Auxiliary Progress…

Since arriving here in Stockton my time has been spent exploring not just the local landscape but also my current limits of my practice. I came here looking to examine how I install current workings of sonic works and how I can develop or bridge the gap that I find between what I am making and what I am trying to offer.

The first few weeks were spent contemplating speaker architecture and how installing speaker drivers within a form that dissolved or collapsed whilst it functioned worked.  Drawing on the inspiration of the local area and its regeneration hopes/plans.  I have been thinking heavily about addition and reduction as methods of creation both in sound and process works.  Glitch process that I have been known to use is a perfect example of how regeneration seems to operate, existing ideology is rehashed the result is urban planning that though clearly considered it is not until it is implemented you realise the functional errors of such planning.

The focus on heritage and community, the life and death of generations that have called a place home.  The time that passes by and the marks those leave on a place last longer than structures in many cases.  Replacing old is not something that should be done without consideration and awareness for those that live within it.  The Auxiliary residency is based within a community that is exposed to many different social factors.  It is an opportunity to live within a place that is struggling to come to terms with how it should function.  The oddity is that with all the trials and time that it takes to rejuvenate a place it somehow still continues, functions without much thought.  Time will change the nature of a community however daily this is not something that is really brought to your attention as each day was like the last.

Mid way through this residency my father has a stroke which alongside my research here at the Auxiliary has given me a new perspective.  Seeing a parent go through a life changing moment in their existence brings reality home.  I have recently been back and forth between the residency and my parents to see how my father has progressed with his recovery.  Even though I have not been making as much as I would of hoped it has provided much needed reflection, thinking more about the sound works that have been started yet not finished.  The last few weeks here in Stockton I hope to realise some new works with little or no focus on completion yet more or presenting something that is mobile/fluid and evolving.  

 

 

Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop Residency

Today I arrived at the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop where I will be artist in residence for the next three months.  It’s exciting times with this residency fitting in-between the Into the Wild residency at the Chisenhale Art Place.  After working handout overseas to fund this six month period of research of making it has finally arrived.  So far so good and I can only say the next few months should prove fruitful with a new body of work in the making.

I will have time to update this blog which for the last year has not been given much attention.  For those that are also interested in what is offered here at the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop please follow the link as its an amazing facility.

Home Page

 

Brutalist Architecture Inspires Simon Terrill’s Foam Playgrounds

We’re familiar with the sight of brutalist towers in Britain, but less well known are the strange playgrounds built at the same time, which are the inspiration for a new installation at the RIBA by the artist Simon Terrill and design collective Assemble. With their rough surfaces and dangerous drops, these surreal concrete structures were very much a product of their time.

• 

  Churchill Gardens estate in Pimlico, London, 1978This playground is on the modernist Churchill Gardens estate designed by Powell and Moya, but clearly built at a later date. Before these postwar playgrounds were built, children would have been playing in the bomb sites left after the war. It’s possible the architects were referencing that in their design.

  All captions by Simon Terrill 

  Photograph: John Donat/RIBA

• 

  Churchill Gardens estate, Pimlico, 1956The flying saucer looks like it has crashed and there’s a mysterious cruise-liner chimney. Brutalist buildings are built out of bush-hammered concrete and the playgrounds are made out of the same material.

  Photograph: John Maltby/RIBA

• 

  Balfron Tower playground, Poplar, London, 2015
  Ernö Goldinger, who built the Balfron Tower, was interested in play and children’s toys. But this playground looks inhospitable. Apparently the slide once had metal on it – now it is just the concrete, so you wouldn’t want to go down it – it would take your skin off.

  Photograph: Simon Terrill/Assemble

• 

  Park Hill estate, Sheffield, 1963Part of the Park Hill estate, designed by Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith, who were tutored by the Smithsons – the founders of new brutalism. The estate was famous for its experimental ideas, like walkways in the sky, and that approach was reflected in the playground.

  Photograph: Arch Press Archive/RIBA

• 

  Park Hill estate, Sheffield, 1962The same shapes appear in brutalist playgrounds around the country: hexagons, ramps, holes in walls. The children would have had a very physical encounter with the concrete – crawling over it, feeling it under their hands, grazing their knees. It’s a very different way to experience brutalism than the way most adults did.

