Sunday 8 February 2015

Eve Allsop - Home

Welcome to the Dwell exhibition and book. For a whole month we will be taking each artist's page and transforming it into a 3 dimensional dwelling. Each one of these small sculptures will be exhibited in public on the London streets.


Eve Allsop, Home beside the Banana Bridge, Mile End, London
 
Today we have Eve Allsop's Home dwelling on the streets of London. Our exhibition is in its 8th day now and has been featured in Artists Newsletter as one of the highlights for the coming week, so we better not let them down.

'Somewhere Between My Fingertips and the
 End of the World I Hover'  - Eve Allsop
Eve Allsop has been exhibiting with us since the Brighton Open in 2011 where she immediately piqued our interest with her idiosyncratic brand of non-conformist creativity. I will never forget seeing the bound figure in 'Somewhere Between My Fingertips and the End of the World I Hover' with someone else's photo glued to the face and wearing a t-shirt with '+1 Add as friend'. It chilled me with the thought of warping personas and losing one's own identity.

Eve Allsop's net is the only one in the book and exhibition to reference an online haven or dwelling. It is a clever play on the ubiquitous HOME link that we see on every website or blog, yet I have never thought of that HOME as a real home until now. We increasingly gather 'friends' around us but we may never have met them in the real world. This net gives us the opportunity to bring them out of ephemeral internet and give them a moment of permanency in the real breathing world.

Eve Allsop
I think Allsop has captured several interesting themes here and these are reflected in her also wider work as an artist. Her practice is a study of cyberculture and the evolving function of the self portrait. She is interested in the way communities and identities manifest themselves online, as if rejecting tangible reality for a limitless, digital utopia. An internet profile is an extension of one’s public persona, and can be seen as a comforting realm of self-importance.

Eve explains more, "I explore ideas of anxiety, obsession, fantasy, revolt, incoherent narrative, and cyberspace as physical territory. Hyperbolically echoing the aesthetics of social networking and amateur photography, my work addresses the inescapable banality of daily life and the conflicting notions of freedom and enslavement that come with virtual escapism."

Home is placed at the Green Bridge in Mile End or as the locals affectionately call it, the banana bridge, due to its yellow underside.

Don't forget to have a look at the next Collect Connect project, 'The Art of Caring' exhibition at The Rose Theatre in Kingston-upon-Thames. The theme is Caring/Care and it is FREE to enter.

To buy the Dwell Book for £6 then follow this LINK.

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