east london – and so she thinks

Weird Menace – Weird Menace

admin — Wed, 10 Jul 2013 20:15:56 +0000

Weird Menace are three girls from Dalston who make moody and sinister sounds. Their 100 run EP was released back in March on cassette (I know, I know, I’m late to the party) and features five feedback heavy, convulsing and fuzzily fragmented tunes. Weird Menace, the song rather than the band, is a song of almost monochrome beauty, layered vocals over slices of churning guitar, like shards through the dense sound. Excellent stuff.

It's All Happening! festival – Alessi's Ark!

admin — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 21:19:11 +0000

The very first It’s All Happening festival! A day of folk music, acoustic indie, original art, craft, spoken word, performance poetry and film – in short our favourite things. Taking place at the Gallery Cafe in Bethnal Green, on June 23rd, from 1pm til late, tickets are available now!
We’re thrilled that the lovely Alessi’s Ark will be headlining – the first of a run of festival performances for the charming folk singer.
Alongside the mix of solo artists strumming in the garden, bands captivating the cafe throughout the day and evening, and entertaining and enrapturing spoken word in the chapel, will be a craft market, delicious array of food and drink, a photography and art exhibition, and tunes to get you in the mood to dance til dawn. (Although not with It’s All Happening necessarily – cafe curfew!).
Anja McCloskey, Soulmates Never Die, Fallingham Fair and The Cooling Pearls will all be playing, alongside The Ruby Kid and Joshua Seigal, and acoustic artists Thom Byles and Larissa.
For any more information, please get in touch.

Stable States – a show of art in flux

admin — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 21:17:35 +0000

Opening night: Thursday 16th February,18:00-21.00
then open from Friday 17th – Wednesday 22nd February 2012
Six contemporary artists. A diversity of disciplines. A range of media. Taking place at Cultivate, Vyner Street,an artist run gallery built on a diy collective framework that evolves and revolves around the local art scene, Stable States is an exciting arrangement of deviating and differential pieces of work. A mix of drawing, sculpture, architecture, engraving and print, this is a genre defying exhibition.
Yasmina Chami’s work is inspiring not solely from an artistic point of view, but for the face of hope it shows to the world. An architect whose work with war damaged buildings from her native Lebanon, she attempts to reconstruct new uses for them by erecting transformative temporary structures. For Stable States she has designed a circus out of the ruins of the countries past. There’s a moral in there.
Very much of its time is the cultural critique of Sadie Hennessey, English eccentricies and absurdities. Working with objects rooted in Blighty’s cultural framework she creates a feeling of both familiarity and disorientation as she explores ‘faux nostalgia’ – the dreams and lure of a time that simply never existed.
Very much en vogue is the practice of removing crafts and arts from their silos and blurring the lines between disciplines, and Elaine Johnson does this to great effect with her fabric and thread installations which loop in drawing and crafting. A detailed, labour intensive and somewhat labour intensive working process borders on that of the traditional fabric industry, but the introduction of human hair and audience perception ensures things are kept suitably challenging.
I’m particularly looking forward to seeing the work of Anna Howard whose simple and sparse drawings of friends and family immersed in activity, cafe scenes and daily life are executed in the rather underappreciated medium of black and blue biro pens. Like holiday snaps executed via a camera of ink, these snapshots of reality are remarkable in their humility.
Quite frankly, Mark Rose sounds a little odd. A fascination with fractal patterns and the relationship between the macro and micro structures that underpin the world has resulted n “Tinnitus Tetrahedron”, an idealized mathematical form that has been remade using cotton buds which he has obsessively accumulated over several years through a ritualized daily routine.
As avid readers you will of course already be familiar with Ben Gooding, whom I had a chat with back in December. Swathes of meticulously engraved lines build up on aluminium sheets to create pieces which to oscillate between two and three dimensional, the consciously habitual and the essential psyche, the industrial and the homespun. Being able to move around the gallery and see multiple images as the distance between oneself and the painting and the depth of light varies will be one of the highlights of the exhibition.
Currently unable to decipher any discernable theme, it is this promise of such variety which will lure me over the East side come February.