Diane Arbus @ Timothy Taylor gallery

Anthony Peskine @ The Wasp Room

Anthony Peskine - Who Do You Think You Are?

April 30th - May 17th 2009

Open Thurs/Fri, 3-7pm; Sat/Sun, 12-5pm or by appointment

Private View: April 28th 2009, 6-8pm

The Wasp Room is pleased to present ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’, the first UK exhibition by Parisian artist Anthony Peskine.

Adopting and adapting the visual languages of advertising campaigns and with a keen sense of the absurd, Peskine’s work is concerned with the predicament of the loser, and how promises are rarely fulfilled.

Peskine seeks to satirise the way in which aspiration and hope are exploited as a manipulative device. He uses his own disappointment and disillusionment to drive a varied artistic practice that ranges from painting and photography, to text pieces, video works and installations.

Offering humorous alternatives to insincere pledges and conceited slogans, mocking intangible fears and superficial aspirations fed by media sensationalism, Peskine’s previous work has included large painted recreations of vouchers printed on ticket stubs which had offered “mega savings of 50p”, and a series of street-based interventions in which he adapted billboard slogans, including a political campaign by Nicolas Sarkozy, adding his own message “ou pas” (or not); rendering their ‘guarantees’ contentious and putting their artificial optimism in jeopardy.

Peskine’s sharp, sarcastic critiques, though cynical and perhaps even childish at times, offer a strategy to fight disappointment; advocating humour as an effective escape philosophy.

For ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’, Peskine will be exhibiting a selection of recent works and new pieces, including the deadpan installation ‘My Weight in Potato Crisps’ and a series of manipulated photo works with bizarre and prophetic narratives.

The Wasp Room

at Tether Studios

17a Huntingdon St 

Nottingham

NG1 3JH

For more about Peskine, visitanthonypeskine.com

Susy Oliveira

It is tough not to stare at Susy Oliveira’s clunky, 1980s-video-gamish polygon sculptures. Of course, sculpture is created for gawking, so clearly Oliveira has reached at least one of her goals with these large-scale pieces made of color photographic prints (c-prints) on archival card and wrapped onto foam core. In her description of her 2008 solo show at Toronto’s Peak gallery, Oliveira wrote about examining “our preoccupation with replacing nature with fabricated versions of itself.” Fittingly, she adds that these sculptures express an “opposition between the round aspects of sculpture and the flat aspects of photography, much like bringing a virtual model into a real space.” Oliveira is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art and Design (2000) and the University of Waterloo (2006).

(source: The Cool Hunter Newsletter: 09/03/2009)

her website