Sarah Sparkes
BORDERLINE
borderline

The Patriothall Gallery, 1D Patriothall, off Hamilton Place, Stockbridge, Edinburgh EH3 5AY

Exhibition runs from 25th March to 4th April 2007
12 till 6pm everyday, except Monday, and 12 till 9pm on Thursday

Preview 5.30 till 8pm, Saturday 24th March

The Patriothall Gallery is pleased to present the first of two shows featuring the work of ten contemporary artists. Five are based and work in London, the other five in Edinburgh. The exhibition explores discourses between the artists of the two metropolises, and examines identity and role, geographic and social geography, the political and the comic.

Sarah Sparkes is playing with the significance of elevating names to a position of dominance. Names and titles are spelt out on bunting flags that reign above the viewers head, raising the question have we entered a political arena, a royal jubilee, a sporting event or a village fete. The theme of borders is continued in Sparkes' three evocative paintings of shorelines.

Marq P Kearey's work is a reaction to the emotional unrest born from superstitious nonsense that keeps people that live in different places, apart. Displayed around the gallery are a series of paintings making references to various cultural backgrounds and delivering responses to there assumed identity, through the expression of jokes.

Geraldine Swayne describes her work as being 'insightful, yet also the work, or the consequence, of malfunctioning glands. Pictures made the day everything was nothing and visa versa. She produces small oil paintings of sombre and yet quite devastating power.

Having recently returned to utilising maps, Peter Mountford has now embarked on the epic 'A squared and reconfigured world' which contains 396 6"X4" panels in 4 sections, plus one 10"X8" canvas in the centre. Documented are the locations 0-99 in the four directions from the Equator /Meridian axis. This work underlines the artist's investigations of global systemisation and structure.

Gary Ferguson's 'still lives' are paintings about images, about how images are read, understood and interpreted. Significance is explored within the context of the hyper-visual media and its 'eye-candy'. Removing images from their context and manipulating them to imply new contexts or stories, suggests a healthy mistrust of the world presented to us.

As a Scot living in England for the last 21 years, Stevie Deas focuses on the relationship between Scotland and England. In the year of the 300th anniversary of the union, the rivalry between the two nations continues, not least in the sporting world. In a series of photographs and drawings, Deas describes a journey both literal and metaphorical between London and Edinburgh.

Rufus Ward mines inspiration from obsessions with perspective, flatness, time, his childhood art, insects, film, analogue/digital processing, all subterranean activities, the transfer of energy, visual politics, representations of the future, ephemera, and the idea that a painting must be viewed in a particular direction.

Playful, humorous and often irreverent, Webster's work is concerned with responding to the rules and conventions of social and institutional realities. Her interactive sculpture, Mover and Shaker, is a mischievous take on the farcicality and awkwardness of networking and new, whilst her drawings focus on the trials and tribulations of life as an emerging contemporary artist.

Vicky Viola subverts the premeditated design of the album cover portrait. Seducing the viewer by confronting them with the familiar pop cultural image, Viola re-stages the portrait event by placing herself at the centre of the identified role.