Video Review of Liane Lang: Fallen at Art First

27/04/13
Liane Lang: Fallen
Art First
10 April - 11 May 2013

Liane Lang’s works combine a mixture of photography and grotesquely lifelike silicon and rubber sculpture. Having recently undertaken a residency at the Memento Sculpture Park in Budapest, where she found herself amidst the supersized discarded sculptures of heroes from the Socialist era, her new works, currently on display at Art First, play with scale, status, and the act of iconoclasm.

To view the vodcast, please go to: http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/liane-lang-fallen

Gideon Koppel: an essay

24/04/13

Gideon Koppel: BORTH

Chapter Arts Centre

1 - 31 May 2013

Having originally studied mathematics, Gideon Koppel went on to gain a postgraduate degree from the Slade School of Fine Art, and is today something of a filmic polymath: a prolific film maker for cinema, television and art gallery exhibition, an award-winning director of film commercials, a Professor of Film at Aberystwyth University, and an Associate Fellow at Green Templeton College, University of Oxford. In 2008, he won The Guardian’s Best First Film Award for his feature-length work, sleep furiously, a portrait of Trefeurig, a small rural Welsh village which he moved to with his parents, age 13. For Diffusion 2013, Koppel will be showing a single-screen film installation at Chapter, depicting “the wild west Wales town of Borth.”

To read the rest of this review, go to: http://www.photomonitor.co.uk/2013/04/gideon-koppel-b-o-r-t-h/

Review of Rachael House: A Space of Potential at Stratford Circus

23/04/13

Rachael House: A Space of Potential

Stratford Circus

1 March – 3 May 2013

Stratford Circus, a community-spirited performing arts centre located in the hub between Theatre Royal Stratford East and Stratford Picture House, is, in itself, an amazing venue. Its seemingly endless corridors and open spaces, diverging on various floors from an open central atrium, are dotted with tables and chairs, themselves occupied by anything from a bunch of local kids, using the space to hang out and listen to music, to business folks there for a lunchtime meeting. Currently, however, it is co-inhabited by an even stranger populace – a small army of cardboard dogs, or, at least, their heads.

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.divamag.co.uk/category/arts-entertainment/rachael-house-a-space-of-potential.aspx

f&d cartier: an essay

22/04/13

f&d cartier: Wait and See

Oriel Canfas

1 – 31 May 2013

We are the camera. The title of one of f&d cartier’s previous exhibitions (2004), but equally an apt epithet for the Swiss artistic duo themselves. Having met at college at 20 years old, the pair built up individual careers – Françoise as a painter and sculptor, and Daniel as a black and white photographer – before entering into a shared dialogue in 1995, and uniting their creative practices with the collaboration, f&d cartier, in 1998.

As minimalist visual artists, they work with the two basic prerequisites for photography – light and photosensitive paper – opting mainly for camera-less techniques, often in combination with found objects. Their professed aim is to question everyday life, intimacy, the passing of time, and the position and role of the artist and the image in today’s society.

To read the rest of this essay, please go to: http://www.photomonitor.co.uk/2013/04/we-are-the-camera-fd-cartier/

Review of Henny Acloque: Life After Magic at Ceri Hand Gallery

16/04/13

Henny Acloque: Life After Magic

Ceri Hand Gallery

12 April – 11 May 2013

Henny Acloque (born 1979) has just returned from a trip to Mexico. Whilst there, she visited the Island of the Dolls, a creepy destination hidden deep amongst the canals of Xochimico, attainable only via a two-hour punt. All around, decomposing, mud-covered, limbless, ghoulish dolls hang from the branches of the trees, just as they were installed by the island’s one and only inhabitant, Don Julián Santana Barrera (died 2001). Despite having a wife and children, Santana Barrera chose the life of a hermit, living alone on the island. After the tragic death of a young girl in the canals, some half century ago, he began to fish the dolls from the water and string them up in an act of exorcism, seeking to drive away an evil spirit and allow the girl to rest in peace. The place is haunting and sinister, and clearly left a lasting mark on Acloque.

Acloque’s work has long been concerned with the desire to capture the past, present, and future simultaneously. Her interest in portals has lent it a haunted (and haunting) quality. And this new body of work, forming her third solo show with Ceri Hand, with whom she has been working for five years, explores this dimension still further.

A restorer of Old Master paintings by day, and having been brought up in the countryside, it is unsurprising to find the basic substance of Acloque’s paintings to be fairly typical landscape scenes. In fact, the paintings in this exhibition are based more or less directly on the images from a Victorian book of fairy paintings she inherited from her father. Using, for the first time, oil on panel, Acloque then removes the ethereal subjects, replacing them with harlequinesque amorphous shapes, both implying and obscuring the presence of a subject: faceless and timeless, these new bodies exist in whichever realm one pleases.

