The Jason Art Gallery

The Jason Art Gallery - I dont mind if you forget me. A work in progress
September 2004. Guests are invited to yet another private view at an artgallery in Hackney, East London, a rough part of town that is going through a recent regeneration and is attracting an influx of newly opened and relocated art galleries, as well as new homeowners and tenants consisting of the more affluent, educated and creative types following in the footsteps of the artists who’d gone before them.
Another new gallery perhaps?
Instead the invited guests arrive (some of them wearing evening gowns and travelling in black cabs) to find themselves at "the wrong” side of Hackney, the infamous "murder mile" and confronted by a closed, abandoned and derelict art gallery, ”a fragment of an art gallery”,"an wreck of an art gallery"," an ecosystem of an art gallery", in advance stages of decay and disrepair.
Less than it once was but also more..
A peek through the window reveal a floor covered in animal excrements in various stages of decomposition, Crumbling walls, entrails emerging, a wheel barrier, builders tools, some pots of paint and an empty take away container. A project abandoned?
On the dirty gallery front a sentence is visible consisting of letters that the artist Lowendahl-Atomic. have formed by cleaning dirt from the window.
It spells I don’t mind if you forget me
Later that evening a shopowner a few doors down tell the story of how the original owner of the gallery dissapeared over 17 years ago...to never be seen again!
Since the private view the gallery has been left more or less untouched. In autumn 2005 scaffolding was suddenly erected over one night, builders was seen on site for a few days, and the gallerysign was removed..
The scaffolding stayed up for one year, then it came down as sudden as it had been erected without any other work having been done.
2007 and the gallery is in more disrepair than ever, but the sentence "I dont mind if you forget me" is still visible under the layer of new dirt that slowly is building up over it.

Photographs will be posted here regularly documenting further developments.

February 2007