​Middlesex Uni Second Years 2019
15th - 22nd February
​Private view 15th February 7 - 9pm

This exhibition will showcase a wide range of innovative contemporary work by emergent artists currently in their second year of the BA (Hons) Fine Art at Middlesex University. The course at Middlesex embraces a wide range of art practice, and has a tradition of encouraging cross over and hybrid forms of art practice. This exhibition will reflect the continuation of that tradition, providing a survey of work by a new generation of artists at a pivotal moment in their development, all of whom have chosen to launch their careers amidst the vibrancy and diversity of cosmopolitan London.

​MakeArt
Exhibition: 7th - 21st December 2018
Private View: 6pm - 8pm 7th December 

You are cordially invited to join the Mayor of Islington, Councillor Dave Poyser for the  opening of this exciting annual showcase of children's artwork, created on the MakeArt Programme by artists aged 4 - 16 years old.

You will encounter a huge painted tableau of dancing figures inspired by the Venice Carnival made by our MakeArt and Move artists during the summer holidays. There will also be mighty group painting of The Reptile House, where by moonlight the inhabitants have escaped! The centrepiece of the main gallery will be The Vegetable Man sculpture, constructed from all the bounty of harvest in our half term workshop 'Ode to Autumn' and it's story time at the foot of the towering Faraway Tree sculpture. As we are approaching Christmas, you are invited to visit the Toy Shop window to pick your favourite Teddy Bear, created collaboratively by our ArtStart artists. Clay Level one students present an array of succulents and cacti ceramics, while Clay Level two have crafted beautiful vessels with slab building techniques, representing each of their personal tastes and interests.
The Tuesday MakeArt class have made wooden pull string puppets making up a menagerie of creatures, both real and imagined. You can explore a paper mache city, constructed by Thursday MakeArt, with vivid colours and quirky detailing. The MakeMoreArt artists will be presenting beautiful prints inspired by flowers and birds, as well as transcriptions of Henry Moore's Sheep Sketchbook in fineline pen and ominous eye drawings.

This year we are delighted to include examples of work from art clubs held at Hugh Myddelton Primary School and Hanover Primary School, these include  a collection of detailed drawings of skeletons inspired by the decorative Mexican Day of the dead parade, and a flock of owls in charcoal!

The MakeArt Programme is devised and delivered by Islington Arts Factory artists Eleanor Pearce (Director of Art), Kayley Holderness, Josephine Sweeney, and Jude Lacey. We are committed to passing on our skills and unlocking the creative potential in every child through imaginatively engaging theme based projects. We respect the artistic merits of young artists  and consider their works on an equal par to adults artists work. 

​We Are All Made of Stars
An exhibition of abstract, explosive and stellar paintings by Amanda Christine Cox
9th - 16th November
Private View: 9th November 7 - 9pm

Amanda returns to her spiritual home, London, the vibrant and diverse city where she was born and raised, to present an extraordinary exhibition that subverts contemporary divisive narratives and instead celebrates all of humanity, the Universe’s potentially greatest creation.

Inspired by existential philosophy, Bauhaus ethos, colour theory, and popular discussions on astrophysics; the work combines playfulness and spirituality in gestural marks, texture, colour and material exploration.

Deliberately using bargain bucket materials, available to all, this Masters educated mature artist embraces inclusivity it its broadest sense, taking into account all our human experience of emotion, finance, sexuality, race and faith, and most of all, neurodiversity (as an ADHD adult she is very much an outsider and rebel), as well as any other infinite variety of marvellous human life.
​
We Are All Made of stars will pull you in, dazzle you, and intrigue you, with its deceptive simplicity.

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: enquiries@jamieshawart.co.uk / 07507771078

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www.jamieshawart.co.uk

Summer Salon 2018
8th - 29th June
Private view 8th June 6.30 - 9.30pm

​Islington Arts Factory is proud to present Summer Salon 2018. Now in it's eleventh year, this large scale open exhibition showcases the work of 90 emerging and established artists with over 200 artworks on display. Taking inspiration from the 18th Century French Salon style for the hanging, Summer Salon 2018 creates a lively and inspiring atmosphere, with a diverse range of work on show including painting, drawing, photography and print.

Catherine Ade Megan Armitage Lina Avramidou Emma Barnie Bob Barron Ruth Batham Rob Birch Mirela Bistran Laura Bodo Lajber Tony Bowen Louise Bradley Kirsty Campbell Elina Cerla Rebecca Chitticks Monica Chrysostomou Martin Church Robin Clark Tamara Chianta Laura Colamonaco Fiona Compton Maria Constantinou Annie Ho Cooper Natasha Crofts Vanessa Cumper Eurydyka Czerska Jess Davis Katya Derksen Curtis Donovan Stephanie Douet Anna Dzieciolowska Eidenai Jenny Evans John Evans Alicia Gradon Rupert Hartley Sarah Hill Chris Holley Philip Hood Amanda Hopkins Alice Hudson Heather James John Johnstone Emma Jones Maria Kokkonen Renata Kopac Magda Kuca Kirsten Lavers Tom Loffill Hamish Macaulay Shirley Maher Enzo Marra Stephen McGowan Marianne Moore Agata Nowak Laura Obon Mathilda Oosthuizen Marona Otero Sayo Ouchhi Abbie Paramor Richard Parsons Eleanor Pearce John Pearse Naroa Perez Esperanza Perkins Imogen Perkins Lindsay Pickett Klaus Pinter Deborah Robins Alister Shapley Jay Shaw-Baker Tom Arran Skinner Barbara Hope Steinberg Sia Sumana Lucia Svecova Joanna Szczvgiel Matthew Theobold Katya Timoshenko Emily Tull Shefali Wardell Christine Watson Nicola Green and Jairo Zaldua, Karen Zvorc

​SKETCHES FROM THE METROPOLITAN LINE AND OTHER THINGS
Artist: Martin Church
28th April - 12th May
Private View 27th April 7 -9pm
In every situation there is an emotional charge and one begins.
There are the things that we see, and the things that we feel, and both are equally important in the process of recording and processing the information and exercising the emotional charge.
 
The images were made on a smart phone and record the commuting experience from Hackney to Harrow.
 
The work is based on traditional, observational, figurative sketching and drawing.
The practice is to look at the object and make marks.
 
Until the ink is sprayed onto the paper, the work is not manifest and cannot be assessed, but once printed, it's real and can be reflected upon and decisions made about that particular effort of mark making. ​