Junctions
A show of paintings by Róisín Fogarty, Maj-Gret Gaupås & Nadja Gabriela Plein
curated by
Nadja Gabriela Plein
 
​Islington Arts Factory is located at the tip of a junction where one road becomes two (or two, one), enclosing it on two sides, island-like, by main roads (Pankhurst Rd and Camden Rd).
 
Imagine the act of painting as a junction, an intersection between experience and the material topography of the world. Roisin paints from the memory of navigating urban landscapes. Maj-Gret works with the sensations of the weather, amongst other factors, and Nadja’s practice is a turning towards the materiality of the world.
 
If painting is a junction, then perhaps it is one that never quite measures up, two roads that nearly meet. Junctions of nearness, more miscommunication than communication. A word is a junction: we think we mean the same thing and meet at the word with confidence only to realise that we have all gone off in different directions.
 
The word junction comes from the Latin ‘jungere’, to join. Yet, in our experience a junction is only a temporal, impermanent joining: a brief touching down in the same place, something travelled through. (Even Camden Rd and Pankhurst Rd become two again, further down.)
 
How is a junction the same place for two people? Imagine travelling from Paddington to Swansea, stopping briefly at Swindon. Is the station I see the same as the one experienced by the commuter waiting there for the umpteenth time? Yet, we both, somehow, speak of the same railroad junction.
 
Three painters in one space, mapping junctions of proximity, mapping junctions of cross communication, their works making a temporary topography, creating a map of potential meetings.

www.roisinfogarty.com
www.gaupart.com
www.nadjagabrielaplein.co.uk

Ztenzila's World (The Return of Zoz)
ZTENZILA
21st - 28th September
Private View: 21st September 7.00pm - 9.00pm

​ITS THAT DARN RED TAGGING HOODLUM HERO AT IT AGAIN !!!

​HERE TO DO WHAT HE DOES BEST MAKE AND SHOW OFF HIS talentless artwork to the public if he can!!

It's ZTENZILA and yet again he is making his ten year come back to do another exhibition at the ISLINGTON ARTS FACTORY this year coming September !!!

He has been doing other stuff, if you've been watching him on youtube or Instagram or what ever stupid social media his in...but any way, this is he 10 year celebration in doing other what he does best ...making great and perhaps once in a life time urban graffiti ,urban and comic art...

Mind you this is a private view on 21st SEPTEMBER so please spread the word about this exhibition and tell your friends about him if you love cartoon, urban,crazy saney art ...please come to this exhibition ...not only will ZTENZILA be showing off his art work...he'll be selling limited edition merchandise such as

T-shirts,mask,action figures and new books based on his work like THE ZTENZILA TRILOGY, THE ART OF ZTENZILA
and THE DELUXE ZTENZILA TRILOGY EDITION  packed with more photos and feature
...as well as the INFAMOUS ZTENZILA MOVIE on DVD too !!!

so please put 21st SEPTEMBER free as it's ZTENZILA or cheaply know as the ZOZ next exhibition since 2008 ...it will be he's greatest show ever ...so please come one come all to the exhibition of a life time

BE THERE AND BE REBELLIOUS TOO !!!
www.ztenzila-world.weebly.com

'I Loved You, Narcissus'
A Solo Exhibition by Jamie Shaw
7th - 14th September
Opening Reception 7th September 6.30 - 9.00pm

''For the most part, my practice is concerned with figurative painting; that’s what I want to focus on with this show. There’s this figure that populates almost all of my paintings. He doesn’t have a name but he exists, eternally, in a space in my mind: ageless and graceful. It’s like… a mirage of beauty, a mythology I’m constantly chasing: but in the paintings he’s always alone. The spaces – the environments – are undoubtedly pretty and euphoric but there’s often this deep melancholy that comes out of the solitude. Like a yearning for lost love. These are fleeting, ephemeral moments of poetry and pain. I’ve called the show “I Loved You, Narcissus” because I’m becoming really interested in what this concept of narcissism means to us in 2018 – not pathological narcissism, but the general vanity of things. I’ve always thought there was this tragic beauty in the image of narcissus by the lake, eternally locked in gaze with his own reflection… somehow, the Instagram selfie doesn’t quite match up. If it’s narcissistic to create pictures - to be obsessed with creating pictures - that represent who you are or how you feel, then I suppose this exhibition is the brainchild of my love affair with narcissism. There’s a religiosity to these things for me, and I think it’s really exciting to show so many of the paintings in the context of an old church. I just hope people enjoy it!”
                               
Jamie Shaw (b. 1992) is a painter and visual artist based in London. With “I Loved You, Narcissus”, the Islington Arts Factory presents Shaw’s first solo exhibition in the capital. The show is curated by the artist and takes a retrospective format, aiming to provide a cohesive snapshot of a unique and determined practice as it has developed over the last four years.
 
Shaw treats his art practice as a realm of personal expression related to contemporary lived experience, believing that the personal is political. He works with intention to create intimate, sentimental musings concerned with expressing desire, longing, and failures in dreaming. His paintings and texts examine the discrepancies between sexuality and innocence, and examine the interstices between consumption and desire; marginality and complicity; kitsch and sublime. He counts life, difference, and innocence amongst his main inspirations. Shaw aims to create poetic encounters of a vision informed both by the minority queer experience (specifically focusing on the ‘sissy boy’ as combatting constructs of ‘toxic masculinity’) and myths of the artist as ‘outsider’ which emerged with Romance. The work expresses personal struggles in desire and constitutes a failed quest for ‘pink utopia’. Shaw works incessantly to create his own mythology, and his deities live on a pink cloud.
 
In De Certau’s “practice of everyday life” it was first suggested that the power of the individual consumer lie in his tactics of consumption: the way in which a consumer chooses to navigate immovable frameworks of power, coercion and imposed standards of desire by his selection, manipulation and personal revaluation of media and spectacle to suit his own needs[1]. In a contemporary context, Shaw’s practice takes this a step further. To compose his paintings, he appropriates aesthetic, narrative and thematic devices from wide-ranging sources: from Disney movies to fashion magazines, from pop music lyrics to fine-art paintings.  He takes these sources, dismantles and manipulates them, queers and recasts them as part of his own individual and unwavering narrative of expression – which in turn can be consumed, within the context of fine-art, as spectacle, providing emotive moments of self-reflection, escapism and quiet in an otherwise frenetic and difficult world.

All works in this exhibition are for sale. Prices on request.
All Sales/Press enquiries: [email protected] / 07507771078

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www.jamieshawart.co.uk