michael, Author at Aylesham Shopping Centre

Christmas Opening Hours 2020

michael — Wed, 16 Dec 2020 11:17:26 +0000

Christmas Eve. 7am – 6pm

Christmas Day. Closed

Boxing Day. 7am – 10pm

Bank Holiday Monday. 10am – 04.00pm

New Years Eve. 7am – 05.00pm

New Years Day. 9am – 06.00pm

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Social Distancing

michael — Fri, 07 Aug 2020 09:41:50 +0000

Here at The Aylsham Centre we take your safety very seriously. That's why we've implemented various signs and floor stickers to help you to maintain social distancing when you visit us.

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Face Coverings

michael — Wed, 22 Jul 2020 12:23:48 +0000

Following recent government advice, we would like to remind everyone visiting the centre from the 25th July to please remember to wear a face-covering that covers the mouth and nose.

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Everything’s Mustard by Sarah Roberts

michael — Thu, 31 Oct 2019 15:08:17 +0000

7 Nov — 4 Dec 2019

We are happy to announce our forthcoming exhibition Everything’s Mustard, an immersive mixed-media installation by artist Sarah Roberts, who has painstakingly made and collected yellow objects to amass a meticulous, yet arbitrary, new chromatic work.

Inspired by her experience of an epic clear out of her late Mother’s seaside bungalow in mid Wales after her death, Everything’s Mustard is a laboured construction that deals with loss, hoarding and discovery, through an aesthetic examination of our human commitment to collection and consuming.

The vitrine, populated with sculptures, found objects and fabric pieces, has become a time capsule of matter. Things are solidified and archived, but in their homogenous ‘yellow’, they evoke this sense of something new, unplaced, untethered.

The exhibition is an examination of the seduction and bizarre futility of collecting from an artist who is the daughter of a hoarder and a self-proclaimed material junkie, in the age of the Anthropocene.

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Podium Sales by Luke Burton

michael — Mon, 09 Sep 2019 10:03:03 +0000

7 September - 27 October 2019
Unit 6 Aylesham Centre

We are delighted to announce a solo presentation by artist Luke Burton. Produced in response to Picnic's contextual and architectural characteristics, Podium Sales consists of an installation of painted cut-outs and hand-made flash sale signs that suggest a sport shop’s window dressing.

The exhibition is organised around two moments in the lifecycle of a commercial shop, it’s opening and it’s closing down. Depending on whether the viewer approaches the exhibition from the left or from the right, the installation gives a transition from the optimistic ‘Opening Soon’ to the pessimistic ‘Closing Down Sale’, and vice versa.

The cut-outs of sports equipment are humorously compressed and flattened. Burton is playing with the archetypal and symbolic qualities of these objects - basketballs, footballs, tennis rackets - reflecting on how they are stretched and distorted to fit many meanings: the aspirational ideals of success, perfection and competition found within sport and commerce alike. He is also transforming them into something more ambiguous, more akin to totemic sculpture with their anthropomorphic and mythical associations.

Burton is interested in the uncertainty of Picnic’s location, and it’s continually changing and precarious function. The installation acknowledges the original purpose of the window as a commercial space within the Aylesham Shopping Centre and explores the traction felt in converting these commercial units into a space for contemporary art - a shift that Peckham’s community has seen many times over in different parts of the area. Burton wants to suggest the inherent ambivalence of this relationship whilst also hinting towards Picnic’s own precarity in using the space.

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Mobility by Jason Kerley

michael — Mon, 12 Aug 2019 10:09:42 +0000

12 July - 1 September 2019
Unit 6 Aylesham Centre

Jason Kerley is a collector of things. For his show Mobility, Kerley presents collections within a collection.

The objects he has chosen are drawn from all sorts of places: cheap toys and balloons, creative commons clip art, cartoon eyes and flowers. Through manipulating these objects Kerley explores the reproduction of real things, to create new, fake things. These fake things ultimately become their own thing, and take on a new strange identity detached from the original.

As objects they functions as copies, but as sculptures they function as a still life. They are given a new higher status now that they’re in the gallery.
Mobility questions the new symbolism of these objects now that they are displayed as ‘art’.

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Thirsty by Naomi Fitzsimmons

michael — Thu, 23 May 2019 13:45:55 +0000

1 June - 7 July 2019
Private View: 31 May 7.30 - 9PM
Unit 6 Aylesham Centre

Picnic is delighted to announce Thirsty by Naomi Fitzsimmons, a new video installation exploring the surprisingly complex meanings that surround water.

