Interview with Amy Franceschini

22/09/16
Interview: Amy Franceschini

Amy Franceschini (b1970) founded Futurefarmers in 1995 as a design studio and a residency programme, while she was working in corporate America as a designer. Having grown up torn between two ideologies – chemical farming and a more Rudolf Steiner-based approach – her work often initiates dialogue between those with opposing views. Working on projects across the globe, Franceschini and three fellow Futurefarmers are currently involved in Seed Journey, a project based in Oslo, which is travelling to the UK for a residency at Delfina Foundation, London, and Artes Mundi 7 (at the National Museum Cardiff, 21 October 2016 – 26 February 2017), as one of the six nominated artists for the £40,000 prize.

Studio International met with Franceschini at Delfina Foundation to talk about her atypical background, Futurefarmers, and Seed Journey.

Read this interview here

Interview with Olivia Arthur

20/09/16

Interview: Olivia Arthur

For its seventh edition, Brighton Photo Biennial returns to examine the politics of identity and representation through the lens of fashion and style photography. Three major exhibitions include a European premiere of a show from the USA, alongside two new commissions: one on British youth style; the other exploring sexuality and identity in Mumbai and Brighton.

Olivia Arthur (b1980) is a London-based photographer, who has worked for many years on the East-West cultural divide. As one of the two artists involved in the latter collaborative project, commissioned by Photoworks and Focus Festival Mumbai, and together with Bharat Sikka, she spent time in India working with and photographing LGBTQ and women’s communities, in response to the politics of fashion photography.

Read this interview here 

Interview with Conrad Shawcross about The Optic Cloak

20/09/16
Interview: Conrad Shawcross
The Optic Cloak, Greenwich Peninsula

His largest scale project to date, The Optic Cloak is an architectural intervention, commissioned by Knight Dragon, in which the sculptor Conrad Shawcross has created a 49-metre-tall aluminium cladding for a flue stack, 20 metres wide and 3 metres deep, standing on the roadside on the Greenwich Peninsula. Making use of the Moiré Effect, Shawcross has tessellated together triangular panels, creating a disrupted surface, which allows light through, causing a flux, or undulation, as if the ‘cloak’ were moving. During the evening, the tower will be lit from within, continually redefining the shape of the structure and its surroundings. Inspirations come from such spheres as maritime camouflage, cubism and op art. The Optic Cloak has been designed in collaboration with the architectural practice CF Møller Architects.

Watch this interview here

Interview with Cyril de Commarque

18/09/16

Interview: Cyril de Commarque

Cyril de Commarque (b1970) believes in the theory of progress acceleration: that we can’t change the technological progress that is going on around us at an exponential rate. But, as a result, changes in society are no longer democratic, he says: they are decided neither by the politicians, nor the people, but happen as a result of mobile phones and social media and who knows what else. “The only space for freedom we can gain is inside ourselves,” de Commarque concludes, remaining adamant of the need to dream of a new utopia, despite its inherent risks.

Having previously worked with architectural projects and social and political subjects, including migration and the evolution of political and geographical borders, de Commarque has spent three years working on Fluxland, converting a 1950s Dutch grain barge into a 25-metre-long, interactive artwork, sound piece and space for debate. The name derives from his interest in borders, but also the Fluxus movement in art, and his belief that art has a function, to reveal to people the necessity of taking action, and not becoming the victim of politics. As part of Totally Thames, the boat will sail up and down the river, attracting audiences, who will hear the battle cries of revolutions and the speeches both of dictators and of peace, emanating from the speakers, and then come closer to see themselves reflected in the mirrored surfaces. This upper part of the barge is constructed out of two polyhedrons – the symbol of melancholia – and will reflect both the river and the onlookers, inviting them to look inside, both the vessel and themselves. As de Commarque says: “You have to go inside of yourself and accept the humility to think: ‘Am I doing the right thing for a better world?’”

Throughout the month, a series of conferences will be hosted on board, in association with Art Review. These will feature other artists, economists, philosophers and a nanotechnologist, all invited to discuss future utopian projects.