  Photograph: Arch Press Archive/RIBA

• 

  Churchill Gardens estate playground, Pimlico, 1963 These unconventional structures encourage children to take risks, to explore. There is an element of danger which you might not get in soft play areas today.

  Photograph: John Maltby/RIBA

• 

  Assemble and Simon Terrill’s foam playground at the RIBA headquarters, LondonWe talked about using concrete, but it would have been impossible in a museum. And it would have been inappropriate for children to play on. So we used foam, which by coincidence has a very similar speckled look to bush-hammered concrete.

  Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

• 

  Children playing on Assemble and Simon Terrill’s playground at RIBAThe colours are standard issue, and relate to the density of the foam. Pink foam is denser than blue. The brutalist ethos was to expose the function of a building, and honour the truth of your materials. Brutalist playgrounds were a truth to concrete, ours is a truth to foam.

  Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

Seductive Reflectiveness – Joel Morrison

Joel Morrison

Target Painting, 2015

Stainless steel

188 x 137,2 x 10,2 cm

© Joshua White – Courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech Gallery

 

 

JOEL MORRISON

Steel Life Crisis

 

April 17 – May 16, 2015

 

Los Angeles-based artist Joel Morrison creates sculptures and wall works that are slick, highly polished and desirable. They are also changelings born from the waste and excess of a consumerist culture. His stainless steel artworks are dystopian aberrations made up of quotidian discarded objects found around his neighborhood and studio in Los Angeles. Broken bits of trolley, balloons, blankets and hammers are reassembled and repurposed into cool, luxe looking artworks. They are, Morrison calls them, “a collage of scenarios”. Often times amorphous and indeterminate, his works are dynamic and full of movement. Found objects are encased sarcophagus-like in a coat of stainless steel bulging and straining against their silver skin, struggling to break out.

 

Morrison critically addresses contemporary consumerist culture with his found object sculptures while playing with visual tropes of art history. A 2012 Hong Kong exhibition brought together references from classical Greek sculpture, Duchampian ready-mades, Arte Povera, and pop art. Like an alchemist Morrison deftly fuses and layers a palimpsest of references from music, pop culture, and art history. High and low culture, figuration and abstraction, the mechanical and handmade, are brought into union with irreverence and humour to create his own visual language.

 

Morrison’s works bridge the distance between viewer and art object, demanding engagement and interactivity. Using an approach to art production rooted in L.A’s Finish Fetish movement of the 1960s and ‘70s — characterized by its obsession with slick surfaces and polished perfection — Morrison takes advantage of the material he works with to play with temporality, and to ask questions about the viewer’s relationship to art. Like narcissus the viewer is seduced and drawn in by the reflective surface of the works. They abstract and distort everything they reflect in real time, lending the otherwise monochromatic pieces a mutable colour palette and contemporaneity. The works are both alien to their surrounding environment and part of it.

 

The freestanding and wall works give the appearance of spontaneity and immediacy, of objects haphazardly thrown together, but this belies the painstaking production process required to complete the works. Eschewing the typical route of mechanical big studio art production, Morrison makes his pieces from mold and lost wax casting: “the simplest and oldest method of replicating objects into metal.”  The approach is lo-fi and old school, allowing for the artist’s hand to be glimpsed in a fingerprint, or indentations from the casts, raising questions about contemporary art production and the role or importance of the artist’s singularity.

 

For his third exhibition with Almine Rech Gallery, Morrison reworks Frank Stella’s flat and geometric minimalist protractor paintings, reinterpreting them as three-dimensional stitched cargo blankets. They hang across what look like canvases, but are in fact mirrors, which remain concealed, denying the viewer the sight of their undistorted self-portrait. The ‘Target Painting’ series (2015) has its genesis in a Robert Morris corner piece covered in a cargo blanket spotted by the artist in art storage. “Things end up in crates, in backrooms. They become such a commodity and it’s important to be able to laugh at that aspect,” Morrison explains. He turns the focus onto the superficial protective layer, highlighting the commodified nature of the art industry where artworks sit like trophies in storage, unseen and swathed in their protective wrappers.

