Pharmakons

PHARMAKONS

Crook & Vincent are proud to present Pharmakons , an exhibition of contemporary emerging and established artists at Pie Factory in Margate’s Old Town running from Friday 5th May to Tuesday 9th  May 2023. We welcome you to explore the exhibition and meet the artists at our private view on Saturday 6th May from 6-9pm , where there will be complimentary drinks from local Kent brewery Shivering Sands and a DJ set from Ramsgate’s Extra Normal Records (also known as the brains behind Contra Pop Festival).

Pharmakons  includes works that deal with contradictory themes such as trauma/euphoria, innocence/corruption, disorder/order, illness/healing, and purity/decay. The artists explore these concepts through a range of painting, sculptural, and printing techniques, including veiling, glazing, layering, and often total destruction and degradation of the medium itself. According to Greek mythology, a pharmakon can be both the remedy and the poison; this exhibition aims to illustrate the friction and battle, as well as the union and reconciliation of these two opposing states of being, whilst offering a perspective beyond binary distinctions.

Exhibiting artists include Zara Carpenter, Lupen Crook, Julie Goldsmith, Keziah Greenwood and The Cameron Twins.

Meet the Artists

Zara Carpenter  is a visual artist based in Rochester, Kent. She uses methods such as combining photography and its chemical processes with paint and physical interventions to create confessional works that examine the experience of pain, grief, trauma, and living in a body that is sick. Her love of memento mori and Japanese Wabi Sabi aesthetics is present in the fragility and impermanence of her pieces which continue to evolve over time. Her work is held in The Wellcome Collection and has been exhibited in Paris, New York, and Lisbon.

Lupen Crook  is a Ramsgate-based artist who creates carefully layered oil paintings informed by his experiences of psycho-sexuality, trauma, mental illness, and the mystic or occult qualities of everyday life. He has developed a unique visual language using mapping and veiling techniques, primitive mark-making and fetishistic symbols that serve to process overwhelming moments and explore the boundary between fantasy and reality. His work is held in private international collections, and he has recently exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery.

Julie Goldsmith is a London-based artist who paints imaginary and historical portraits of fairies, poets, ghosts and the marginal or shunned. She paints in layers of slips, oxides, and glazes onto clay canvas, scratching lines of poetry into the surface. Personal and mythical, her paintings explore survival through story-telling; they struggle against morbidity and speak of renewal and rebirth, romance and love. A member of the Royal Society of Sculptors, her work has been recently exhibited at both Somerset House and the Saatchi Gallery.

Keziah Greenwood  is a London-based artist whose work observes a grey world with a brain that works in black-and-white. Like a clock where you can see the hands telling the time alongside all of the cogs and inner workings, her multi-layered oil paintings use paralleled imagery, overheard conversations, and observed and found images to form a confusing sort of truth. Trying hard to see between the lines of these colliding narratives, she pulls from her experience with neurodivergence. She has recently exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery.

The Cameron Twins are a London-based collaborative duo who work with a range of mediums including screen printing, sculpture, and installation. Their work often incorporates photographs, notes, drawings, and toys collected from their own childhoods, a process that acts as a visual conduit to their memories and past selves. Through the contrast of childlike imagery with sinister themes, they invite the viewer to question the effect of nostalgia on their own lives. They have recently exhibited with West Contemporary and Pure Evil Gallery.

Meet the Curators

Lupen Crook is an outsider artist, musician, and lyricist originally from the Medway Towns, now living in Ramsgate. Over the past twenty years, he has presided over a prolific creative catalogue that has drawn acclaim from a range of press sources (NME, The Sunday Times, The Guardian), and has garnered him a reputation for his uncompromising artistic vision and DIY punk ethos.  His interests include occulture, pagan mythology, and mental health.

Willow Vincent  is a writer and musician originally from Humberside, now living in Ramsgate. She has a formal background in comparative literature, film studies, and contemporary curatorial practice, and has had her writings on subjects such as the feminine supernatural and witchsploitation cinema published in academic journals. She has recently completed her debut novel The Ducking Stool, which deals with puberty and the grotesque.

Socials

houseofbrokenarts.com

Instagram: @crueldesign @lupencrook @sexcellsuk