Fitzsimmons is particularly interested in the way that even though water can seem so basic - sweat, tears, thirst, rain - it’s extremely significant and powerful. Water can be emotional, it can be political, and, being made into a product it can become commercial. Fitzsimmons uses found footage, adverts and song lyrics to highlight the absurdity of turning water into a commodity or political tool.

Thirsty is curated by Georgia Stephenson with the support of the Picnic team.

Naomi’s website: www.naomifitzsimmons.com

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Pedro Moreira: Skeuomorph

michael — Wed, 23 Jan 2019 14:47:51 +0000

27 JAN—24 MAR 2019
PRIVATE VIEW 26 JAN 3—4.30PM
UNIT 6 AYLESHAM CENTRE

Pedro Moreira, also known as the digital artist persona Ped.Moreira, is a queer multi-racial artist based between Porto and London. His work explores the idea of reality through theology, identity and virtual theory. Using videogames, social media, and other virtual landscapes to create videos, installations, and performances, Pedro is interested in expressing the concept of ‘virtual-existentialism’, or the acknowledgement of one’s own ‘existence’ in a virtual and imaginary environment.

Skeuomorph (2019) is a new video installation piece that questions the progression of human (or post-human) identity as it transcends reality through virtual means. This piece presents the thought patterns of four characters with differing ethical resolves pertaining to their state of immortality within an imaginary landscape, eluding in no small part to theories of post-existence, heaven and utopianism.

Perplexed by personal quarries such as the nature of absolute truth, righteousness, chaos, and neutrality, the four video-game avatars communicate telepathically both with the audience and each other in a perhaps futile attempt to make sense of the senseless nature of both reality and virtual reality.

Skeuomorph is the second part of Pedro Moreira’s series ‘The Tripplesapiens’, an ongoing work that focuses on the analysis of the virtual landscapes of a 3D generated videogame as a form Utopia. Inspired by the artist’s idea of ‘heaven’, instilled by their Mormon upbringing, the world of the Tripplesapiens is one in which humans have evolved, through a techno-biological process similar to that of imago (found in metamorphosing insects), into a state of immortality, where time is spent improving individual skill sets and learning more about new and past worlds.

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Rosie McGinn: 3 for 1

michael — Fri, 02 Nov 2018 10:03:12 +0000

EXHIBITION 4 NOV—12 DEC 2018
CLOSING EVENT 13 DEC 2018 | 7–9PM

Rosie McGinn's three installations explore how we push ourselves to extreme limits and chase after mind-blowing experiences in the search for our place in the world.

Full Howse is a giant, hand made, leopard-printed bingo woman, inflatable sculpture. As the air flows through the nylon structure the women rises, her arms flinging out to each side, mimicking the frenzied moment of winning a full house. The image is of McGinn’s grandmother, who is now banned from her local bingo. Terrifying in scale and presence, while maintaining slapstick humour, Full Howse captures this moment of euphoria. The deflating of the body punctures the joy and the fleeting moment of escapism is gone.

World’s Strongest Man uses stolen footage of competition strong men lifting incredible weights. The clips are chopped and edited in such a way that each weightlifter has no time to rest, highlighting humanity’s restlessness and constant search for the next level of experience. McGinn has framed the weightlifters as you see them letting go of their self awareness, and the results are strange and humorous. One of the men even splits his lip open as he pushes himself to the end of his limits. By putting these men in PVC prints and 90s TV monitors, McGinn points back to her own childhood, watching WSM on the small TV in the backroom while eating fish fingers.

McGinn’s last installation for our closing event Ravers is a brand new installation work comprising human-scale inflatable air puppets, flailing with relentless and unpredictable movements, powered by an industrial bouncy castle air blower. These characters examine the culture of raving, and the joy of dance as a means of escapism. The Ravers are trapped in a moment of endless dance as they seek another level of being, and are lost in their lack of self awareness.

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Ben Doherty: Serious Hats

michael — Fri, 05 Oct 2018 10:23:45 +0000

15 SEPT—27 OCT 2018

For the inauguration of Picnic in September 2018, we are pleased to present the new exhibition Serious Hats. Ben Doherty is the first artist to take over the long commercial display unit, and to present works that have been produced in response to the unique attributes of the space, and its location in a walkway.

Ben makes sculptures and multimedia installations that inhabit the edges. Largely inspired by science fiction, his work tips over into a parallel present where mysticism and pseudoscience predominate. For this exhibition, Ben is presenting a large mix media installation involving abstract sculptures and stained fabric sheets, creating a mysterious environment. Obstructive, the works shy way from the limelight and pose the question of why they might be there, and whether we are meant to look at them all.

The exhibition runs in parallel with the Peckham Art Festival.

See more of Ben’s work at: www.romanslug.com

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