After his 2006 show at Leo Kamen Gallery, Smash the Bourgeoisie! Victory to the Decorating Business! this is David Mabb’s third exhibition. Its title, The Rotting Fruits of Revolution, is taken from an article by the same name published in Principia Dialectica (2006), wherein Alice McEwan describes Mabb’s paintings and their basis in Morris’s Fruit pattern. "The over-ripe fruit either droop like some heavy burden under the strain of the modernist utopia… or are suspended in mid-air, left to float aimlessly, their support system engulfed by geometric avant-gardism."

Mabb produces three groups of work. In the first two he paints textile designs by the 1920s Russian Constructivist artists Varvara Stepanova, Luibov Popova and Alexander Rodchenko onto British designer William Morris (1834-1896) wallpapers. The paintings bring together two utopian forms of pattern design, all the designers sharing a commitment to proletarian revolution and the production of designs that involve that commitment, however differently conceived and realised. In the third group Mabb paints loose copies of Suprematist paintings by Kazimir Malevich onto Morris wallpapers. This last group of paintings are hung like strips of film down the gallery walls, reminiscent of Malevich’s own installations of his Suprematist paintings. The contrast here is perhaps more extreme, proposing a dialogue and conflict between the values of Malevich’s Suprematist paintings and Morris wallpaper’s own images of super abundance.

David Mabb is based in London and has been working with the fabric and wallpaper designs of William Morris for nine years. Mabb simplifies and recontextualises Morris's designs, questioning the patterns' Utopian idealism. This on-going "collaboration" with William Morris has taken many forms and has been exhibited widely in Canada, Britain and India. In 2004 he curated the exhibition William Morris: "Ministering to the Swinish Luxury of the Rich" at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, UK, and in 2006 he showed at the Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, Lithuania. During 2007 Mabb will exhibit at the Jugendstilsenteret, Alesund in Norway and the Manezh in St Petersburg, Russia.

For years Cliff Eyland has been interested in conceptual problems related to photo-realism, though he has never been interested in blurring the line between his photographs and his paintings. His paintings have seldom used photography as source imagery and his photographs have always been made from scratch; meaning that Eyland uses blank Photoshop files in an attempt to "create" a photograph.  In previous work he has painted over top of his photographs, but in such a way that the paint and the substrate photograph were kept distinct. In his new show, Party Pictures, he deliberately blurs the line between the two, but in such a way that the paint does not "overtake" the process.  He wants both photography and painting to have an equal stake in the final image.

The Party Pictures are digital photographs that are altered using Photoshop and then laser printed onto archival paper. They are hand-painted in acrylic and mounted on gessoed MDF board. All measure 3"x5". The images are based on photographs of members of the art world and were taken in Winnipeg, Halifax, Chicago, New York and Venice, at beach parties, apartment parties and gallery parties.