Our Species of Space/s and Other Pieces exhibition is featured in the current UAL Postgraduate Community Publication.
Uncategorized
Expanded Crit and Exhibition
Our intention for the show was to concentrate very much on the idea of collaboration, with works merging into each other, so that one artists work was not necessarily identifiable. It was an exercise in questioning the idea of space, but also questioning the way we traditionally hang work. If group shows intend to show a theme, to unite artists etc, then we could push this by amalgamating and contaminating each others work.
Donald Smith (who chaired our expanded crit) really related to this idea, but said we fell short, because it appeared as if we got scared, and started to worry about putting on an ‘exhibition’. I totally agree with this, there was a moment in the process where we refined what was an impulsive and chaotic hang, and perhaps we should have followed that. He suggested ways of pushing our initial idea further by breaking down the work, blocking off doorways to interrupt the flow of the space, and for the work that had a very set way of being installed to be taken through the whole space instead of being static and permanent.
We had comments that some rooms felt like they were architectural, and that another was quite fun and playful. I quite liked that there were distinctions between each room.
It’s interesting because this way of working, as you suggested alienates the viewer and makes it increasingly difficult for non art background audiences to engage with. But I found it to be a really intriguing way to work; it allowed me to question all of the rules and restrictions that we place on ourselves. So this can be anything from working within a strict picture plane, or standard ways of exhibiting work. I guess at the risk of alienating people we hope to get somewhere new and unknown to us.
It’s a very complex thing, to know what is right, to know whether to stay painting in the same picture plane, to know whether to stop painting, to know whether to use the figure… how can we make work and images that reflect us as individuals when everyone is an individual. We have to also battle with everything that has gone before and find our own way in a confusing and chaotic organism, that is revolved around money, whitecube spaces and ego.
But also, maybe some onus should be placed on the viewer, that they should be more active in there viewing of contemporary art, that it is ok to not understand everything clearly and that maybe you have to spend some time with it to work it out. To me it’s the difference between watching a Michael Bay film and watching a David Lynch film, you have to tune into it, to begin to engage with it and maybe not both are for everyone.
Related material:
http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/it-installation-art
Rebecca Molloy
Publication in progress
Our publication being made on Wednesday before the Private View.
Meeting at CSM
Further development made at the meeting last week at Central Saint Martins.
This week should see our press release, flyers and publications finalised.
Chewday’s
“Disembodied and shed of much content, these apolitical, asexual, ahistorical works – are prepared for high-speed travel. [….] In our era of infinity scrolling[4], where knowledge circulates across networks at an unprecedented rate, Comrades of Time Comrades of Time suggests a renewed confidence in the plastic arts for continued art making.”
CHEWDAY’S
Michel Foucault
“There are in every culture, in every civilisation, real places—places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society—which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias.”
Michel Foucault
In Defense of the Poor Image
The poor image is an illicit fifth-generation bastard of an original image. Its genealogy is dubious. Its filenames are deliberately misspelled. It often defies patrimony, national culture, or indeed copyright. It is passed on as a lure, a decoy, an index, or as a reminder of its former visual self. It mocks the promises of digital technology. Not only is it often degraded to the point of being just a hurried blur, one even doubts whether it could be called an image at all. Only digital technology could produce such a dilapidated image in the first place.
Hito Steyerl – In Defense of the Poor Image
Geographies of Contamination
“According to Pfeffer, art’s brief is no longer to generate unique,original images, but to seek reflection in a de-subjectivised approach to the existing stocks of object, images and spaces. The order of the day is to understand the world from the vantage point of abstraction and not to abstract from the world”
Geographies of Contamination, 2014.
David Roberts Art Foundation
Full catalogue text below:
Natalia Davis
Natalia’s work:
salinas
salinas
print // print // paint // document // print // copy // scan // file
print // document // print // document // file
print // print // paint // document // print // copy // scan // file