The titles of the works are intriguing also, apparently bearing no relation to their content. In fact, Acloque explains, they are the titles of whatever piece of music she was listening to whilst she worked – and that, she laughs, could be anything from an eclectic playlist ranging from classical to Fatboy Slim, the rhythms in each case affecting the way in which the paint hits the board.

Alongside the paint works, the exhibition also showcases a number of drawings and mixed media pieces forming a series called Quimbaya, named after the Colombian civilisation, famed for its work with gold. Built up on top of etched landscape prints, Acloque has turned the skies into harlequin patterned backdrops for a population of fluorescent and glittery horsemen and trees. Again, the subjects are rendered eerily indistinct, and there is a fairytale quality to these magical scenes.

Acloque’s pieces are clearly working through extant ideas as well as the latest input from her travels. Whether or not these themes have now been fully exorcised, or whether they shall endure and continue to haunt her forthcoming output, remains to be seen.

Images:

Bendable Poseable

2013

Oil on board

15.7 x 19.6 in. / 40 x 50 cm

Photograph: Niall McDiarmid

Courtesy of the artist and Ceri Hand Gallery

Tarantella

2013

Oil on board

11.8 x 15.7 in. / 30 x 40 cm

Photograph: Niall McDiarmid

Courtesy of the artist and Ceri Hand Gallery

Quimbaya 2

2013

Mixed media on paper

12.5 x 9.4 in. / 32 x 24 cm
Photograph: Anna Arca 
Courtesy of the artist and Ceri Hand Gallery

Book Review of Patternotion: Life-changing Art, Art changing lives

06/04/13

Patternotion: Life-changing Art, Art changing lives

Published by Sampson Low Ltd, 2013

“Life is a delicate balance. Drift in a perfect bliss of ignorance and you can find your personal Nirvana or find yourself lost. Structure our unpredictable lives and we harness our potential, achieve greatness or send ourselves to the edges of insanity.”

With this thought in mind, Alban Low set out on a unique project: he sent a proposal to 1000 artists and authors, asking them to analyse their lives and try to describe the personal systems which they employ to help them function at work and at play. The response he received was overwhelming and spanned poems, sculptures, collages, paintings, photographs, prose, and mini manifestos. 60 of these are now available for consideration by a wider public, in the resulting book, Patternotion: Life-changing Art, Art changing lives.

The book is split into two sections: the first containing the contributors’ systems, and the second containing the results of an experiment whereby nine of the contributors were asked to interpret and follow nine of the systems proposed by nine of the other contributors. The results are curious, and the interpretations very free – so much so that it makes me wonder how the proposers felt upon seeing their systems employed in such a different way. Having first been asked to bare their souls, it seems almost like a psychological rape, yet in these cases there was full consent, since the initial sharing was willing and voluntary.

Only two of the systems proposed make reference to religion (Patten Smith’s God’s Script and Gary Evans’ and Veronika Cerna’s A prayer like any other…), and one offers up a modern day memento mori (Shona Davies' and Dave Monaghan’s Wheel of Misfortune) in the form of a steely water wheel with miniature hospital scenes filling the gap between each spoke, confronting viewers with “vision[s] of their potential fate.”

Dreams play a role in Mike Russell’s drawn call to record them and Melanie Ezra’s written response, and memories and mindfulness are also brought to the table. Decisions, attempts to change, and, unsurprisingly, New Year’s Resolutions (Ella Penn’s Two little words) form a basis for a number of the systems, and Robert Good’s flowchart (No Way) would perhaps be closest to my own largely imperfect system, currently in the process of being replaced by the motto “do, delay, delegate, dump.”

The system which made me smile the most was Catherine Steele’s Collected Philosophies of Jubilee Saffron-Beeton, and, for anyone else who remembers the Baz Luhrmann Sunscreen song, it will probably have the same effect.

Overall, Patternotion is a charming little book, full of idiosyncratic responses, and soul-baring offerings. Some entries speak to me, others don’t. But, as Low concludes, “Patternotion is not a dramatic ‘do or die’ ultimatum of course, it is just a book. Read it though and the ideas inside could influence the next chapter in your life.” Who knows? Give it a try!

Patternotion: Life-changing Art, Art changing lives is available on amazon. 

