'Bow Cross' is the culmination of Simon Terrill's one-year artist residency developed by Acme Studios with the support of the Swan Foundation. Based around Swan Housing's major regeneration project at Bow Cross, London, E3, the exhibition is made up of three parts: a mural-sized photograph, a video and a book. Together the works form a contemporary account of a street and its inhabitants.
On 10 September 2011, all the Bow Cross residents were invited to take part in an epic photographic portrait that was shot on a large format film camera amidst film lighting, smoke machines and an ice cream truck. While the stage was set, the participants were free to choose how and where they wished to present themselves within the final image.
Exhibited beside the photograph, a video work extends this captured event into a revealing flight past friends, families and neighbours as they fill the street from dusk until nightfall, anticipating the next frame.
The accompanying book, to be launched at the opening, includes donated personal historical photographs from residents alongside images from inside the wreckage of detritus filling the last of the three towers in the street to undergo regeneration. Simon
Terrill's work offers a meditation on regeneration and its temporal effects on the physicality and identity of a street.
'Bow Cross'
Saturday 17 December 2011
6.30pm-8.30pm
Rainhill Way Centre, Bow, E3 3EY