Preview: OLIVER GRIFFIN & NICK JEFFREY

OLIVER GRIFFIN
Demonstrations of Patterns in Flow
Downstairs at Holly Grove

This set of nine new photographs by Oliver Griffin (b. 1983 Boscombe, Dorset, UK - works in London and Berlin) are from an extensive series taken in 2015 during the level vibes BMX competition at Crayford leisure centre. The photographs show combinations of lines (in red, black, yellow, blue, green and white) denoting the playing areas for different competitive sports. They also show series of curved tyre marks left by the movements of the BMX bike made under the control of its rider in competition. The combination of the sets of rigorous lines and graceful marks make up what Oliver Griffin has termed the “demonstration of patterns in flow”. Each image presents a shorthand for his photographic capture of the orderly world of rules and regulations contrasting with the skilled free wheeling of the Flatland rider. To return to the philosophy of BMX, where the only ideal that comes to mind is freedom, Oliver Griffin’s is a photographic freestyle. In his world, rules are there only for your imagination to break them. The exhibition will also include its own sets of floor lines for the rule-based sports of korfball, tennis and hockey over which on two days BMX flatland riders will meet (5 & 20 May).

NICK JEFFREY
Folk
Upstairs at Holly Grove

Nick Jeffrey (b. 1984 Rinteln, Germany - works in Berlin) presents a new body of work in dialogue with recent paintings and films, continuing an exploration into movement and fluctuation by processes of layering surfaces. The manipulation and filtration of visual material generated on and through the canvases enters a dialogue with the distortion of moving images in the film works, a journey through transparency and opacity, abstraction and representation.

We get in each other’s way once in a while is a book, a project, a bridge, a shared venture. It is the organic continuation of Dream Divider, Nick Jeffrey’s solo exhibition at Horse and Pony Fine Arts, Berlin (June 2016). It functions as a repository of material and findings as well as a further explorative undertaking, setting the ground for discontinuous voices to meet, gather, confabulate, narrate. Edited by curator Carolina Ongaro, this publication combines documentation of Nick Jeffrey’s past and current works with strands of research informing his practice. The visual journey is accompanied by a fictional story by artist and writer Anna Szaflarski, and two essays by curators and writers Katharina Weinstock and Alex Bacon. The design and graphics have been conceived by Céline Strolz as an accurate understanding of, and important contribution to, the project. This way, the book accommodates a range of practices that, though gathering around the artist’s body of work, set apart and unravel with a life of their own.The book is produced with the support of the Artist’s International Development Fund and will be launched on 20 May.