Images:

Patternotion: Life-changing Art, Art changing lives

Book cover 

© Sampson Low Ltd

Gary Evans and Veronika Cerna

A prayer like any other…

© the artists

Shona Davies and Dave Monaghan

Wheel of Misfortune

© the artists

Robert Good

No Way

© the artist

Harvey Wells

My aim for 2013 is to be more mindful

© the artist

Review of Julia Pfeiffer: Figures of the Thinkable at Maria Stenfors

28/03/13

Julia Pfeiffer: Figures of the Thinkable

Maria Stenfors

27 February – 6 April 2013

Walking in to Maria Stenfors’ lofty gallery, you are currently faced with an amazing sight: a wall of clay, cracked and dessicated, barren and bare (Building the Labyrinth, 2013). It could be one of Alberto Burri’s Cretti, but it’s not. It’s a shrine to all that has been, has failed to be, could still be, but isn’t yet. Representing the full life cycle of her works, Berlin-based artist Julia Pfeiffer has constructed this wall of clay, slathered on to the existing gallery wall with thick palette knife strokes, out of discarded off cuts from failed and unwanted works, which she allowed to dry right out, before adding water and remoulding them almost as paint. Underneath are layers of actual paint, which could themselves be depicting an image – but who can know, or ever will? The wall is heavy, not only with the weight of the material, but with the possible figures and forms that abide therein.

And as you stand and ponder the imponderable, you are, yourself, being watched. For behind you, lined up in an intimidating row, are eight eyes, staring penetratingly ahead (Iris Studies, 2013). Made of ceramic, and glazed with special pens which allow colour to be applied in a painterly manner, these extracted eyeballs gaze voyeuristically, dreaming the dream of what might have been and what may still develop. Removed from their surrounds, they are no longer figurative, but purely symbolic. Freud, no doubt, would have had a scopophilic field day.

Pfeiffer doesn’t just work with clay, but also with canvas, which she paints with grand expressionistic gestures, spread out on the floor, before hanging the resulting scene as a backdrop for an installation, which, itself, then becomes a black and white photograph. There are four of these on display, each depicting an equally uncanny interior, none of which actually exists. That said, the toppling liquid-filled dog, which occurs first in Stages (Vessel Tilting) (2013), does also feature in the exhibition, as a vision made real: the possible made actual, a dream become reality (Animal Vessel (Figure of the Unthinkable), 2013). But distorted as ever, the ceramic creature must sit upon two supports, as his oversized genitals hang down uncomfortably in between.

Whilst, in this instance, an image has become an object, a ceramic slab standing upon an easel nearby renders a 3D character from a mug (sadly not on display) almost as flat as a painting (Body Relief (Figure of the Thinkable), 2013). Here, the woman, whose breasts on the mug are, so I am told, doomed to tip up every time the drinker takes a sip, has been relieved of her physical discomfort and elevated in status from a mildly distasteful comic item to a virtually 2D work of art – the reverse fate of the pitifully encumbered dog.

This sense of humour permeates much of Pfeiffer’s work, and, again, one can but imagine the father of psychoanalysis’s joy at many of the innuendos and interpretations offered up. Indeed, to return to the wall of broken dreams, with its visions of the past, present and future, and the eyes which gaze eternally upon it, trying to make something out of the blank canvas it offers – what more is this exhibition than an invitation to the visitor to unleash his or her own imagination as to how the story might unfold?

Images:

Building the Labyrinth

2013

Iris Study: blue

2013

Stages (Vessel Tilting) 

2013

Animal Vessel (Figure of the Unthinkable)

2013

© the artist


Also published at: http://www.a-n.co.uk/interface/reviews/single/3188811

Review of Loudest Whispers 2013 at the Conference Centre, St Pancras Hospital

27/03/13

Loudest Whispers 2013

The Conference Centre, St Pancras Hospital

4 February – 28 March 2013

“My singular medical and psychological history has informed who and what I am. […] It is not all of me though it has left a lasting impression on my life and informs the person I am today.”

Victoria Canton was born intersex, with the chromosomes XXY. Raised as a male, she was finally recognised as female in July 2009, aged 39. Now a professional artist, her large scale, brightly coloured, abstracted paintings show figures reclining on sofas in the typical poses of female nudes throughout art history. Alongside their flowing locks and ample breasts, however, they also have penises – not exactly something you would expect of Manet’s ‘Olympia’, no matter how much of a challenge to artistic circles the painter wished to pose at the time!

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.divamag.co.uk/category/arts-entertainment/art-review-loudest-whispers.aspx

Review of This ‘Me’ of Mine at APT Gallery, Deptford

26/03/13
This ‘Me’ of Mine

curated by Jane Boyer

APT Gallery, Deptford

14 – 31 March 2013

Strange Cargo | Georges House Gallery, Folkestone

12 April – 7 May 2013

Sevenoaks Kaleidoscope Gallery, Sevenoaks

10 May – 29 June 2013

Art School Gallery, Ipswich Museum, Ipswich

Dates t.b.a.

