Marriage

MARRIAGE

GROUP EXHIBITION

23 Apr 2013 - 22 Jun 2013

Geta Brǎtescu

Hannah Höch

Ioannis Koliopoulos

David Noonan

Paola Palavidi

Sergei Parajanov

Artavazd Peleschjan

John Stezaker

at Qbox

[site]

fig. (i)

fig. (i)

David Gates

Duration: February 9 – March 30, 2013

Qbox gallery is pleased to present David Gates’ (b. 1979) first solo exhibition in Greece, entitled fig. (i). The title of the show relates to the systems of referral between the images and the descriptions used in the scientific manuals and old natural history books, which are often used as the starting point and source of much of the work. These outdated sources of information, sometimes modified sometimes not highlight an interest in their obsession with order and totality and the impossibility of rationalising the objective world around us.

David Gates works with pinhole photography, found images and objects. Pinhole images, far from being nostalgic, authenticate the present, making it vibrant and shimmering by pushing the not too distant past away, opening up the future to the possibility of possibilities. 

Being a resident artist during a month on the island of Kea, Greece, Gates used a small van as a travelling darkroom, peering over fences, dodging shadows and scouring the roadsides. Finding usefulness in the neglected, the everyday and overlooked. Paying attention to the edges and in some cases eliminating the focus of a photograph in a book page, photographing overgrown trees which have long outlived their original plan or usefulness, or flattening a feather, removing its featheriness whilst allowing it to cling on to its undeniable objectness. These things seem to stand in for the objects or ideas that they actually are. 

The artist does not look for certain results to prove a theory and to make a virtue of trial and error, instead he plays at the border between the visible and invisible, somewhere in between things and meanings, between representations and actual things. He poses questions as an activity, uses method as a meaning and tries to open up a space for looking or relooking by removing images and things from the flow of time towards their inevitable disappearance.

[ more about the exhibition here (.pdf file)  ]

Blue Moon

Blue Moon

Michail Pirgelis

23 Nov 2012 - 26 Jan 2013

Qbox gallery is pleased to present Michail Pirgelis’ first solo exhibition in Greece, entitled Blue Moon. 

Michail Pirgelis explores the notion of flight, seeking all over the world the resting places of obsolete airplanes and transforming their remnants into sculptures. Following a different process each time, the artist decontextualizes the fragmented aircraft parts while keeping the aura of the objects intact.

In the exhibition Blue Moon, the artist intervenes in the gallery by adjusting to the space, layers of plastic panels that are used for lining the interior walls of the aircraft. He creates the sculptures Alma II (2012), Blue Moon(2012) and Incision (2012) that are made up of different airplane fragments in which Pirgelis interferes, thus introducing a new cosmos of shapes and forms.

Pirgelis constructs his familiar environment and invites the viewer to become part of it, allocating him in an unbarred in-between space. The spectator “sleepwalks” in an imaginary room of a continuous transition while he becomes a passive passenger and a distant observer.

Michail Pirgelis explores the fragility and the awe of flying as well as the human desire to defy gravity, which entails also the danger of complete failure. The archaic, mythical dream of flying is unveiled through the minimalistic forms that signify the perpetual technological evolution. The artist’s modernist discourse is reminiscent of the drives that open up new possibilities of looking, thinking and thus acting. Pirgelis creates a “contemporary archaeology” where the aircraft’s pieces are strange amalgams of the past, seen in the present while denoting the future.

[ + more ]

Absence

Qbox Gallery is pleased to present the second solo exhibition in Greece of the video artist Ali Kazma (Until 31/03/2012).

Ali Kazma (Istanbul, 1971) is known for his Obstructions series where he meticulously documents different human activities related to production and labor. His unbiased viewpoint depicts with the same visual clarity and neutrality the violent process of animal slaughtering (Slaughterhouse, 2007), the dexterity and patience of clock-making (Clock Master, 2006) and brain surgery (Brain Surgeon, 2006) as well as the rapid and repetitive movement of stamping (O.K, 2010). Through a discrete way he enters into the realm of artists, artisans and professionals such as a taxidermist, a dancer, a painter, a cook, a studio ceramist, textile workers and elucidates with verisimilitude their work in process.

 

In his exhibition entitled Absence the artist has chosen to present his latest works called Absence (2011) and Written (2011). The first piece is displayed by two video projections where Kazma captures through multiple perspectives NATO’s old facilities, in which the intrinsic dynamic between human presence and absence recreates, but also reenacts another stream of consciousness towards the identity of the specific location. The latter work is depicted in a simultaneous six-channel video that records the burning process of written pieces of paper. The editing of the burning paper veils and unveils at the same time several phrases that instantly turn into ashes.

 

The paradoxical interrelation between life and death is enhanced in the Absence’s mute stillness combined with the subtle nature sounds that indicate the slightest evidence of life. Additionally, the disintegration of the paper and the included text is in a constant state of becoming that hovers between form and formlessness, growth and decay.

[ source ]

Known, Unknown, Anonymous and On Death Row

Qbox gallery is pleased to present a group exhibition under the title Known, Unknown, Anonymous and On Death Row.

 

 

 

The show combines artists who have been widely recognized and engaged in the art scene with artists who have not yet been known or they will never be as they were not part of the art market.

 

 Despite the nature of the art-piece a name carries all sorts of information and holds a dynamic by-itself, which is something that artists like Marcel Duchamp (pseudonym Rrose Selavy 1921), Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg (Erased de Kooning, 1953) have dealt with different ways in the past.

 

 

Moreover, human portraits are depicted through the medium of painting and photography, which stands as a common thread between the artists. Among the known and unknown artists in the exhibition are: Ellie Coates, Sileia Daskopoulou, David Gates, Takehito Koganezawa, Martin Maloney, Apostolos Michailides, David Mathis, Adrian Piper, Ugo Rondinone, Malick Sidibé, Tabakopoulos and Foundoulis, Rosemarie Trockel, Karen Yasinski. A number of works by anonymous artists are also included in the show.

Duration: 8 November ‘11 - 14 January ’12