Author: featherhouse

featherhouse were once again invited to show work for Decima in an exhibition, this time in London at a temporary pop-up gallery in collaboration with Jackie Clarke and Nomad Galleries – What Happens After The Ball?

Adapting the photo collage technique used for the Britain’s Rubbish exhibition, featherhouse again allowed romantic fictional characters to invade well known tourist spots. This time in giant form, and in Picadilly, spreading the big love at the nation’s dazzlingly colourful home of Eros and er, Coca-cola….

The A3 print outs were positioned near the thermostat in the gallery… sizzling!

Nomad Galleries, Jackie Clark & Decima present

An art show not to be missed nor sniffed at

W H A T?H A P P E N S?A F T E R?T H E?B A L L ?

Adam Dant + Stephen Gill + Mark McGowan + James Hopkins + Vicki Gold & Alex Fear + Simon Ould + Brian Morrissey + Eleanor Lindsay Fynn + Mark McGowan + Joy Collie + Ingrid Z + Piers Wardle + Jackie Clark + Laura Oldfield-Ford + Louise Camrass + Micalef + Richard Niman + Gilbert & George + David C West + Derrick Welsh + Alex Chappel + Angelica Fernando + Byron Pritchard + Dr. Adolf Steg + Emma Andrews + Emma Forsberg + Featherhouse + Francis Farmer + Geoff Hautman + Geraldine Cox + Geraldine Ryan + Harriet Fleuriot + Ian Wright + Jackson D Ferguson + Jenny Gordon + Josephine Ada Chinonye Chime + Julesy P + Katarina Forss + Kate Ketchup + Larry McGinity + Louise Loudoun + Mark Reeves + Mel Simone Elliot + Natasha Morland + Oliver Dungey + Richard Starbuck + Rob Sargent + Rudi, Count Phalle + Takayuki Hara + Tom McDougall + Rose Mouton

Dress for after the ball.

We cannot emphasise enough, this event is strictly INVITE ONLY. To gain entry you MUST rsvp here as “coming” or go to www.decimagallery.com and follow the links. This is a legal requirement of the venue so there will be no exceptions, sorry. Get on the guest list.

What happens after the ball??That’s what I want to know.?In the one step they all hold you so near?and whisper things that a girl shouldn’t hear.

But in the two step?They have a new step?that isn’t in the dance at all.

And when the band began you’d have a surprise.?You could tell their thoughts by the look in their eyes?If that’s what they do when they’re dancing…?What happens after the ball?

On the weekend of 12/13th December 2009, feather house went to the Tate Modern for Rob Pruitt’s Flea Market, where we were selling more romance-themed items on the Tate Modern  Turbine Hall Bridge– beating heart books, prints from Britain’s Rubbish and What Happens After The Ball, as well as some beautiful lighting inspired by exploding males torsos and a tombola style lucky dip where you win a saucy novel with the naughtiest bit bookmarked by an original featherhouse postcard. Ooh la la!

Here’s the info about Flea Market:

“Holiday cards! Ornaments! Garlands! Mixtapes! Crafts! Artwork! Clothing! Gifts! Photographs! Fruitcakes! Stockings! All by your favorite artists, celebrities, and other surprise guests!

A festive reprise of Rob Pruitt’s Christmas and Kwanzaa (an African-American festival) version of the ‘Flea Market’ event, programmed to coincide with the exhibition Pop Life: Art in a Material World, in which Pruitt also appears.

Originally held at Gavin Brown’s Passerby gallery in New York in the late 1990s, then featuring artist peers including Elizabeth Peyton, Piotr Uklanski and Rikrit Tiravanija, Pruitt’s Flea Market is a playful take on a curated group exhibition cum entrepreneurial initiative.

For Tate Modern, Pruitt has worked with a new selection of London-based artists, plus some of the original participants, to set up market stalls with everything from artists editions to old 12²s, in a seasonal flavour.”

http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/eventseducation/musicperform/20642.htm

On the 29th October 2009 Harriet and Constance ran away to Berlin for a few days, to take part in Decima Gallery’s rather wonderful Britain’s Rubbish exhibition on 73 Hasenheide, Kreuzberg, Berlin.

featherhouse was exhibiting a series of photo-collages entitled A REASON FOR BEING IN BERLIN, which were a mix of photos that Constance had taken when she was living in Berlin in the winter/spring of 1990, and photos that Harriet had taken when she was staying in Berlin in the summer of 2005. We then superimposed the illustration of an embracing couple from Penny Jordan’s book A Reason For Being on Constance’s photos, and Harriet re-enacted this embrace with her hunky manfriend Duncan McGonigle and superimposed this onto her photos.

Underneath the framed photos we had a pile of Mills and Boon paperbacks with postcard versions of the images neatly tucked into the book and sealed in envelopes, with “TAKE ME NOW, I’M FREE” written above. As soon as Harriet wrote this on the wall during the private view they were devoured.

Why this illustration you ask? Why give books away? A Reason For Being was the romance novel that publisher Mills and Boon decided to give away for free to East German women after the Berlin wall came down, an entire 750,000 translated copies no less.

We felt that somehow this had been a little unnoticed within stories of the wall, and if noticed then dismissed, no doubt seen as trashy fiction that had little effect in the grand political scheme of things – one Independent writer dismisses the books as “Liquid Narcotic”. But this genre of fiction gets read by millions of women worldwide and undoubtedly affects their perceptions of sex, relationships, men, family, careers, so it then follows that perhaps a woman’s experience and opinions on these things in turn are also a little dismissed.

We liked the idea that these books were seen as being dumped on the women in East Germany and the idea that you could give away romance for free and that romance will always be very much an important part of political dramas and we liked the apparent novelty of our mother/daughter collaboration but also that the way in which we connect with one another was reflected in the nostalgic nature of the work….

And of course we felt this all tied in rather nicely with the “Britain’s Rubbish” concept.

All in all, we had loadsa fun and it was also a perfect opportunity to meet up with one of Harriet’s partners in crime – Claudia Sarkany (aka Gloria Salami).