|
|
|
Vera’s Room
Maria Chevska, Hélène Cixous
September 10-October 22, 2005
Slought Foundation
Reception on Saturday, October 08, 2005
Exhibition Openings Series
|
|
|
Slought Foundation, a non-profit organization rethinking contemporary art, presents “Vera’s Room,” an exhibition in the gallery by British visual artist Maria Chevska. Maria Chevska will be present for the public reception on October 8th, 2005 from 6:30-8:30pm, which will also serve as the book release for "Vera's Room [the art of maria chevska]," forthcoming from Black Dog Publishing, London in October 2005. The exhibition and publication "Vera's Room" includes a text by French feminist Hélène Cixous, who will also give a public talk entitled "Cities" on the evening of the opening at 5:00pm. This program has been organized by Jean-Michel Rabaté and Aaron Levy.
Maria Chevska’s work, drawing on both painting and sculpture, examines a number of interrelated issues, including the implications of language upon the visual world and the narrative dimension of the visual. In the installation on view at Slought Foundation, her interest in collectivity and narrative informs an exploration of displacement and exile and comments on the figure of the stranger in contemporary life. The installation is of varying sizes and components and has been installed according to a series of prescriptive procedures determined by the artist and enacted by the curators. It has both ‘real’ objects in it—functional furniture, for example—and a number of ‘imaginary’ sculptures made up of both found and made objects. The objects, simple forms made from cloth or paper rendered solid in kaolin, look familiar and functional; however, they are not quite the same as the articles they resemble. This uncanny and abstract quality is given further tension in the installation due to the intimate setting and a sense of transient domesticity. This in turn suggests the fragile and nomadic existence of a stranger who achieves visibility on account of his or her sheer resourcefulness.
Maria Chevska was born in London, and lives and works in London. She is the Head of Painting at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at the University of Oxford. She recently exhibited "Reading Room," an installation with Simon Morley, at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in London (May 2005). She has also exhibited in The Wetterling Gallery (Stockholm), Maison de la Culture d’Amiens (Amiens), Marianne Hollenbach Gallery (Stuttgart), Kunstpunkt Berlin (Berlin), L'Artothèque de Caen (France), Maison des Arts de Bagneux (France), Stadtische Galerie im Albstadt (Germany), and Kunsthaus Kaufbeuren (Germany). She is represented by Andrew Mummery Gallery ( London) and Philippe Casini Gallery (Paris). Vera's Room [the art of maria chevska] is forthcoming in October 2005 from Black Dog Publishing in London and features the collaboration with Helene Cixous.
This program was made possible in part through the generous sponsorship of the British Council USA and the "Mission du livre" program of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs
 
Organized by
Jean-Michel Rabaté, Aaron Levy
MLA Style:
Maria Chevska, et al. "Vera’s Room." Slought Foundation Online Content. [08 October 2005;
Accessed 14 March 2010]. <http://slought.org/content/11300/>.
|
|
