Charles Avery
Untitled (Place de la Revolution), 2011
Pencil, ink and acrylic on paper
240 x 416 cm
Untitled (Place de la Revolution) is a large drawing, over four meters in length, chronicling the activity on a busy square. Cyclists converge before peddling off along their own routes, kids are playing and there is a shopping centre in the background (click on the image carousel for details). The drawing forms part of a singular world-building project that Charles Avery has been developing since 2004, through depictions of an imaginary island. ‘The Islanders’ charts the formation of Avery’s fiction through drawings like this one, sculptures, texts, ephemera and occasionally 16mm animations, as well as live interventions into our own world. In 2017 for Art Night, Avery showed objects and characters from his fictional Island across east London including sculptures, performers, a flyposting campaign and the transformation of a café in St Katherine Docks into a landmark from the Island.
Avery is also the selector of our current On Screen Special: Beer by Erik van Lieshout. This programme invites artists that feature in the David and Indrė Roberts Collection to select and introduce a moving image work from a peer they admire. Explaining his choice Avery writes 'Erik’s strategy when making a film is generally to embed himself in a place, situation or community and, with great economy of means, use anything that happens to come his way, material or mental, to weave a story.' This points to Avery’s interest in van Lieshout’s work being grounded in similar methods of constructing narratives.