 

While the Target Painting series makes up the basis of the show, Morrison also introduces a corner piece, again recalling Robert Morris’ minimalist ‘Untitled (Corner Piece)’ (1964). This time the work sits bare and unprotected by a cargo blanket. Radiating out of a Tupperware container’s centre are rays of a sunrise, a reference to Kenneth Anger’s occult inspired ‘Lucifer Rising’. This piece provides a more esoteric counterpoint to the exhibition while at the same time tying the works in the exhibition together through its geometric composition.

 

Joel Morrison (born in 1976, Seattle, Washington) has exhibited widely in the U.S and abroad, with solo exhibitions at Almine Rech Gallery Paris (2014) and Brussels (2012); and the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (2011). Institutional group exhibitions include One Way: Peter Marino, Bass Museum of Art, Miami, FL (2014); The Avant-Garde Collection, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA (2014); Signals, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA (2008); Tangible Sculpture Today, Kolbe Museum, Berlin (2007); California Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA (2006); Anstoss Berlin, Haus Am Waldsee Museum, Berlin (2006); and Thing: New Sculpture from Los Angeles, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2005). Joel Morrison lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

 

Diana d’Arenberg

 

 

ALMINE RECH GALLERY

11 Savile Row, Mayfair

London

W1S 3PG

T: +44 (0)20 72 87 36 44

 

ALMINE RECH GALLERY

 

Beauty In Destructive Process – Sebastian Wickeroth

I have always been drawn to destructive processes in art.  The art practice of Sebastian Wickeroth intrigues for sure however combined with its simplicity of form and palette asks more.  These considered works seem to create layers no matter what angle you approach them.  Whether just visually or by their orientation, textures, concept or existence.  If you would like to see more works by Wickeroth click here to see his website.

Beyond Tinted – Exhibition Photos

Here are some recent photos from Beyond Tinted exhibition which took place between the 19th-23rd of November 2014 at the Modern Art Museum, Yerevan MAMY.  These works I created after participating on the ACSL artist residency here in Yerevan.  Through the support from the residency as well as ECF Labs which helped fund my time here in Yerevan.

Beyond Tinted consisted of four series of work incorporating past and present processes and mediums.  The works developed on previous themes and new concepts researched whilst here in Yerevan.

U – DYS – HET
(Audio/Visual Digital Collage)

Watchers
(Digital Prints)

Folded Control
(Mixed Media)

Contained Spaces
(Mixed Media Sculptures)

 

 

Passing Weeks..

These last few weeks have been spent exploring all parts of Yerevan some intentionally and others purely by accident.  One day this week even was comparably to my days on my snowboard.  Using the bus like a chairlift to take me to a point in the city with a line back to house which I walked capturing many elements that I had over the weeks hope to experience.

These random wanderings and planned excursions have allowed me to interact with architecture and accidental sculptural objects.  They have created conversations within my practice that I am now exploring and will continue post residency here.  I spend time photography and field recording the sounds I encounter not always for later work but to use the process of recording as a way to explore the moments that I have experienced.  Some of these elements naturally appear in the work but sometimes it is me focusing on something that i see a metaphor amongst or pausing just so the brain absorbs and allows the senses to filter completely.  Though the sounds and visual elements are important it is all senses that inform my thoughts.  If only to have a machine to record the smells both pleasant and not so.  The aromas here are strong and really striking.

Certain themes are constant within my travels such as looking through but seeing behind in reflective moments or the attraction to controlled and protected spaces.  Here especially where traffic cones are not so common the ways in which people mark space is intriguing.  One thought that is common with my travels here though is to do with vacancy as a positive.  The building of vacancy, i.e. in the sense of building glass and marble buildings that seems to be for something that only they know about.  With these buildings not necessarily fitting into the landscape rather standing alone amongst the tower blocks of Soviet era.  I see these new buildings a positive in one sense and nod to a new era or at least optimism.  This in comparison in other cities that I have lived recently where new construction has stopped.

