A Pigeon, A Kitchen and An Annexe: Sites of Alternative Publishing
18 February – 4 March 2012
The animated duo that form the publishing collective, Ladies of the Press invited us to participate in an exhibition that encourages us to probe our practices, and what it means to be an alternative publisher. Along with Annexe and VerySmallKitchen, the exhibition centres around publishers placing their work into a gallery context and what this means for ideas of editing, curating and collaboration.
Imagine swiping an open source code off the internet and laboriously typing it up with a typewriter – a tedious act of love that nullifies the original content’s function while conjuring the romantic cliché of the writer at work, at their desk in a dusty room next to a windowsill, preferably with antique furniture and a lit cigarette nesting on an ash tray. The nostalgic gesture of intentionally translating an up to date medium into its low-fi predecessor is the starting point for this exhibition: why use letrset when you can pick up any font off a drop down menu? Why publish books in the age of WordPress? A Pigeon, A Kitchen and An Annexe invites you to step into the world of a bustling ‘press room’ devoid of wifi, a scene created especially for this show.
Come to our Private View on Friday 17 February at Five Years Gallery in Bethnal Green, to witness live press and performance, and for a chat with all of us. Read the full press release here and come join us on the night!
Check out photos taken on the night here.
Epilogues: It Started With A Car Crash
17 September – 23 October 2011
Curated by Charles Danby, Epilogues examines how artists address the contexts, ideologies, and histories that surround them in the work of their contemporaries and predecessors. The exhibition looks at the nature of archives, ideas of dialogue and exchange, and of education both inside and against educational institutions; a timely response to today’s climate of cultural and institutional instability.
Pigeon Magazine Launch and Film Screening
Saturday 24th September 6pm – 9pm
It Started With A Car Crash: Alternative Educational Road Tour
Tuesday 18th October 2pm – 8pm at Slade Research Centre, Woburn Square, London WC1H 0AB
It Started With A Car Crash: Alternative Educational Road Tour seeks to open up a debate around alternative networks of arts education and artwork dissemination. The Bruce High Quality Foundation set up their own University in 2009, and in 2011 they embarked on a coast-to-coast road trip of America visiting educational institutions, project spaces, groups and individuals, documented in their work Teach4Amerika (2011).
Also accompanying Epilogues: It Started With A Car Crash is It Started With A Car Crash a publication produced from invited contributions from publishing collectives, zine artists, and writers including Pigeon Magazine, The Ladies of the Press, ZEENE.
Supported by the Arts Council England.
Pigeon celebrated the launch of its core online element at Grey Area Gallery, Brighton on June 4 2011.
Providing an celebratory evening of sound and vision, launching Pigeon’s online magazine by projecting the site onto the walls of the underground gallery. The event featured limited edition prints created especially for the launch by the screen-printing collective Parliament of Feathers, as well as promotional cards complete with the Pigeon branding and site address.
Pigeon displayed work from a newly formed collective of dynamic Illustrators, Mark Prendergast, Michael Nunn and Nick Tudor, alongside recent graduate Mark Adams, who responded creatively to the space handed to them on the day of the launch. What resulted was an ephemeral sculpture that responded to the lack of light within the space, as well as a filmed documentation of its construction which was projected during the course of the event.
The event also marked the launch of Illustrator, Jake Evans’ innovative project ‘Studio Swaps’ which provides a platform for artists and designers to potentially inhabit one another’s creative environments.
Pigeon thanks all who have supported the birth of the magazine, particularly thanking Grey Area Gallery for their continued encouragement and generosity.
Nick Tudor flickr.com/photos/nicktudor/
Michael Nunn notjustabeatlesfan.blogspot.com
Mark Adams markoliveradams.co.uk
Pigeon Online Navigation from Pigeon Magazine on Vimeo.
This short film shows the navigation around the newly formed Pigeon Online at the point of it’s launch, projected on the walls of the underground gallery Grey Area at the Launch Event held last Saturday.