SCHOP Exhibition, Edinburgh Gallery, Building, Architect, Location, Show, Photo
SCHOP Gallery, Edinburgh : Architecture
St. Mary’s Street gallery – design by Oliver Chapman Architects, Scotland, UK
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Last Schop Exhibition Featured
A SCOTTISH LAND
4 Aug – 7 Oct 2011 Mon – Fri 9:00 – 5:30
An exhibition by Nick Sargent
Questions of ownership and attribution are addressed in the new exhibition by Nick Sargent, entitled ‘A Scottish Land’. The focus of the exhibition at Schop is a large scale, painted and embroidered canvas entitled ‘A Scottish Landscape’.
Alongside this new commission will be a folio print of ‘General Scottish Views’ and a faded watercolour entitled ‘A Scottish Landscape, Artist Unknown’. The two items, purchased from an Edinburgh bookshop and a charity shop in Devon, provide the inspiration for the principal work.
The dialogue between the anonymous ‘original’ artworks and the new work explores the mercurial nature of the ‘picturesque’ and the notion of what constitutes originality.
Schop Gallery 36 St Mary’s Street, Edinburgh EH1 1SX
CV
Nick has exhibited widely in Scotland and in 2003 was one of eight artists, including Toby Paterson and Elizabeth Blackadder selected by the Society of Scottish Artists to represent the best in contemporary Scottish art. His work is informed by his previous practice as a set and costume designer in Edinburgh where he was based until moving to London in 2004.
Schop – Edinburgh Architecture Summer School
SCHOP are organizing a Summer School for visiting architecture students
picture from Schop
Schop Summer School, Edinburgh Festival
8 – 19 Aug
Used to mixing teaching with practice, the team at Oliver Chapman Architects have been thinking imaginatively about how best to use their spare creative energy. Since 2009 they have been expanding their series of successful architectural evening classes that take place in their office in a former shop in Edinburgh’s old town. Now they are hosting a European summer school too, to be held over a fortnight in August during the Edinburgh Festival. It has been advertised to Architecture students who also want to improve their English and was quickly fully booked by international students, many from Spain and further afield. It will involve guided building visits, talks in other architecture practices and with planners and design exercises under the heading ‘Architecture and Crisis’.
Since 2009, their sister organisation Schop, has found there’s a great demand for people to take part in their structured programme that mixes talks with model making. It’s only six two hour sessions. ‘I suppose it’s just like having constraints within a building project’ says Oliver Chapman. ‘It’s just that the evening classes are greatly constrained by time. The summer school will allow us to develop ideas for event spaces in Edinburgh with the luxury of a little more time and with students who already have some experience of architecture.’
If you are in Edinburgh between 8th and 19th August, there are plenty of lovely places to stay and they would be delighted if you dropped in to check on developments and join in the reviews.
Oliver Chapman
Michael Collins
Mark Cousins
Schop, 36 St Mary’s Street
Edinburgh, EH1 1SX
For more information please contact Michael Collins 0131 477 4513[email protected]
Current Schop exhibition
W A S S E R T Ü R M E
24 Jun – 29 Jul Mon – Fri 9:00 – 5:30
New work by Tim Taylor
Schop Gallery 36 St Mary’s Street, Edinburgh EH1 1SX
[- n. a reservoir or storage tank mounted on a tower-like structure at the summit of an area of high ground in a place where the water pressure would otherwise be inadequate for distribution at a uniform pressure – F. le chateau d’eau D. die Wasserturm ].
pictures from Tim Taylor
Schop present the first fruits of a new project being undertaken by artist Tim Taylor. Taylor pays homage to the seminal work of Bernd & Hilla Becher and their photographs of water towers; diverse in design, yet fulfilling the simplest of functions.
Taylor is currently constructing every water tower photographed by the Bechers over a period of some 25 years. In acknowledgement of the Bechers’ rigorous approach to their work, Taylor’s models are constructed from a single material (matchsticks) and to the exact dimensions recorded in the 223 plates of their 1988 MIT publication “Wassertürme”.
Schop, 36 St Mary’s Street, Old Town, Edinburgh, EH1 1SX
Previous Schop Exhibition:
28 Mar – 17 Jun 2011 Mon – Fri 9am to 5.30pm
Re:aligment
An exhibition by Richard Strachan
This exhibition is the result of a Scottish Arts Council grant to explore the synthesis of traditional painterly practices and digital software programmes and have been realized in collaboration with Eastern Photographic. Strachan’s paintings have always included an element of computer-aided design but this new exhibition foregrounds digital technology’s role and documents the way in which digital processes can facilitate a responsive and expressive standpoint.
picture from Schop
The architectural nature of the work roots the paintings in a dialogue between pattern + perspective. Self has been placed centrally in this debate through nebulous colour glazes, chance happenings and the physical appearance of the viewer in the high gloss finishes of the paintings.
