2018
EXHIBITION
13 SEPTEMBER – 13 OCTOBER 2018
Unreal Estates @ Homefinders
146 Kingsland High St
London
E8 2NS
Please note that Homefinders is a working estate agency. You are welcome to visit during their opening hours:
9am – 6.30pm Monday – Friday
10am – 4pm Saturday
An Unreal Estates agent will be present on Saturdays through the exhibition run.
12 – 4pm Saturdays until 13 Oct.
or at any other time by appointment by emailing sales@unreal-estates.org
For full details see: Visitor & Accessibility info
UPDATE: Talks now available as podcasts
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ART LICKS WEEKEND 4-7 OCTOBER
We have scheduled a couple of talks for this year’s Art Licks Weekend. Free to book, just send us an email.
ARTIST & WRITER TALK 1
SAT 6 OCTOBER 2018, 4.15PM
RSVP for this talk on Facebook
Artists Anna Jung Seo and Brian McKenzie speak to magical realist writer Karina Lickorish Quinn about their collaboration for Unreal Estates.
Karina Lickorish Quinn is a writer pursuing a Phd in creative writing, focusing on transnational experiences and the impact of space and place on identity formation. Oögenesis was shortlisted for The White Review short story prize and highly commended for the Manchester Fiction Prize.
Together with Brian McKenzie, Lickorish Quinn has created an eccentric menagerie of aliens, bees, snakes and fungal cultures who might just be living next door. McKenzie states: “I love to make complex images depicting peculiar things and situations. I used the estate agents’ online sales and rental spaces as egg like pods where the germ of my favourite themes could grow and mutate alongside commentary on some modern urban trends. Sealed away inside normal housing, obsessive behaviour, strange characters and general weirdness have flourished and hatched to secretly inhabit the district of Dalston and surrounds.”
Anna Jung Seo’s paintings contain an “element of story-telling inside a house that form the pivotal moments…rich, emotional landscapes that speak of life, time and death.” In her collaboration with Jung Seo, Lickorish Quinn presents two ‘double exposure’ poems which relate to the duality of our understandings of home. Lickorish Quinn states: “As shelter, it protects us from some of our most basic fears (from predators and would-be attackers) and yet it also houses countless threats (the ghost, the monster under the bed, the intruder). As artefact, we fashion it (with paints and wallpapers and embellishments) to express who we would like to be and how we would like to be seen. As home it becomes a receptacle for our memories, including our most private moments, whether cherished or repressed.”
With a short introduction and tour of the exhibition by Amanda Lwin (curator)
ARTIST TALK 2
SUN 7 OCTOBER 2018, 2PM
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Painters Héloïse Delègue (Goldsmiths MFA) and Elysia Byrd (Wimbledon) speak to Marco Cali (Contemporary British Painting) about their work for Unreal Estates.
Héloïse Delègue is a recent graduate of the MFA programme at Goldsmiths. For Unreal Estates she has worked in close collaboration with poet Martin Jackson. Describing their work process together Jackson states: “The two of us, painter and writer, we visited properties. Two of them. Flats for sale. Half a million each. The bright-painted walls and oversized mirrors made to stretch the length and breadth of each of them. There we were inside, an impostor couple, ventriloquist capitalists, nothing in our wallets.” Delègue’s and Jackson’s contributions focusses on tropes contained in the others’ work, in the words of Delègue, “a constant back and forth movement between words and visuals, a play between slippages of language.”
Elysia Byrd is a painting graduate from Wimbledon College of Art. She has been selected for the Woon Prize and FBA Futures. Her vibrant and often fantastical work often involves responding to self-written stories; for this exhibition she has reacted to an existing story. This story was written by Portals of London, a blog that documents incidences of inter-dimensional rifts in London; the writing mixes psychogeography, sci-fi, horror and ghost story, wrapped up in a local history format. Byrd will speak about how working from an existing text has “allowed clear, essential way of working than normal which has freed up the act of painting.”
With a short introduction and tour of the exhibition by Amanda Lwin (curator)