FLOCK - Inaugural Show

August 2007

FLOCK brought together a group of eight international contemporary artists, migrating to South London for the summer to exhibit in GXgallery for the launch of DeviateProjects.

Curated by Helene Kazan, FLOCK challenged the normal constraints and expectations within GXgallery's environment. Showcasing an amalgamation of drawing, painting, photography, site specific installation, video installation and sculpture, it exposed viewers to things they might never have seen before.

Michael Petry

Extract

June 2007

in conjunction with Camberwell Arts Week

Petry's installations at GXgallery were from two important bodies of recent work, the Tie A Knot In It series and his Web Portraits.  All the works in the knotted series comprise a repeatedly knotted spool of cord, leather, silver, or 24 carat gold. The form of the knot serves two purposes. In British slang a mother might tell a small male child who has to use the rest room, to ‘tie a knot in it’.  On the other hand, the knot represents a puzzle (in this case, the puzzle of coded sexuality). In ancient western symbolism, knots indicate the power of knowledge, most famously the Gordian Knot that was severed by Alexander the Great.  First World peoples used groups of knotted chords to pass messages from one end of the Americas to the other in a matter of days (runners passing on the knots from one to the other).  This body of work examines hidden language and develops themes from Petry’s seminal curatorial project Hidden Histories: 20th Century Male Same Sex Lovers in the Visual Arts at the New Art Gallery Walsall.

Carlos Cortes

You Are Art Hotel

February 2007

Cortes' installation, You Are Art Hotel presented the audience with an interactive space -  one in which they had the choice of either entering into the structure and being gazed upon or remaining outside and, in effect, becoming the voyeur, looking in on those inside through a peep hole. The work raises questions about the relationship between public and private as well as our relationship with the domestic space and of surveillance.