START Art Fair, Saatchi Gallery | London
Conrad Armstrong – TENSION
Thursday 15 September – Sunday 18 September 2016
The Quietus review writing about our Hackney Wick artist performances.
START is a platform that shines a spotlight on emerging artists and new art scenes. Organised by the prestigious Parallel Contemporary Art and the Saatchi Gallery, START creates the best possible showcase for innovative young galleries and new artists by providing an elegant environment with museum-quality spaces. In 2015, START featured 38 galleries from across 23 countries.
“START Art Fair is a truly global affair. […] There are galleries from Bogotá to Budapest via Colombo and Cape Town, Jeddah, Lagos, Riga and Seoul, which combine a high level of quality with some genuine surprises.” – The Art Newspaper
Unit G was very pleased to have participated in the third edition of START Art Fair, organised by Parallel Contemporary Art and held at the Saatchi Gallery, London. We are featuring an intriguing collection of paintings and sculptures from the body of work titled TENSION (2016). Our booth presents artist Conrad Armstrong’s investigative reflections on the structure of contemporary society in Britain.
TENSION is an emotional outburst from the artist post Brexit. The works show Armstrong’s typically experimental material approach to create a series of paintings that explore themes of Tension, Division and Violence in society. The works however don’t embrace a culture of negativity and fear but instead look to the future in search of positive outcomes through healing, resistance and open dialogue between fractured communities.
“We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.” – R. Buckminster Fuller
◇ E V E N T S ◇
• Saturday 17th September @1pm | ARTIST TALK •
Artist Conrad Armstrong will be giving a talk, reading new poetic works and screening his short film TENSION as part of the programme for his exhibition representing Unit G Gallery at The Saatchi Gallery for START Art Fair.
‘I am an English man
Cut adrift on a dustbin lid
In the Northern Ocean
Turning on a turnbuckle tide of tension
I stare back at an island
Being swallowed by a sinking horizon’
• Sunday 18th September @1pm | SUNDAY SERVICE •
SUNDAY SERVICE is Conrad Armstrong and Vicious Collective monthly worship of the great muses. Usually taking place on every first Sunday of the month at Vicious Collectives HQ and Conrad’s studio in Vittoria Wharf, Hackney Wick, Sunday service is an Open Live Arts Platform used by a network of people for free expression, collaboration, inspiration and annihilation as people make their artistic offerings. Sunday Service is there for the community it serves and provides a space in which those in attendance are free to flourish and fail within a nurturing and constructive environment. The dream is that similar Services will grow from communities across the world and give people the space they need to develop, test ideas and find inspiration.
To help introduce the idea of Sunday Service to a wider audience Conrad has taken to closing his exhibitions with special one off services. These are not technically ‘real’ Sunday Services as organising Sunday Services is completely against the core principals of Sunday Services. Sunday Services should happen regularly in the same place because people want them to happen and they just become part of their creative cycle and need for community… but for the purposes of spreading the word and to get a taste of what it’s like to be at a Sunday Service we have invited a few of the main characters who regularly perform in Vittoria Wharf.
