News and Opportunities
A lot of Small House Gallery artist opportunities will open up in the new year, including the opportunity to show your work as part of a hybrid physical/‘phigital’ collaboration between Small House Gallery curator Eldi Dundee and the Guild of Micro Galleries (with specially invited non-guild guest micro-gallerists)‘ under the banner of ‘SMALL PACKAGES‘ at APT Gallery, London being planned for April 15-23 2024! … (More on this soon.)
As for the Small House on Tour co-curation project, Small House Cottage has taken up semi-permanent residency within Turntable Gallery, Grimsby, NE Lincolnshire in from November 2022 for a radically different programme co-curated by Dale Wells, Darren Neaves, and Eldi Dundee.
Small House Gallery One & Small House Two will continue to operate from their South London domicile for the foreseeable future, curated by Eldi Dundee and guest curators.
Check back for further updates & announcements here, or via our Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, & TikTok accounts, & if you’re an ARTIST? then CuratorSpace is the place your you!
>>>> New CuratorSpace OPEN CALL <<<<
April 2023 – Joshua Y’Barbo and Daughter: Poppet & Pop
Small House Gallery is proud to announce ‘Poppet and Pop’, a daughter-daddy exhibition of drawings, sculptures, and video. Specifically made for this exhibition, these works are about responding to each other, sharing mark-making gestures and materials, communicating across our different life experiences, and collaboratively creating artworks in the micro-moments of parenthood and domestic life.
Bio
Joshua is an artist and expert in participatory art and design who makes artwork and designs art clubs. Over the past two decades, he has maintained a studio practice, creating, and selling commissioned artwork, original paintings, and limited & open-edition prints. Since 2013, he has taught undergraduate and postgraduate students, curated exhibitions, and conducted practice-related research, all of which he has combined into a multi-hyphenated professional fine art practice. He follows a postmodern approach to creating artwork, which focuses on visual allegory and personal metaphor, often delivered in collaged compositions, and assembled work associated with artists active during the cultural revolution of the 1960s. He primarily works in digital printmaking to create visual narratives that simultaneously represent his world experiences and speculate how things around us all fit together. His most recent projects explore this ongoing existential crisis through simulation theory and nostalgia. He was born in the USA but has lived and worked in the UK since 2008. His daughter was born at the end of 2019, and they began drawing together in early 2022. Her favourite animal is an elephant, she loves blue AND pink, and she’s recently progressed from Paw Patrol to Spidey and his Amazing Friends.
joshuaybarbo.com
joshuaybarbo.blogspot.com
https://www.instagram.com/ybarbojoshua/
May 2023 – Florencia Durante
The brilliant architecturally & sculpturally-minded RCA-educated Argentinian fine art photographer Florencia Durante will be creating new work specific to the scale of Small House Gallery.
Image: Whirlpool, from her Light Action series, 2006
We are so privileged to have Florencia’s first show after she took some time out to raise her gorgeous family and pursued a stellar career on the consulting side of the art world. This show will mark her return to making her own work again. This is BIG, even though it’s also small.
In lieu of a bio, hear Florencia talking about her background in the clip below (from her RCA days).
She defines her work thus: “My fine art photography is very theatrical. It’s very stage-based; it takes place in a studio, and I create performances for the camera.”
One thing Florencia does not mention in this video clip (and that is because it came afterwards) is the high-end art consultancy work she became known for, and which slotted in so perfectly with raising her family. As is usually the case with artist-mothers/mother-artists, our own art making energies get funnelled into the crucial role and tasks involved in child rearing, and kids cost money to raise, so maintaining a viable career as a working artist when the children are a certain age is not really a practical option for most artist-parents, especially artist-mothers.
Once an artist, always an artist! And like she says in the video: “Whatever you do, it’s gonna, at the end, come together. … I don’t think to limit yourself by having to choose, I think everything can be done, everything is possible – you can be a chef and you can be an artist and you can be a writer, and you can still be a mother. … and it’s gonna take me time to fine tune, and I’m in that process, and … I think the main thing is I just have to be patient…”
Her fans will have been patient too, and that patience will, no doubt, be well rewarded. Now that her children are older, we will almost certainly start to see more and more from this stellar creator. Small House Gallery is a perfect testing ground and showcase for her playful, low-stakes re-entry into the art world (on the professional art-making side of things, that is). We are honoured to be the stepping stone right on the threshold to the way back ‘in’.
Also in May 2023: Sijia Guo 思嘉 郭 (a.k.a. Zoe) with sculptures and prints expressing the alienation of cultural suppression and ‘othered’ ‘outsider’ treatment, not only experienced with foreign travel, but sometimes within the borders of one’s own land.
June 2023: maquettes by Poppy Whatmore MRSS, reflecting on their function and significance in her process of making sculpture.
July/August 2023: an exhibition of hauntingly amorphous sculptures by Ali Darke in which “echoes of trauma, loss and psychic fragmentation are viscerally expressed in materiality and form.”
Sept 2023 –
& beyond…
In the Autumn 2023 (& beyond) lineup, we have a mini ‘Poster Girls’ show by contemporary surrealist Rosemary Jane Cronin with an exclusive and fabulous new cocktail bar by miniaturist Yvette Driver of Little Papa Dollhouse, Brighton; the 60s hairdo drawings, paintings and press-on nail sculptures of Chrissie Stewart, the postponed shows:
- Winner of the David and Yuko Juda Art Foundation Award, 2022: Brian Dawn Chalkley
- ‘Two for Joy’ with Liz Honeybone & Pia Goddard, of the former Skip Sisters collective
- expert papier maché sculptor and football coach Emmely Elgersma
- comic artist, social commentator/connector/decontrstuctor? Louise Ashcroft
- Artist, miniaturist, model-maker and rebel curator Dale Christopher Wells
AND, co-curators of Turntable Gallery Dale Wells and Darren Neave will not only be installing a couple of surprise exhibitions of their own works, but also an exciting and innovating programme of solo shows by hard hitting artists on their main gallery roster who will be offered takeovers of Small House Cottage during its long residency at Turntable Gallery, Grimsby!! Watch this and their space!
#smallhouseontour #smallhousenortheast #smallhousegrimsby #smallhouseatturntable
PLUS, and this is REALLY REALLY REALLY EXCITING STUFF:
There is at least one Guild-wide collaborative exhibition on the horizon involving an international array of Guild of Micro Galleries members and specially invited guest micro gallery curators. The first will be at APT Gallery, London, April 2024 (more concrete info to follow).
There will be SO MANY OPPORTUNITIES FOR ARTISTS to showcase their original small-scale contemporary artworks in the various micro galleries curated by Guild members’ and invited guest micro gallerists who will be showing their micro galleries together in one physical space for the first time ever.
Small House Gallery 