Wednesday – Sundays, 1- 6pm

Ninna Bohn Pedersen, Rafał Zajko and guests, including Melanie Clifford in collaboration with six Royal College of Art Curating Contemporary Art students

Rules
1.    Everything is public
2.    We must inhabit a position of control
3.    No one can keep a position of control
4.    Everything is art
5.    Everyone must interact
6.    Vetoes will be published
7.    Experiments will be commemorated
8.    Things must collide daily
9.    Everything is open to interpretation
10.  We will break

‘Adjacent Practice Colliding Daily’ is an experiment. The two adjacent galleries in the Acme Project Space will be used as artists’ and curators’ studios to test the distinctions between places of production and display. This will be a collaboration between Acme artists Ninna Bohn Pedersen (Adrian Carruthers Award), Rafał Zajko (Chelsea Studio Award) and curators Anna Clifford, Matan Daube, Katherine Finerty, Dunya Kalantery, Gregory Leńczuk and Victor Wang (RCA Curating Contemporary Art). Artists and curators will be working together in the space for the three week duration, unfolding as a continuous event open to the public. http://adjacentpracticecollidingdaily.tumblr.com/

Rafał Zajko: 8 – 12 May 2013
Performance: Saturday 11 May, 7-9pm

Ninna Bohn Pedersen: 15 – 19 May 2013
Opening: Wednesday 15 May, 6-9pm
Closing event: Sunday 19 May, 1-6pm

Unscheduled collaboration: 22 – 26 May 2013     
Closing review: Sunday 26 May, 1-6pm

The show continues Acme’s annual collaboration with the Royal College of Art, Curating Contemporary Art MA, whereby first - year students undertake a series of studio visits to artists who are part of Acme’s Residency, Awards & Community Programme. Following detailed research and planning the students then lead on an exhibition proposal and manage all stages of the process to fruition, receiving support and advice from college tutors and Acme. The project provides an opportunity for students to put into practice their skills and knowledge accumulated during their studies and provides a framework for Acme artists to encounter and develop critical dialogue with young curators.

Private view: Thursday 6 June 2013, 6pm to 8pm

'Vernacular Hangover' is an exhibition of new work by Ben Cove conceived for the Acme Project Space. New paintings will be hung on top of, and alongside, large-scale reproductions of American press photographs from an early 1970s Primitive Art exhibition. Cove’s work examines the physical and social legacies of Modernist practices and its associated languages. Initially trained in architecture, earlier work utilised a broad range of media to focus on particular strains of Modernist architecture and design. These concerns have expanded out in the painting language that Cove has developed over recent years into an exploration of seemingly incongruous phenomena; the universal and the vernacular, the functional and the decorative, brashness and sobriety, abstraction and representation. Always aware of the physicality of the painting as an object, Cove’s paintings are often made to be hung in conjunction with other elements. Several works in the show will consist of paintings which sit alongside partially painted, wall and floor mounted plywood structures.

The exhibition will be accompanied by an essay by curator and writer George Vasey. 

'A painting is never just purely compositional; to make a line is to assert both an aesthetic and ethical position. Modernist Abstraction was all about these divisions; you and me, us and them, figurative and abstract.

Ben Cove’s paintings invoke a particular strand of Modernist Abstraction, yet one attuned to his own conditions. If Modernism was a response to its own technological advancements (aviation, industrialism, and the machine) then Cove’s paintings are informed by new abstractions (economic, social, and digital.) Where Modernism was oppositional, Cove collapses these dialectics. His paintings are at once heraldic, and diagrammatic, provisional yet monumental. Cove’s new paintings invoke Modernist Abstraction while offering a necessary corrective to its pathologies. We could be looking at an unbuilt home, a logo for a multinational corporation or simply two lines intersecting within a nebulous environment. Cove understands that while the Modernist project was about purging narratives and metaphors we can’t help but use the surface of an abstract painting as a type of mirror to reflect our own narratives back at us.' George Vasey

29 March to 1 April
1pm to 6pm
Private View: 28 March, 6pm to 8pm

There is more than one way to tell a story, and most stories have more than one possible ending. Peter Burgess is known for having a way with words, but in his solo show, 'Bryant and May . . . and', the artist uses simulacra of an everyday object and images of London cloudscapes to construct a set of narratives that pose more questions than they answer.

The studio where Burgess is currently undertaking an Australia Council for the Arts residency lies within the converted Bryant and May matchbox factory premises in Bow. Co-incidentally, the company, has a role in Australian History. The phrase “You will answer to Bryant and May” is allegedly attributed to the Wobblies (International Workers of the World). It was an intimidatory threat concerning various small fires in Sydney 1910-20. This mundane domestic object, a matchbox, has the potential to instill terror. Or not.

The “. . . and” section of the show represents work that has been completed during the first three weeks of Burgess’s London residency. In these 2D works, the artist puts a contemporary spin on photographic history’s notion of Equivalence. These works on paper mimic the iconic cloudscapes of seminal photographers Minor White and Alfred Stieglitz, but they have been layered with texts and corporate logos the artist has encountered during his time in London. What you see isn’t what you get. The dark liminal zone between, brimming with potential, is where the focus lies.

Peter Burgess Biog

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