As opposed to being a cold and empirical approach to painting the functionality of the advanced software interface provides a flexible and intuitive platform where a range of alternative interpretations of a single space can be considered. The artist can then investigate patterns between the construction lines of the compositions, generating motifs that converse with the role of the composition in describing perspective. The populist history of pattern + motif thus converge with the more emotive + instinctual moment of mark-making and experimental colour choice as part of the expressive personality of the work.
Concurrently the unique contribution of the computer is represented in terms native to it’s self (pixilation) whereby lines drawn from a perspective point fracture, create strobing patterns according to specific algorithms. Representing process as aesthetic in this way is a broadening of an enquiry which has in turn provided chance happenings and exciting possibilities for development.
The work echoes the way that the built environment is founded upon calculation and construction but is also the hub of our expressive interpretation. This dichotomy between seemingly opposing elements is at the heart of these paintings. The exhibition ‘Re:alignment’ represents a chaotic and unpredictable period of experimentation and re-appraisal that has been achieved by operating within and beyond exact parameters.
Richard Strachan – CV
Strachan graduated from Gray’s School of Art (Aberdeen) in 2001 and currently teaches at the Edinburgh College of Art. He has been awarded grants from both the Welsh + Scottish Art’s Councils has exhibited nationally and was awarded the Aspect Prize in 2006. His paintings are often exhibited as academy submissions and he has been awarded prizes from the Scottish Society of Artists and professional membership of Paisley Arts Institute. Recent one-man shows include the Amber Room Gallery and Oriel Canfas. He enjoys a close relationship with the Red Door Gallery and showed work at Glasgow Art Fair with the Lost Gallery in 2010.
Previous Schop exhibition
17 Jan – 18 Mar 2011
Interior views of the Ballantyne Type Museum
Lilliputian Museum Matrix
An installation by Thomas Mason
Harkening back to the Cabinets of Curiosity of the classical era, the ‘Lilliputian Museum Matrix’ is a collection of miniature museums inhabiting Edinburgh’s historic police boxes. Each box houses a succinct collection of Scottish artifacts, ranging from Sir Walter Scott’s printing type, to the ancient Lewis Chessmen. In a city which can be considered a museum itself, the miniaturization aspect causes us to question the nature of museums as they themselves become the artifacts on display.
The idea of the miniature is the seed from which the project bloomed. The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard laments that “…we haven’t time, in this world of ours, to love things and see them at close range, in the plenitude of their smallness.” This installation entices the viewer with a window into that ‘small’ world. The public can sit and daydream on the miniature machinations of the museum’s tiny inhabitants.
Dreaming for dreaming’s sake is not Mason’s main objective, he argues that the miniaturization of an object can enhance its meaning and as Le Corbusier famously declared that “A house is a machine for living in”, so a museum must be a machine for learning in. However, in order to fully realize the function of a great machine, we must extricate ourselves from its inner workings. We may work its levers and buttons, but we cannot know the whole while we reside within.
Thomas Mason is an expatriate American with a background in interiors, architecture and film design. He read architecture at Newcastle University, then collaborated on a few short film projects in London. He moved to Edinburgh in 2008, where he studied Interior Design and graduated with a Masters (with Distinction) from the Edinburgh College of Art in 2010. His work was exhibited in the summer graduate degree show and featured in ‘Line’ magazine. He now works for RFA Design in Halifax, as a museum exhibition designer. His extensive travels have given him a unique insight into the built environment and how it changes from city to city, culture to culture.
Rasha Alkhatib has acted as Assistant Curator for ‘Lilliputian Museum Matrix’. She completed a BA (Hons) in Architectural Studies at Newcastle University and a Master of Architecture (MArch) at the University of Edinburgh. She has worked at several architecture firms in Dubai and London, and since graduating has assisted in the curation of a number of exhibitions.
Cut-away Axonometric and interior view of the Ballantyne Type Museum
Schop, 36 St Mary’s Street, Edinburgh
17 Jan – 18 Mar 2011 Mon to Fri 9:00am to 5:30pm
For more information contact: Oliver Chapman or Mark Cousins
Tel: 0131 477 4513 E-mail: [email protected]
Schop
Schop
pictures from the architect
Schop is an initiative of Oliver Chapman Architects to provide a place for creative thinking, learning and the exploration of architecture and art. It is dedicated to bringing the work of artists engaged in the built environment to a wider audience.
Schop Gallery : Exhibitions Archive
Location: 36 St. Mary’s Street, Old Town, Edinburgh, EH1 1SX
Tel: 0131 477 4513 www.schop.org.uk
Schop : art+architecture gallery and events
SCHOP [noun] : a shop; a workshop; derived from an old Scots word.
“In his SCHOP or booth certane drogs & mendicaments” – 1644 Edinburgh Testament.
“That litle merchand SCHOP…upon the west syd of the gait” – 1678 Douglas Bequest.
The inaugural SCHOP Exhibition took place from November 2008 to February 2009.
Royal Mile Edinburgh : buildings
Comments / photos for the SCHOP Edinburgh Architecture page welcome
SCHOP Gallery Edinburgh – page