So there in Number Eighteen

Jo Addison
Ray Andrews
Neil Keith Baker
Sam Brown
Caroline Jupp
Andy Parker
Sarah Pettitt

So there in Number Eighteen – the first line of Ted Hughes’ poem about this house.  In contrast to the memorialised house and inhabitants of the poem, these seven artists point towards something more present and continuous, to life in Number Eighteen as it is now.  

Jo Addison has made simple sculptures, with an emphasis on hand-finished surface. She systematically unpicks everyday objects, remaking until she's reduced them to their fundamental elements: form, weight, balance. Deeply sculptural concerns posing existential questions like "how would someone make a shelf before a shelf existed?"

Ray Andrews has made a small relief sculpture that combines a culturally specific object and a historic figure. It's shrewd, romantic and funny, and reveals the joy in labour and its transformative power.

Neil Keith Baker has made paintings that are deliberately unspecific - thin, layered gouache seems paradoxically reductive in its application. There are paintings with faces punctuated by paintings of near-solid colour. He is concerned with the edges of the canvas, and sometimes there are borders.

Sam Brown has made a slide show of images taken over the duration of a walk between his house and my house. Black and white images captured late at night or very early in the morning, recording absence and presence simultaneously but denying close scrutiny - mirroring the method of production: on the move, shooting as he went, on his way here.

Caroline Jupp has made a two-part collection of words - short stories about favourite movies, boiled down to two constituent parts: crying scenes and chicken scenes, if any. And CVs from current inhabitants and visitors - simple lists of all the work ever done from our first jobs to now, an antidote to the CVs produced in order to get work. 

Andy Parker has made a photograph of a very large box balanced on a semi-derelict boat. Re-creation and appropriation, new space and old space suggest the possibility of creating an other place in which to exist. 

Sarah Pettitt has made small brightly painted objects as a means of traversing the space beyond the picture plane (she has previously been making paintings). Compositionally improvised collages that flip back and forth between the remains of the image or the remains of the process, funny little votive offerings.

So there in Number Eighteen is Parlour's first exhibition in the United Kingdom, curated and hosted by Susie Clark in the house she shares with friends in Bloomsbury, London.

Parlour is a nomadic curatorial project started in 2008 by Leslie Rosa, that presents weekend-long exhibitions in private homes. Its impetus is to showcase the work of contemporary artists in a unique and dynamic setting.  

Though most exhibitions have been based in New York City, Parlour is slowly expanding its programming to include shows in different cities throughout the country and around the world.