• Fluxland will be on the Thames as part of Totally Thames festival until 30 September 2016. For visiting times, visit fluxland.co.uk

Feature: Collecting Performance

13/09/16

Collecting Performance

Published in issue 22 of State magazine

Editorial: News of the Art World

13/09/16

Editorial: News of the Art World

Published in issue 22 of State magazine

Profile: Gina Soden

13/09/16

Profile: Gina Soden

Published in issue 22 of State magazine

Feature: Who is Maureen Paley?

13/09/16

Published in issue 22 of State magazine

Interview with Paul Carter

13/09/16

Interview: Paul Carter

Paul Carter: Municipal

CPG London

17 August - 25 September 2016

As the title of this immersive exhibition, Municipal, filled with quasi-architectural sculptural installations, suggests, its artist Paul Carter is interested in ideas of communality and civic architecture. Building on the notion that his studio – and, indeed, the gallery space and all communal spaces around us – is a hotel, or a kind of social sculpture, in which people are invited to come together and connect in their isolation, his installations reference public buildings and often quite Communist architecture, considering their functionality and dysfunctionality as places of social exchange.

Here, a lift stands centrally, opening and closing at timed intervals. Visitors may enter it, press the buttons, and wait to be transported to another place. Where or what this place might be like, only their imaginations can tell. They may, of course, also walk around the outside of this object, a view they never normally would get, opening up a liminal space, a place of division. Carter, who suffers from claustrophobia and never uses a lift himself, enjoys watching people interact, or standing waiting for “residents” to appear. He describes his phobia as coming from “a sculptural sensibility of space”, and this sensibility resonates throughout his work. The “piss corners”, recreating abandoned walls of buildings where men give dysfunction a new use, line the left-hand-side of the main gallery space, inviting visitors in, while, perhaps, once they recognise the reference, repelling them at the same time.

A film plays in the background, showing a man destroying his down-filled puffa jacket – feathers flying everywhere, a gesture of despair and isolation, almost soundless, “a crisis of materiality” as the subject seeks to understand his place within a municipal structure – a municipal society. An everyman, or a resident in the municipal hotel, who travels in the motionless lift, and pisses between stained yellow plexiglass frames.

Watch the interview here

Essay: Close Up & Personal. Victorians & Their Photographs at Watts Gallery – Artists’ Village

01/09/16

Close Up & Personal: Victorians & Their Photographs

Watts Gallery – Artists’ Village

14 June – 6 November 2016

Watts Gallery was set up in 1904 to show off the work of George Frederic Watts (1817-1904). A little over a decade ago, a Heritage Lottery Fund enabled it to be restored and renovated and, just this year, the east wing of Limnerslease, the house across the road in which Watts and his wife Mary (1849-1938), also an artist, lived, has been opened to the public, transformed into recreations of Watts’ and Mary’s studios. Just down the road, the Arts and Crafts chapel, decorated with terracotta tiles made by locals under Mary’s direction, adds to what is now referred to as the Watts Gallery – Artists’ Village.

Alongside the 100 paintings by Watts, which are on permanent display in the gallery, and the further works and archival materials in the studios, another key component of Watts Gallery – Artists’ Village is its collection of Victorian photography. This is formed predominantly from three sources: the personal photographs of the Wattses; photographs by Frederick Hollyer of Watts’ paintings; and the Rob Dickins Collection of Victorian photographs and letters. The latter is named after the pop music promoter and arts benefactor, who bought a unique archive of some 3,500 Victorian photographs and 1,000 artists’ letters, collected by the renowned London art dealer Jeremy Maas, at auction in 2007 and gifted it to the gallery. One or two of these photographs have crept into each exhibition held at the gallery since this date, but now it was felt to be time to host an exhibition devoted to the photographs, looking at how Victorians collected and consumed the medium. In addition to items from the collection, there are a few loans of Victorian stereoscopy, from the collection of astronomer and Queen guitarist Dr Brian May, completing the story of the Victorian compulsion for this new form of image capturing. Visitors can enjoy a whole range of photographs encompassing and illustrating the artistic, literary and social world that GF Watts inhabited throughout his long career – a career that coincides almost exactly with the Victorian era.


Read the rest of this essay here



Image:

Famous Four Generations, 1894 
The Rob Dickins Collection 
Watts Gallery Artists' Village