ANDREW KÖTTING’s Buoyed By The Irrelevance Of Their Own Significance pays tribute to the startling incongruity of stuffed animals glimpsed on journeys up and down the Essex Road, “buoys of poetic improbability bobbing up and down in a sea of city-life normality.”
"I’ve lived in South London for most of my life and whenever I’ve headed northeast along Essex Road I’ve been drawn to Get Stuffed - the taxidermy shop. Long before Tintype ever arrived it was a landmark and fascinator. Not the Joe Orton Library, vessel for his cut-and-pasted pornography nor the women of the night that used to light up the town and paint my face red. No, it was the incongruity of a giraffe glimpsed through a shop window or the fleeting, rain spattered image-burn of an ostrich up a tree that had a hold of me.
It’s inspired me.
GEORGE EKSTS’s Essex Boulevard is a nocturnal, futuristic journey down a street which both is and isn’t Essex Road. The shop names are the same and in the same order but the signs are re-designed. Eksts creates a parallel reality, a digitally animated, sci-fi Essex Road.
“I like the variety and sense of joyful freedom in the design of the shop signage along the road. And I love the sheer range of shops and businesses there. From the most essential and practical, like the hardware shops, and the most frivolous, like the Sea Dragon Aquarium, and everything else in between. It seems to be constantly changing.”
EMILY RICHARDSON’s Assemblage was filmed in the Criterion Auction Rooms on Essex Road. Richardson was struck by the temporary tableaux of objects, furniture and artworks. She has worked the footage into mesmerising repeating patterns and kaleidoscopic designs; decorative elements that reference the materials of which they are made, wood, leather, glass, woven fabrics.
"I was thinking about the haberdashers, textile companies and hand block printed wallpaper firms that used to be in Islington. In the Criterion Auction Rooms you see domestic objects, all with a personal history, competing with each other to find a new home. Pairs of chairs look like they do not want to be separated. There’s something for everyone - the lover of kitsch, the trendy, the connoisseur - an eclectic mix of styles from a range of historical periods, differing wildly in value, all in it together, fighting against the homogeneity of the high street, holding on to a past Essex Road, an Islington of antiques and junk shops that have almost all been gentrified and replaced with coffee shops and chain stores. Neutralised radicalism, or to use a slogan from the New Resurrection church that has taken over the old Carlton Cinema in Essex Road - Divine Regeneration. The auction house is a reminder of a London fast disappearing, itself seemingly under the hammer."
FRANCES SCOTT’s Apex: in a darkroom a 35mm negative is enlarged and printed. The image is a kind of hieroglyph, from which the Essex Road might be deciphered. The film looks to motifs found within the 1930s Egyptian revival architecture of the old Carlton Cinema, and draws in other sites such as a funeral directors, and a dispensing-pharmacy that offers photographic film-processing services.
Frances Scott's APEX and Anna Lucas's OPI 21, OOPSY DAISY, TIGER LILY can be seen as ongoing conversations showing the shared working methods between the two artists. The two films intersect, whilst simultaneously operating as discrete works.
ANNA LUCAS’s film OPI 21, OOPSY DAISY, TIGER LILY is inspired by Tintype¹s location between a beauty salon and a taxidermy shop and a number of conversations with residents along the Essex Road. This flickering film of still images creates connections between tropical fish, fur and fingernails.
Anna Lucas's OPI 21, OOPSY DAISY, TIGER LILY and Frances Scott's APEX and can be seen as ongoing conversations showing the shared working methods between the two artists. The two films intersect, whilst simultaneously operating as discrete works.
Interior, night. An empty gallery. A woman sits at a desk. There is a small table lamp. She is very still. TONY GRISONI's paradoxical loop BOOTSTRAPPED featuring Anamaria Marinca, turns Tintype’s gallery space into a film set where cinematic convention eats its own tale.
In SUKI CHAN’s Obscura an inverted image of Essex Road floods the interior space of the gallery, projecting onto the walls, ceiling and floor. Filmed from sunrise to sunset using a camera obscura and timelapse, Obscura juxtaposes the internal space of the gallery with the external environment of the street outside.
“The work is about place, space and time, but also about places that are transient. In the film, at times we become more aware of the physical architecture of the gallery, whilst the inverted image of the street is faint. But at other times, the boundaries of the space are obscured in shadows and the inverted image is at its strongest. The inversion of the image is for me about getting closer to an aspect of reality – how our eyes perceive light in each instant before it is interpreted by our brains.”
PENNY WOOLCOCK “I am interested in the objects and the people we discard. The things we ignore and consider worthless can be very beautiful when you look at them properly. I decided to cast bits of rubbish as the main characters in a road movie and chose a broken Styrofoam container, a plain blue plastic bag and a pink one with a star on it. The film is called Road Movie.
Each of the principals displayed a distinct style and personality: the Styrofoam container revealed itself to be quite stubborn, either refusing to budge at all or scuttling off and hiding behind things, quivering sadly. The blue bag was wayward and temperamental, taking any opportunity to head off and do its own thing, while the pink bag was a floaty, silly delight. The team had to keep chasing them down and feeding them back into the designated film set, tolerating the odd friend they picked up on the way. They eventually made it to Tintype although by then one of the blue bags had run away with a car and had to be replaced by an understudy from the vegetable shop. The battered and diminished Styrofoam container immediately slid behind the gallery door but the two bags flew around inspecting the art before rushing back out to the street.
I once looked at ‘Sweeping Up’ with a five year old. It’s a Joseph Beuys piece with a pile of rubbish and a broom inside a glass vitrine. We discussed whether the context of being in a gallery turned that rubbish into art because you looked at it differently. She decided that it did."