SMOKE

Various artists - Curated by Implicasphere

5 October 2008 - 15 December 2008

Ground-breaking exhibition, talks, workshops and performances exploring the theme of SMOKE

Smoke has plumed and swirled since history began. Not so long ago, in a London that was dubbed 'The Big Smoke', it reached a suffocating density as it gushed from chimneys and mighty industrial plants producing its infamous pea-souper smogs. Now, in this once smokiest of cities, with its smokeless fuels and smoking bans, smoke is gradually fading from our fireplaces and fingertips. Were it not rapidly enveloping other parts of the globe, it might seem as if smoke is slowly going up in smoke, becoming its own metaphor. This exhibition smokes out some of the substance’s overlooked traces and marks its numberless manifestations across history and culture.

The exhibition 'Smoke' comprises a curious collection of artefacts from major museums, contemporary artworks, archive films, ephemera and everyday objects. It presents a cacophony of objects, images, texts and sounds that extends beyond the gallery.

'Smoke' includes includes works by contemporary artists such as a monumental tapestry by Pae White; Simon Patterson's performance, Landskip; Germaine Koh's installation that converts Pump House Gallery's computer activity into Morse-coded spurts of smoke; an experimental short film by John Smith; Hayley Newman's Volcano Lady, who sports a dress that issues larval puffs; and Henry Krokatsis' delicate fumage drawings.

Intermingled with the artworks are objects such as NASA's Aerogel, or 'solid smoke'; an ethnographic pipe collection; an antique smoke enema resuscitator; chronophotographer Étienne-Jules Marey's photographs of smoke trails, early experiments with magic and film; an authentically smoke-blackened brick from the Black Country; examples of smokeless fuel; a 1935 documentary on skywriting; a new film by Implicasphere with an eclectic montage of smoky phenomena, and a library of books and pamphlets on smoke in fields such as war, computer graphics, health, environmental pollution, makeup and literature.

Smoke is curated by the editors of Implicasphere: an itinerary of meandering thought in collaboration with Pump House Gallery. Implicasphere is an occasional mini-publication that seeks to unearth and revive compelling, illuminating and curious ideas in the form of image and text fragments taken unadulterated from fields as diverse as folk craft, nuclear physics and metaphysical poetry. Each issue takes the form of a single printed broadsheet and has as its theme an everyday word that seems direct and concrete: Stripes, The Onion, Smoke. But its collage effect combines often incompatible
shards of thought in webs of association that tangle the meaning of those simple words.

www.implicasphere.org.uk

Events
OPENING EVENT - SIMON PATTERSON, LANDSKIP
Sunday 5 October, 2 - 3pm
Location: Battersea Park
Free - all welcome
The exhibition launch is marked by a public performance in Battersea Park of Simon Patterson’s Landskip. First presented at Compton Verney in 2000, the installation brings a pastoral painterliness to Second World War camouflage testing. Military smokes (smoke-making devices) are installed by Patterson and timed to emit plumes of coloured smoke that unfurl ribbons of green, blue, red, violet, yellow and orange into the landscape. This event will be followed by a special viewing of the exhibition.

SMOKE FAYRE
Saturday 8 November, 12 - 4pm
Location: Pump House Gallery, Battersea Park
Free - all welcome
A bundle of smoky-themed workshops, demonstrations and performances in the grounds of the gallery, for both children and adults, including tastings and demonstrations of food smoking, trying out smoky eye makeup techniques, meeting Smoky Angora rabbits and learning how to knit their hair into smoky forms, watching magicians make objects disappear in a puff of smoke.

TRAILING SMOKE
Wednesday 12 November, 6.30 - 8.30pm
Location: The Art Workers Guild, 6 Queen Square, London, WC1N 3AT
Admission: £5
What is smoke exactly? We invite specialists to try to pin down smoke as it is manifest in fields as diverse as the literary history of smog and cutting-edge materials science. The panel includes broadcaster and historian of the poetics of air, Professor Steven Connor, and 'Professor' Mervyn Heard on the practice of projection on smoke by false ghost-raisers in the late 18th and early 19th
Centuries.

Please note this is a ticketed event and has limited capacity. Tickets can be purchased in advance in person, or over the phone from the gallery.