Windows on the World: Mail Art / Photography / Woodblock Print Show for LFA2020 Digital
4 June 2020 - 30 June 2020

Velorose presents another Virtual / Actual / Mail Art exhibition, this time inspired by looking out and looking into our world(s)

Windows on the World is a three-part exhibition in conjunction with the London Festival of Architecture (LFA 2020 Digital), featuring the second Velorose Mail Art Project by You the Artist (Inside Looking Out / Outside Looking In), Photographs by Amelia Lancaster (Regeneration) and Woodblock Prints by Celia Scott (Windows (Reversed)). Everyone is invited to visit Velorose online, by post and eventually in person; Mail Art postcards will be unveiled online, on social media, and in the gallery itself, visible through the gallery windows, alongside Lancaster’s photographs and Scott’s woodblock prints; visitors are welcome to the gallery in line with government guidelines, from 15 June 2020 (one household of visitors at a time)

LFA Digital / Windows on the World Mail Art Project: You the Artist ‘Inside Looking Out / Outside Looking In’
For 2020, the theme of the London Festival of Architecture is Power

For centuries, windows have represented power in its many guises, from the rose windows of churches and the opulence of Venetian glass to the window-walls of Hardwick Hall and Modernism, and the net-curtained windows of working class homes. Mail Art hands power to anyone who cares to become an artist, while the act of posting transforms each creation in to an artwork; although Mail Art has often ‘traditionally’ (since the 1960s) been an anti-gallery movement, Velorose happily challenges that provocative premise and, in the spirit of Mail Art’s democratic nature, gives everyone an equal voice and exhibits every submission received. And because the artworks and architectural representations are yet to arrive, this vision of the built environment is not only still to be discovered, it's there to be developed by you, handing power to the people

Wish you were here? Join Lancaster and Scott, other artists, architects and non-artists / architects alike, and be part of a global picture-postcard of our times by taking part in the 'Windows on the World’ Mail Art Project, ‘Inside Looking Out / Outside Looking In’. For details, and for submissions received to date, click here

LFA Digital / Windows on the World Photography: Amelia Lancaster ‘Regeneration’
Amelia Lancaster’s ‘Regeneration’ photographs capture what might otherwise be a quickly-fading and soon-forgotten history of the South Kilburn Estate, spaces devoid of people but replete with memories of the lives lived therein. Lancaster's haunting but tender images of net-curtained windows, benign ghosts with their traces of humanity in what many might see as mere rubble, hint at the power of unity in an urban community and give nuance to these abandoned spaces, paying reverence and respect to the ‘ordinary’ lives experienced within their walls

Like an unexpected ‘Wish You Were Here’ picture-postcard, ‘Regeneration’ has been brought to the City of London by Velorose; Lancaster’s work is a window in to a world close to that of many of its viewers, yet simultaneously far. To enjoy Lancaster’s glimpse of another world, click here

LFA Digital / Windows on the World Woodblock Prints: Celia Scott ‘Windows (Reversed)’
Celia Scott’s apparently but deceptively simple woodblock prints of windows are inspired by the paintings Matisse created looking out to, and through, the French windows of his home at Collioure. Described as a ‘window [that] opens on the future of painting in the twentieth century’, Matisse’s flower-bomb vision seen in ‘Open Window, Collioure’ of 1905 (in the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC) is ultimately eclipsed by his foreboding and almost completely abstract 1914 version (‘Window at Collioure’, in the collection of the Centre Pompidou) which presaged the horrors of World War I, and of the century that followed. We soon understand that, while a window may remain the same, the view therefrom can change dramatically

Scott plays with Matisse’s window, taking it one step further towards abstraction, while using colour to shift the mood from one iteration to the next. Her bold use of colour, and her deference to the natural texture of timber, bring life and possibility to paper. To view these window works, click here