Tag: UK
ALBUM
Album is an exhibition comprised of new and existing works by 17 artists currently studying on the Royal College of Art’s Photography MA course. Working across the disciplines of photography, film and video, new site-specific works, which seek to respond to the particularities of the surrounding area and Wolstenholme project space, will also be produced.
Whilst the exhibition does not seek to tie individual artists together via an overarching thematic structure, a unified intention to create and reconstitute existing works, in relation to the project space, is common to them all. Intrigued by the prospect of exhibiting in an unconventional gallery space, the decision to show at Wolstenholme was made, by the group, in order to allow a reciprocity of influence to take place.
For Rebecca Court this has enabled the development of a site specific work across the buildings exterior, and for Tom Pope the interior network of doors provides a framework for the production of a work in which the site visitor will be made to perform. For others presenting still or moving image works the removal of pieces from the context of an ostensibly neutral white cube, provides a unique opportunity for a renewed or unique reading to take place. Similarly, the site itself will, in hosting the collection, be subject to a process of transformation and re-reading.
Album is part of the Independents exhibitions programme that runs parallel to the 2010 Liverpool Biennial. On Saturday 18 September at 1pm, Album curator Morgan Quaintance, an MA student from the RCA Curating Contemporary Art (Inspire) course and the exhibiting artists will give a talk about the work in the exhibition.
The RCA Photography Department has a world-renowned reputation for providing a critical and educational environment in which students can develop as artists with photography at the core of their practice. Alumni of the course include successful practitioners working in both fine art and the commercial sector, including Alison Jackson, Bob Carlos Clarke, Sophy Rickett, Hannah Starkey, Paul Smith, Tom Hunter and Idris Khan.
Hew Locke | The Nameless
MARK TITCHNER
Jacco Olivier //
WITHSTORE_001 launch
Marcus Coates
Marcus Coates is renowned for his shamanic performances, where a community or an individual is invited to ask difficult questions pertaining to their own predicament, from the deeply personal to the broadly political. Coates summons answers by communing with an animal kingdom that is part imagined, part scientifically observed. In costume and literally entranced, he relates the nature of this host of species and their attendant attributes; and from these narratives he extracts analogies, identifies thought patterns and discerns clues to a wider understanding.
For his first exhibition at the gallery, Coates has absented himself from the gallery, displaying only the material peripherals of these performances. We are presented with the questions asked and answers offered, as well as the costumes and objects used to facilitate the exchange, displayed like anthropological artefacts of a strangely familiar culture. The questions and answers are translated and transcribed during each performance, the handwriting indicating a sense of urgency behind each social, political or personal problem addressed. The objects have been collected, adapted and reused over years, bridging the utilitarian and the symbolic, the everyday and the mythical. Several pairs of glasses bound together become a mask and a mode of seeing beyond the immediate; lemon juice produces a soured, contorted face, which, in some shamanic traditions, increases the chance of admittance to the grotesque realm of the spirits.
Participants in these performances may or may not believe in Coates’s abilities as a transcendental shaman – the point is not so much the validity of his claims, but the discussion they elicit. With such pressing issues as anorexia and war on participants’ agendas, it can be the naïve outsider who asks the obvious, but useful, questions. And it is Coates’s recourse to the world of animals that demarcates an alternative space, enabling the demystification of social relations, imaginative speculation on causes and the dramatic resolution of enduring problems.
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CLAIRE BARCLAY
Stephen Friedman Gallery is delighted to announce an exhibition of new work by British artist Claire Barclay. This is the artist’s second solo exhibition at the gallery, and it coincides with her Bloomberg Commission ‘Shadow Spans’ at the Whitechapel Gallery through 2 May 2011.
Barclay is one of her generation’s foremost sculptors. Her practice explores formal and conceptual concerns through both large and smaller scale installations. Turned wood, rawhide, soft leather, machined brass and woven straw are some of the materials that coalesce as the precious and the everyday, the hand-woven and the mechanically produced, are brought to the fore. Familiar forms are hinted at in these careful assemblages. Each sculpted piece teeters somewhere on the brink between the figurative and the abstract, between the ambiguous and the referential.
For her newest body of work, Barclay responds to both the fabric of the gallery, and its location in the heart of the world-renowned tailoring district of Savile Row. Though previously more known for her larger-scale work, for her show here, Barclay has made a group of smaller and more intimate sculptural forms. Hand-printed fabrics draped in the front gallery and hung behind the window beckon the viewer to enter. They also reference the uncut cloths readily found in the workshops of the surrounding tailors and fashion houses. Amongst these fabrics, portions of the gallery’s parquet flooring appear to expand and multiply, rising up from the floor in organic formations. These replica parquet blocks, handmade by the artist, form impromptu plinths for small, domestic-sized objects of leather and metal. Barclay’s physical and almost performative response to the gallery’s spaces reveals the subtle, transformative power yielded by the artist’s hand.
Machine metal and sewn fabric ‘toy-like’ sculptures, somewhat reminiscent of small dolls, expand on Barclay’s interest in the tension that lies between the known and the unknown. Partly disguised in a delicate, thin foil wrapping and hand-printed with a selection of geometric designs, the pieces recall packaged sweets or chocolate Easter bunnies. As the foil is torn away from these moulded forms, so too is the resemblance to the known object. In this transition from the wrapped to the unwrapped, one thing is revealed, whilst another is lost. Barclay’s sculptures capture a moment within this process, as the foil sheath bestows a sensuous fragility that neither fully covers nor wholly reveals the being underneath.
Each component of Barclay’s work has been carefully and purposefully made, either by or for the artist. It is in this process of making, of endeavouring to fully understand the properties of any given material, that the meaning is developed. The end results of this practical endeavour to ‘work through’ are uniquely beautiful sculptural forms, which deny categorisation. Neither functional nor figurative, they initiate a cascade of inferences, suggestions, emotions and ideas in the mind of the viewer.
Claire Barclay (b. 1968 Paisley, Scotland) lives and works in Glasgow. Her Bloomberg Commission ‘Shadow Spans’ at the Whitechapel Gallery runs until 2 May 2011. Other recent solo exhibitions include: Pale Heights, MUDAM, Luxembourg (2009); Claire Barclay, Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (2009); Open Wide, Camden Arts Centre, London (2008); Fault on the Right Side, Kunstverein Braunschweig, Braunschweig (2007) and Half-Light, Tate Britain, London (2003). Recent group exhibitions include: What Matters, Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, (2010); Material Intelligence, Kettles Yard, Cambridge (2009); If it didn’t exist you’d have to invent it: a partial Showroom history, The Showroom, London (2006) and British Art Show 6, Baltic, Gateshead (2005). Barclay was the recipient of the Hospital Club Creative Award in 2008 and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Artist’s Award in 2007.