As for work I am currently working on a new digital work, a step on from the Athens Arrival work I made in Greece last year and also some new photo and sculptural works.  These are all due to be exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art here in a couple of weeks.  So for now the walks and excursions are more precise and studio time has increased.  I will update from the studio in a few days prior to the show.

Delicate Precision – Artworks of Karyn Olivier

The work by Karyn Olivier is playful yet unsettling at the same time.  The attraction to object or site, altered with an acute sense of humour or timing.  The ease of her works to create thoughts with from their first impression is incredible.  Maybe its just me and the area of interest Olivier operates within is somehow on a similar wavelength as my own thoughts.  Yet I feel it is also a sign of an artist who is intone, adept at knowing balance, able to strip a work back and not to make something look like its trying but instead for the work to operate on its own.  I am interested to see future projects that stem from Oliviers’ practice.  Click here to see more work on her webiste.

Link Between Title and Work.. Thea Djordjadze

Interesting short about Thea Djordjadze and her works.  The importance she puts on the title being part or the work or addition rather than an explanation or a throw away remark.  The work and title go together it is part of the work.

I am finding myself drawn to to practices that seem to be visually similar.  I am not sure if this is a need by me to make works in this vain or whether they are just comforting and digestible on my part.  However the works by Thea Djordjadze are by no means simple or something I think are easy to make.  The comprehension of space and 3D composition are intelligent and the execution is beautiful.  Some of the works are as though you are holding your breath, a savoured moment that is enjoyed for a brief second.

Tatiana Trouvé – Subtle Touch

I am drawn to the work of Tatiana Trouvé, the works seem strong and made with such precise intent yet delicate and respectful of the spaces they occupy.  Trouvé exhibits a skill that I rarely see with a lot of artworks and that is touch, an ability to present works that are not over worked and stand on their own, not questioning why they were made.  This subtle skill allow Trouvé to present works that fulfil a hunger I guess for me as an artist to see within other artists practices.  Trouvé works intrigue and raise questions of their being and a desire to ask more.  I am not sure I can ask for more from art work.  The review by Andrea Gyorody in Artforum discuss’s some of the work in her first solo show at the Kunstmuseum in Bonn.

Tatiana Trouvé

Andrea Gyorody

View of “Tatiana Trouvé,” 2014.

Artforum March 27, 2014

KUNSTMUSEUM BONN Friedrich-Ebert-Allee 2 October 16–May 4

For her first solo exhibition in Germany (co-organized with the Kunsthalle Nürnberg and the Museion in Bolzano, Italy), Tatiana Trouvé has transformed eight galleries of the Kunstmuseum Bonn into a series of separate but interconnected installations. Each room is presented as a work in itself, comprised of singular sculptures—and in a few cases, drawings—in combination with alterations to the space. One gallery, with an intervention titled Prepared Space, 2014, is blindingly white, thanks to a stark coat of paint that exacerbates the effect of sunlight pouring in from above, an aggression matched by shallow gashes transecting the walls and floors. Bronze wedges are shoved into the cuts at irregular intervals, holding them agape like surgical wounds and making the entire room feel as if it might split open at any moment, swallowing the sculptures—and visitors—within it.

This sense of carefully orchestrated precariousness pervades the exhibition, particularly in the center gallery, which plays host to 350 Points Towards Infinity, 2009, an installation of small magnetized spinning tops, each suspended from the ceiling with taut wire and left to hover over the ground improbably, as if paused while in motion. Illusion is also a common theme of Trouvé’s work, whether manifest in sculptures that only appear ephemeral from a distance but which turn out to be cast concrete or bronze, or in constructed déjà vu moments, as Trouvé has created here by bookending the entrance with galleries that are eerie near mirror images, with only the subtlest variations in arrangement and detail. At first glance, one might be tempted to understand Trouvé’s work in the lineage of Arte Povera, especially when it involves yellowed mattresses, plastic bags, used shoes, piles of black sand, and copper piping. But her evident investment in tricks of the eye—and of the mind—paint her more accurately as a twenty-first- century surrealist, more interested in instigating a double take (and then a lingering, probing gaze) than in elevating humble everyday materials.