncertain future–is inherent within modern England’s nationhood. Perhaps this fraught tension is, to borrow from Iain Sinclair, a “prize cicatrix” embedded within the country’s skin.3 Creasey depicts Britain as it is today–a country rich with contradictions. It is impossible to distill the nation into its component pieces, for she is greater than the sum of her parts.

Nimby captures this intangible wholeness. In Creasey’s work, there is expansive consideration of the external, but his worldly view is tempered by humility. There is much to be learned from this measured vantage. I may never know England as a native, never intuit the coexistent unity and discord that radiate from her cities through the hinterlands, but I will endeavor to look through Creasey’s lens, finding beauty and honor in Britain today, just as she is.

Hannah Chappell.

1 Wordsworth, 1,3, “London, 1802”                                                                                                                                                   2 Ballard, “People seethed with a sort of repressed rage,” 1991. Accessed at https://www.jgballard.ca/media/1991_dec16_independent.html                                             3 Sinclair, 1, “sub (not used): Mountain”

The Right Honourable, A solo exhibition at The Shop House, Hong Kong.

Jan 3rd - Feb 18th 2024. 

I wander all night in my vision,

Stepping with light feet, swiftly and noiselessly stepping and stopping,

Bending with open eyes over the shut eyes of sleepers,

Wandering and confused, lost to myself, ill-assorted, contradictory,

Pausing, gazing, bending, and stopping.

Walt Whitman, ‘The Sleeps’

 Winter has barely arrived as the year 2024 rolled in. Tribulations arrived one after the other while people went on with their lives, mostly undisturbed. On the evening of January 2nd, while the American Continent was still asleep, the BBC reported on the airplane collision that had occurred hours before at Tokyo’s Haneda airport ‘a commercial jet rams into an earthquake relief plane bound for western Japan’.

 Meanwhile, in the city of London the architecture sprouts out like weed, devouring its inhabitants. Young adults trek through the city, broadcasting digital textures in subway stations that never see daylight; as phone signal fades in the tunnel, they rest their eyes. If you pause amidst the concrete walls, perhaps you will hear the blood of the metropolis flowing. In Creasey’s work intricately layered oil paint creates texture on rough fabrics and services like  jute, linen and plaster to communicate the complex dynamics that coalesce in the urban fabric. By also introducing fauna into the paintings, the artist constructs a more complicated dialogue, considering the city’s relationship with its natural underpinnings. These animal creatures are largely free of societal constraints, but in Creasey’s paintings they indifferently dwell amongst metaphoric imagery of Britain’s imperial past. Creasey reflects on his positionality as both artist and Londoner: 

 “I reinterpret my findings within urban exploration onto the painting surface. The work is not autobiographical per say, but it demonstrates my relationship with the part of the city I occupy. People in London are constantly on the move and anxious, the pace the city operates on can only be rivaled by a few other cities in the world. I sense an oscillating scuffle between the built environment, infrastructure, and its inhabitants. The city’s demands require a certain kind of resoluteness’. 

 Sam Creasey’s work captures the tensions between Britain’s past and present, metropolis and nature, human connection, and hierarchy. His paintings harken to the nostalgia inherent within national identity. As individuals, we too rely on nostalgia even as we crave newness. Ever we must grabble with this anxiety, while all around our collective consciousness battles against history and a future national identity unknown from its present.  

Text by Faust Luo. 

The Best of Bees, a solo exhibition at Quip and Curiosity, Cambridge. 

Curated by Kristian Day 

March 24th - May 6th 2023

Quip & Curiosity

71 Tenison Road, Cambridge, CB1 2EF

Friday + Saturday 12-5 or by appointment 

FULL CATALOUGE 

Contributing Exhibition Text by Elliott Mickleburgh  

In order to execute, it is first necessary to conceive. Our earliest ancestors built their huts only when they had a picture of them in their minds. It is this product of the mind, this process of creation, that constitutes architecture and which can consequently be defined as the art of designing and bringing to perfection any building whatsoever. 

Thus reads a fragment of the introduction to a treatise on architectural design written by the neoclassical architect Étienne-Louis Boullée at the end of the 18th century. While the text was never officially published during its author’s lifetime, it is in no way lacking in ambition. Throughout his writing, Boullée rejects the Vitruvian idea that the prerequisite of all architecture is to be found in the trifecta of firmitas, utilitas, and venustas — variously translated as strength, durability, or solidity; utility, usefulness, or convenience; and beauty, delight, or charm. While all of these attributes were of importance to Boullée, he found it contentious that they should be constituted as the very origin of architectural design itself. For Boullée, a building does not begin in the material properties of stone and timber, nor does it come into existence via an appraisal by the rhetoric of aesthetic taste. A building for Boullée is first and foremost an idea formed in the imagination. Only after its conception in the mind can a building become an object with qualia pertaining to the trinity described by Vitruvius in De architectura.

