Tag: UK
Wild Fantasies, A Decade of Don’t Panic Posters
Hernan Bas, Isaac Julien and Yayoi Kusama
Kitagawa Utamaro
AVPD // Hitchcock Hallway
Ikon Eastside presents Hitchcock Hallway, an installation by Danish artist
duo AVPD, whose work typically consists of complex spatial and perceptual
experiments that analyse the ways in which people respond to their environments. The title makes reference to director Alfred Hitchcock who
employed spatial effects to create psychological intensity in many of his films. This major new work, commissioned by Ikon, sees the entrance to the gallery replaced by a door. What lies beyond is for the visitor to discover.
In addition, the artists have produced a number of off-site projects around
Birmingham. At Ikon, Brindleyplace a window at the gallery entrance is
covered by multiple layers of glass in Conceal; paradoxically, with each
transparent sheet the window becomes more opaque. Meanwhile in locations around the city, Level, a series of simple graphic posters appear, black with a white horizontal line, each one subtly different, exploring memory, recognition and expectation. A fourth project, Rotobjects, is a discreet, unpublicised, sculptural action – white Perspex objects, each the shape and size of a drinks can, are abandoned at the top of public escalators around Birmingham – there they will rotate, hypnotically, until removed.
AVPD are Aslak Vibæk and Peter Døssing, both graduates of The Royal
Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Often inspired by ways in which space is
re-imagined in literature, film and science, their works challenge socially
conditioned or innate perceptual habits, emphasising how our bodies ‘read’
spaces and react to them, be it physically, intuitively and intellectually. They
see the human subject as defined by space; shaping it and in turn being
shaped by it, and as such their experiments with constructions are suggestive of new possibilities for imaginative space.
Nychos //
Pablo Bronstein / Herald St
James Ryan @ Rod Barton Gallery
For his first solo show at Rod Barton Gallery, James Ryan presents a diverse body of new work.
The viewer is confronted with a collection of paintings that all seem to be running to their own irregular logic. These are paintings that unravel, inviting the viewer to slowly decipher and navigate their path through contradictory planes of translucent colour.
James Ryan’s paintings focus on the exploration of an implied three-dimensional space onto a physical two dimensional surface. Starting from simple line drawings or a photograph each painting is created using the same repetitive process of overlaid, transparent geometric forms which are allowed to develop intuitively by straying away from their source material.
As well as continuing to work with long standing motifs such as isometric cubes and freeform geometric structures, Ryan has introduced commercial patterned fabrics as painting supports which extend the readings of his work. On a material level the fabrics offer a ready-made grid of sorts, albeit in polka-dot or chequered gingham that generate domestic connotations. Visually however, the combination of printed pattern and painted geometric form produce odd visual moments and figure/ground relationships as design and paint freely interplay over the surface of the canvas.
The word Glitch is most commonly used in computing and electronics to describe a temporary fault in a system. The term is also used in video games where a player exploits a fault in the game’s programming. Glitch is exploited here in much the same way, referring to the optical and spatial irregularities generated by the painting process. Ryan’s looser areas of paint handling counteract the work’s hard-edged pretence. It is these faults and irregularities that produce paintings that are readable without being fully understandable, stationary without being fixed.
James Ryan was born 1982. He completed his MA in Painting at The Royal College of Art, London in 2007, since then has exhibited regularly in group exhibitions and has had two solo exhibitions at Studio 1.1, London, 2009 and the Corn Exchange Gallery in Edinburgh, 2008.
