MAY DAY: THE DARK TIMES (Editor’s Choice≠1)

'You are here' by Sarah Sparkes

coffin built to fit the artists and infinity box on trestel legs, 2006

Curated by Paul Sakoilsky, editor of The Dark Times
45 Robertson Street Hastings East Sussex TN34 1HL

Private View 6–9pm Friday 1 May 2009

Exhibition 2 May–12 June Wednesday–Sunday 11am–6pm
Contributing artists and writers for exhibition and publication:Petra Johanna Barfs Christine Binnie NoNose Cedric Christie Leigh Clarke Marc Vaulbert de Chantilly Andrew Cooper John Cussans Aidan Dunn Thomas Draschan Selena Godden Mark Hammond Richard Heslop Dick Jewell Dan Langton Dean Kenning Calum F Kerr Peter Lewis Lee Maezler Elizabeth Manchester Susana Medina Stephan Micalef Nasrin Montag Anne Charlotte Morgenstein Makiko Nagaya Richard Niman Derek Ogbourne Laura Oldfield Ford Sophie Parkin Mark O’Rorke Raul Pina Paul Renner Imogen O'Rorke Paul Sakoilsky Liam Scully Dallas Seitz Martin Sexton Bob and Roberta Smith Rose Smith Sarah Sparkes Gavin Turk Mike Watson Jürgen Wolfstädter

In 2007 Paul Sakoilsky started collecting London's free (and other) newspapers "from train, bus and street, editing the covers with paint and collage, adding, altering and deconstructing image and text to create a new periodical: The Dark Times. With the passage of time and the appearance of each succeeding cover this act of subversion has grown into an impressive body of work: at once satire and psycho-social investigation".At F-ISH gallery, the artist curates/edits ‘May Day: The Dark Times (Editor’s Choice≠1), the first extension of the project into the arena of curation. It will be an exhibition of essential works by international and emerging artists; many pieces exhibited for the first time. Whilst being fully respectful of individual works, the gallery will function as 'The Dark Times: Press Office≠3', an overall installation in which carefully chosen pieces will be set into dialogue. A further element will be the production of a special, first ever printed edition of The Dark Times, made up of commissioned work and text. This will be issued both as an affordable, standalone newsprint catalogue-paper, and as a limited boxed edition, with digital c-prints of selected pages.

Opening on May Day, a day on which Hastings town starts its Green Man celebrations the show runs over a 6-week period. The idea of May Day and Beltane is to be seen as an important conceptual framework, as a celebration of the international struggle for workers’ (human) rights, as much as for its ancient lineage as a celebration of fire, fertility and rebirth. The editor is interested in the alchemical-like power of discourse and art, akin to what critic and artist Dean Kenning terms 'Art-Energy', to question and to transform everyday struggle and materials.An editor's desk will be set up in the gallery from where Sakoilsky will periodically make a special edition in situ. From here, he will conduct symposia, inviting artists and thinkers from a variety of discourses, and the public to join an interdisciplinary purview of the times we are in, and where we might be heading. These will be published through the dark times podcasts and website set up for the project in collaboration with F-ISH's eco-hosted/solar-powered website.

Part of F-ISH gallery's Guest Curator Program.

REVIEW in Artvehicle by Lee Campbell

....guest-curated by Paul Sakoilsky, entitled MAY DAY MAY DAY: THE DARK TIMES, an extension of his The Dark Times newspaper, featuring an array of local, national and international talents with artists such as Leigh Clarke, Laura Oldfield Ford, Marco, Rose Smith, Calum F. Kerr, Bob and Roberta Smith, Gavin Turk and Dallas Seitz and others. The gallery's mission is to respond to local audiences and engage the local public with their own idiosyncratic concerns. This show is no exception in allowing a wide range of audiences to be able to enter into a dialogue with the work of pagan and ritualistic beauty. Highlights include Sarah Spark's plywood coffin ‘You Are Here’ 2006 and Liam Scully's ‘Fertility Spell’. Mark Hammond presents an installation containing a placard with the words SAY NO TO JERWOOD, in response to the announcement of a new Jerwood gallery to the region. Laura Oldfield-Ford displays a copy of her Savage Messiah paperzine with its intricate details of architectural deprivation in a highly entertaining comic book graphic mode. Lee Maelzer exhibits ‘Scale’, a painting of both living in beauty and ugliness. Despite the space being much of a white cube outfit architecturally, much of the work has a grungy anarchic populist aesthetic enough to please the fine art connoisseurs and Joe Bloggs coming in off the street. It’s populist pagan poetry and thought-provoking.