The premise for this group exhibition, bringing together 15 artists, touring four venues, and curated by Jane Boyer, was to look at the notion of “the self in relation to context,” working on the assumption that none of us can exist external to some context or other, be it our social network, our location, our memories and past experiences, our current circumstances, or our perceptions. The works on display span various media, including a couple of digital video and sound pieces (Cathy Lomax’s Glass Menagerie, Pt 1 & Pt 2, 2011, and David Riley’s Bar EP Blues (kinetatic), 2011) and a printed scroll of coded and transcribed Twitter handles (David Riley, Twitter User Names: coded and transcribed, 2013), alongside some more nostalgic collections of objects which you might associate with your past as a child, playing with pinwheels on the beach (Hayley Harrison, Her, 2011), or visiting your grandmother and looking at her thimbles, glass animals, and coronation memorabilia (Kate Murdoch, It’s The Little Things, 2011).

There is a lot of grey in this exhibition, and no, that’s not just me bringing in the unseasonal chill from a sleeting Deptford creekside. In David Minton’s Peripheral Vision (2010), for example, which places a falling bird and its shadow on an otherwise empty canvas, the shadow of the non-contextual space hangs heavier than that of the unidentified bird. Similarly, the school class of Darren Nixon’s Untitled 30-5-11 (2011) scarcely manages to emerge from the lurking and almost sinisterly enclosing grey-black behind. The sense of transient youth and the hopeless promise of becoming, the acquisition of identity, and the incidental creation of memory, is something we can all relate to if we recall this annual “rite of passage” of posing awkwardly and being captured for posterity, usually in a most unflattering gurn.

Shadow plays a role in Shireen Qureshi’s Untitled Nude (2011) too, where the yellow torso fights to escape its oppressive black ground, perhaps struggling to form an impossible new self, free of context and binds?

Aly Helyer’s two pieces, Strange Fruit and Happy Family with Sheep (both 2007), look, to me, almost more like Rorschach tests, questioning the viewer’s perception and probing her psychological identity, whilst Sarah Hervey’s sketchy Purple Nude (2011) attempts to capture and pin this down, uncomfortably framing it in much the same way as Francis Bacon does his Screaming Popes.

For me, the most thought-provoking work by far is Anthony Boswell’s Time Box (2010), a small open box, with a mirror as its floor, and a clock in its ceiling/lid, ticking audibly, and reflecting deep down into the plinth below. The grisaille scene on the back wall provides a strangely disconcerting stage set, and the inverted grey chair reflects its upright counterpart, causing us to question which version is more accurate a representation of reality – the physical construction or its shadow; the present actuality or its mirrored memory; the way we see ourselves, or the reflection beheld by others?

Not all of the works in this exhibition are brilliant, and some rely more on concept than execution to pull them through, but, as a whole, the show hangs together well and indeed raises questions about the self, identity, and ways of seeing and of being seen. The bright spotlights, at least in venue number one, seem to place the visitor herself on the stage, and, as Boyer accurately asserts, this exhibition is very much a snapshot of humanity with ourselves in centre-frame.

For further information, essays, interviews with the artists, and links, please visit the exhibition’s blog at: http://thismeofmine.wordpress.com/

Images:

Kate Murdoch

It’s The Little Things 

2011  

assemblage  

50 x 60 cm

Darren Nixon

Untitled 30-5-11 

2011  

oil on canvas  

160 x 105 cm

Shireen Qureshi

Untitled Nude 

2011  

oil and charcoal on canvas  

76 x 50.5 cm

Aly Helyer

Happy Family with Sheep  

2007  

watercolour and ink on paper  

31 x 23 cm

Anthony Boswell

Time Box 

2010  

mixed media construction  

20.3 x 27.9 x 20.3 cm

Review of Candida Höfer: A Return to Italy at Ben Brown Fine Arts

22/03/13

Candida Höfer: A Return to Italy

Ben Brown Fine Arts

12 February – 12 April 2013

Those of us lucky enough to live or work amongst architectural splendour all too often become blind to it; it becomes part of our daily backdrop. This is what struck photographer Candida Höfer (born 1944) about the Northern Italians when, after years of documenting interiors of beauty in the Central and Southern regions, she moved north a couple of years ago. Her current exhibition at Ben Brown Fine Arts in Mayfair showcases 13 new and previously unseen photographs documenting the region’s architectural treasures: the interiors of palaces, opera houses, libraries and theatres.

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.photomonitor.co.uk/2013/03/a-return-to-italy/