Hounslow High Street, London, UK, 29 May – 13 June 2021
Featured artwork: Claire Zakiewicz, Gerald Curtis and Dirtangnan, Performance Painting
Artists Claire Zakiewicz and Gerald Curtis have been collaborating with the band Dirtangnan on a new performance painting to be shown in Hounslow, London between May 29 – June 13. The work has been commissioned by Creative People and Places Hounslow for Future Visions, an exhibition of works that signal a positive future for Hounslow High Street and its communities. Writing the Future is a 45-minute performance which incorporates themes of creative participation and attunement.
Claire and Gerald move through a ritual of phases and actions with paint and automatic writing methods, layering marks made in response to each other and the music. The composition of the movements form the image and the performance, creating tension, momentum, flow and resolution. The marks and movements can be read in many possible ways throughout the performance and within the traces on the surface of the canvas.
The focus was to generate a piece that explores possibilities of interpretation, cooperation and collaborative practice methods to create an open outcome. The band Dirtagnan created the soundtrack for the performance.
This piece will be exhibited as photographic and video documentation (by videographer Cristina Schek) as part of Future Visions.
Future Visions is a new and ambitious project led by CPP Hounslow brings together Hounslow’s local artists to send a message that imagination, hope, and kindness are not cancelled, even in difficult times.
Future Visions will adorn Hounslow High Street from Saturday 29 May for two weeks, followed by a touring exhibition appearing in libraries and cafes throughout 2021. The exhibition will also be shown online from 14 June 2021 at hounslowvisualarts.org.uk/future-visions and accompanied by a series of Meet the Artists events that will run throughout the year.
The exhibition will fill the town centre with bright, bold, uplifting work representing the artist’s hope for the future of our community. The exhibition sets up a new type of social interaction, highlighting the positive impact art can have on health and wellbeing, and reinvigorating the high street with art!
Curated by members of the local community with support from CPP Hounslow, we want to give everyone the opportunity to experience the incredible wealth of artistic talent in our local area.
The exhibition is part of CPP Hounslow’s Visual Arts Programme, supported by Creative Enterprise West.
Future Visions will be on display on Hounslow High Street, starting at Bell Square from 29 May – 13 June 2021.
It will also tour London Borough of Hounslow Libraries and Hounslow’s other High Streets later in the year, and throughout 2022. The exhibition will also be online from 14 June 2021.
Creative People & Places Hounslow is part of the Arts Council England’s major investment in increasing arts capacity in underserved areas, working in Feltham, Heston and Cranford, Brentford and central Hounslow. CPP Hounslow is a consortium led by Watermans.
Watermans is West London’s leading arts centre. It attracts over 250,000 visits a year to its thriving and inclusive programme of independent cinema, theatre, exhibitions and courses. Watermans runs a year-round programme of cutting-edge digital arts for which it receives National Portfolio Organisation funding from Arts Council England.
Twitter: @CPPHounslow
Facebook: @CreativeHounslow
Instagram: @hounslow_cpp
Claire Zakiewicz is an inter-disciplinary artist working in both London and NYC. She is interested in the (meta)physical relationships between sound, drawing, movement, how we read drawings and the processes that underlie our emotional relationship with art. Mostly working with performance painting, Zakiewicz often works collaboratively and uses dance and acting methods as part of her drawing and painting practice. She has a background in improvised music and drawing as well as composition and inter-disciplinary scores. She contributed a chapter describing her drawing practice for the volume Aesthetics of Imperfection: Spontaneity, Flaws and the Unfinished (Bloomsbury), 2020.
Her past residencies have included Bill Young’s Dance Studio (New York), USF Bergen, (Norway), Cill Rialaig, Ireland and PointB Worklodge, (New York). Her works have been presented at galleries, performance venues and institutions including Tate Tanks and Tate Britain, for the exhibitions Tweet Me Up (2011) and Label (2012), at Landmark, Bergen for the performance piece Engastromyths Quakers and Shamans (commissioned by Ny Musikk, 2009) and most recently she produced a collaborative performance painting for Future Visions, Hounslow (2021), funded by the Arts Council, England
Zakiewicz studied at Chelsea College of Art, Anglia Ruskin University and Sir John Cass School of Art where she completed a research-based MA in the physical and metaphorical relationships between sound and drawing, which had both practical and theoretical components.
website: www.clairezakiewicz.com
Gerald Curtis works across performance, painting and photography to produce multi-faceted bodies of work rooted in explorations of urban and rural environments. Gerald is interested in cross disciplinary research-based practices and the potentially new dynamic social spaces that these processes can inhabit. Primarily taking ideas of flux and flow as starting points, his practice can be described as being grounded in tactile material-based media while looking into connections between the landscape and memory.
Recently graduating from the Royal College of Art, Gerald Curtis has exhibited and performed nationally and internationally including Revolve Festival, Sweden and Lublin Performance Festival, Poland. His first solo show, Regeneration on Hounslow Heath (2019), was selected by Hounslow Creative People and Places to become part of their touring library programme. The exhibition incorporated a collection of photography, painting, video and performances. Most recently, he has collaborated with artist Claire Zakiewicz and Habib William Kherbek of the band Dirtagnan to produce a video performance, Writing the Future (2021) (forthcoming). Gerald Curtis is a recipient of the Time Space Money bursary from A-N and the Farnham Maltings No Strings Attached fund.
website: www.geraldcurtisstudio.com
Photos: Cristina Schek