Boullée’s placement of imagination as the origin of design is reflective of that period’s dedication to what is now known as visionary architecture, a practice in which buildings are conceptualized and rendered on paper but not constructed. During this period of French history, land ownership and wealth were still largely distributed according to the remnants of a feudal system that made architectural patronage something of a rarity. Members of the aristocracy could afford to commission elaborate projects in the form of palaces and private gardens, but since this social class was minuscule in comparison to the size of the general population, appointments to design the lavish estates favored by the nobility were limited. In lieu of practicing their art in construction, many architects developed their approach to design by entering competitions held by universities and scholarly societies. Entrants would submit drawings or engravings depicting fantastic buildings that matched the competition’s theme. As a member of the Académie Royale d’Architecture, Boullée himself frequently coordinated and judged entries to one such competition, the esteemed Prix de Rome. In his capacity as a programme coordinator for the prize, Boullée would set competition themes with a particularly civic character, challenging participants to design buildings such as lighthouses, hospitals, museums, and schools. 

Visionary architecture in France at the end of the 18th century is, as alluded to above, inextricable from the social, political, and economic conditions present in the country during that historical moment. The inequity of wealth distribution that prompted many architects to execute their art as propositions with intaglio plates and washes of ink was the very same condition that distilled revolutionary discontent amongst the citizens of France. And just as the vainqueurs de la Bastille imagined the effects of a future that had no causal basis in the fabric of the lived present, so did the visionary architects dream of a city uninhibited by the conditions of restricted patronage. 

While we are over two centuries beyond the events of the French Revolution, the contemporary moment doesn’t feel all that estranged from the circumstances that led to the collapse of the Ancien Régime. This young century has already been marked by worldwide economic recession, deadly pandemics, decentralized armed conflict, and the exponential rise of both extremist political factions and violent non- state actors. What then might it look like if contemporary art were to adopt the speculative temperament of visionary architecture? What if the subject matter, materiality, and content of an artwork were more than just ennobled recapitulations of the status quo? An anthropomorphic plane tree might lift its limbs towards the heavens to make a vow of either vengeance or fealty to a sky mottled in bursts of dead pixels. A ceremonial mace then reclines into a digital posture across the impression of a bucolic landscape that may or may not exist solely in the lacuna of collective memory. And the eyes of a juvenile sentry might betray the anxiety of all those that have crossed the event horizon that separates too much from not enough and all at once from little by little, their thoughts now stretched like the bodies of the sentry’s brothers-in-arms reflected in the bell of a brass instrument. I don’t know what the future will feel like, but an art like Sam Creasey’s in The Best of Bees looks to me like a beacon for all who seek egress from the tired present.

More info

Future Archive: Group Exhibition. Royal Institute of British Architecture.

1/6/22 - 1/7/22

As part of 2022’s London Festival of Architecture (LFA), RIBA is hosting the Royal College of Art (RCA) Future Archive project.

Future Archive is a bespoke publication and exhibition that gathers artworks, texts, and conversations from the Future Archive artistic research laboratory, led by artist Rut Blees Luxemburg. Future Archive focusses on the four year long construction process of the RCA’s new Battersea campus, designed by architects Herzog & de Meuron, opening in 2022.

Future Archive explores the construction site in Battersea as a location for field study, generating diverse artworks including paintings, photographs and billboards; performances, sculptures, videos and publications. The opportunity to work on a construction site provided the artists with a productive conduit for exploring urban transformation, memory and the active construction of a future archive. The representation of labour and masculinity; data and ethics; visualisation and material experimentation were key questions of artistic enquiry.

Future Archive aims to visualise and bring to the fore the often hidden narratives of architecture and construction, which are usually invisible in conventional visualisations of architecture photography or computer generated architectural propositions. 

The Age of Sagittarius: Damon James Owen and Sam Creasey two person show. Filet.

14/12/21 - 09/01/22 

Press release: 

‘Amser’ – Old Welsh: ‘Time, Moment, What about the stars?’ 

In the midst of the darkest month, we propose an AGE OF SAGITTARIUS, where reflections on systems of capital, labour and the gig economy collide with yearnings for creativity and independent thought. The paintings, sculpture and moving image show shifting visions of cities, manufacturing and infrastructure, together with an educational resource in the form of a lesson plan devised to exchange artistic knowledge in the spirit of Chiron.

Alongside the show, visitors can engage with an educational resource document produced by Damon and Sam which delves deeper into the surrounding themes of the show. 

Access resource here <— Click 

In Crystallized Time - Museum of Museums - Seattle, WA

8/10/21 - 27/12/21

In Crystallized Time is a group exhibition curated by Anthony White, that puts the history of painting through a filter that assesses the contrast of speed and the internet through the historical practice of painting. In Crystallized Time is a simulation of lo-fi and hi-fi graphics, twisted landscapes and figures birthed within a world made up of 0’s and 1’s. These processes are derivative of a simulation which is the vehicle that guides this digital language and visual representation of a system/screen. This show is a conversation about time, and a response to what is unfolding, while analyzing structures of contemporary nostalgia that seem to predict the future.

Final Not Over: Open Fields - Unit 1 Gallery Workshop. July 2020

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The Royal College of Art: Work in Progress Show. January 2019