V1 GALLERY PROUDLY PRESENTS
Murder One
A solo exhibition by Rose Eken in The Depot
It’s a great pleasure to present Rose Ekens (DK 1976) first solo exhibition at V1 Gallery in the Depot.
The world of music is the focus of Rose Eken’s artistic practice. Eken has staged V1’s depot as a backstage- or rehearsal room of a rock band. A total installation in ceramics, tinsel and embroderies where the music itself is not the focal point, but the remains are, once the band have left the place – empty bottles, cigarette butts, beer crates, microphones, cables, duct tape. The exhibition is built around 'Murder One' – the rock band Motörhead’s two meter high Marshall amplifier, named by the lead singer of the band back in 1976. Eken has created a 1:1 copy in clay and glaze for the exhibition.
The works appear concrete and recognizable often created in the exact dimensions as those objects they imitate. They place themselves between a collective memory and private memory. And it’s rather this memory, than the concrete object itself that is the exhibition’s focal point. The staging of the works evoke an associative memory like the Madeleine cake did for Marcel Proust. Not just as thought, but as something corporal and sensuous.
The dedicated fan will easily be able to decode all the references to bands like Motörhead and Metallica in Ekens exhibition. But the works are for that matter no less relevant for the uninitiated. Rose Eken tries to capture the more common, in the form of fantasies or notions of an artistic (musical) expression that goes beyond the individual back patch, album, cigarette package or half empty beer can.
Rose Eken works in various media in her installation, where for example the empty beer can reappears as a motif in different materials. Models and sculptures demonstrate a combination of meticulous craftsmanship and amateurish do it yourself style. Eken’s rough, cartoony ceramics and tinsel paintings (also known as reverse glass painting) and her fine, meticulously executed embroideries and quilts, are created with the same intensity, dedication and endurance that characterize the making of music.
Rose Eken (Born 1976, Denmark) is educated from Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland and the Royal College of Art in London. She has participated in residency programs worldwide and has exhibited internationally. Recent solo shows include among others: Love is the Drug, Munch Gallery, NY, USA, Everything Louder than Everything Else, MOHS Exhibit, Copenhagen, Denmark, Hit The Lights!, Unspeakable Projects, San Francisco, USA, Tomorrow is a Long Time, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin.
