250 words or less - Short and sweet art reviews and opinions

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#gilbertandgeorge #mona (at MONA - Museum of Old and New Art)

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Gilbert and George #mona #gilbertandgeorge (at MONA - Museum of Old and New Art)

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#mona (at MONA - Museum of Old and New Art)

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#CrisBrodahl 'marquise' exhibited at @approachgallery. Eerie and uncanny paintings on display until 27 March. Well worth a look.

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The architecture and archaeology of time

Above: Tropisme 2015, refrigerated vitrines, plants, liquid nitrogen. Dimensions variable, & The Blue Fossil Entropic Stories, photograph on archival pigment print on photo rag paper 160 x 240cm

Julian Charrière For that they sow the wind

Parasol Unit Foundation for contemporary art 14 Wharf Road London N1 7RW

15 January - 23 March 2016

Bridging the gap between what is required from the earth for the advancement of technology, and the curiosity that influences human exploration – which has the cyclical effect of driving technological advancements – Charrière’s work re-appropriates the outcomes of nuclear testing, archaeological excavations, mining, and exploration into geometric totems, photographic record, and biological specimen.

His main concern is that of time: “…the continuous cycle of past, present and future, as well as sudden and gradual physical transformations that have occurred naturally or due to human activity.”  The installation, Tropisme, displays four plants snap-frozen in liquid nitrogen and encased in temperature-controlled vitrines.  This species of plant has existed for 65 million years, and are emblematic of Charrière’s concerns with both the passing of time, and the steps necessary for preserving the future environment.  They are simultaneously both a sculptural object and a scientific specimen.  Due to the delicate nature of their conservation, they are at the behest of human care to maintain their duel existence.  

Partnered with, but conceptually sitting in opposition to Tropisme are The Blue Fossil Entropic Stories, photographs depicting the artist astride icebergs blow-torching them; alluding to the human causes of climate charge and the potential effects of the melting of permafrost releasing what has sat preserved in the ice for millennia.  In this case, ice is not a preservative force but a destructive one.

This show acknowledges the passing of time through an entirely contrived archeology, which is achingly aware of the interpretations of these artifacts in future discovery.

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The curation of Leibovitz’s new show undermines the strength of its content.

Above: Visitors viewing Annie Leibovitz’s Women: New Portraits Pic: Andrea Polanco

WOMEN: New Portraits - Annie Leibovitz

January 16 – February 7 2016 UBS Global Arts

Wapping Hydraulic Power Station, Wapping Wall, London E1W 3SL

As an update of Leibovitz and Susan Sontag’s 1999 book WOMEN, the cavernous industrial space of the Wapping Power Station lends itself to the intended work-in-progress aesthetic.  However, the result was visually messy and amateurish, with little consideration given to how the audience would move through the space or engage with the work.

Despite the space’s size, the exhibition felt crowded with no thought given to the audience’s flow, primarily due to three large multi-panel display screens occupying the centre of the room, and the proximity of the ‘pin-board’ behind. The screens’ arrangement – and that of the chairs in the space between – inhibited the negotiation of the space as opposed to evoking conversation, as was the intention.

The screens themselves were divided into six had the effect of, not only dissecting the photographs, but also had a peeping-tom aspect about them, as if you were staring through a window.  This encouragement of an uninvited gaze is not sympathetic to the feminist credentials of Leibovitz’s work.

Recall of the work-in-progress aesthetic was via the ‘pin-board’ display of the artist’s proof-prints.  I found this unnecessary, as pining the prints to the dun-coloured board looked cheap and had echoes of a municipal notice board.  Covering the board in plexi-glass, which bisected the photographs randomly, detracted from their visual impact disallowing audience engagement, further compounded this – a better impact could have been achieved through traditional framing.

Ultimately, there was a disconnect between the content of the show and its presentation, undermining the work’s strength.

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Gilbert and George @whitecubeofficial Bermondsey #thebanners @laceyhunterfelton

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The historical geometry of civic structures

Above: Civic piazze of Tuscany (Siena) 2016 Pencil, cuts & gouache on watercolour paper 21 x 21 cm

Geometra

James Brooks 15 January – 6 February 2016 Canal 60 De Beauvoir Crescent London N1 5SB

Brooks dissects civic spaces into their constituent parts analysing how each are experiences of European social order, at the junction between the contemporary and historical.  He has brought together these elements – Roman roads, Ancient Greek lakes, town squares, and urban boundaries – re-imagining them as a cartographer, containing them within the boundaries of pure geometry devoid of the organic and the human.

The shapes are precision cut and reapplied to a base that contains the geometric super-structure. Up-close you can see the calculations, lines, and intimate geometric explorations; from afar, we are presented with a birds-eye view of each series rendered in flat colour.

I found the most successful works to be Paris’ twenty Arrondissements and the Tuscan Piazze. The former are no longer shown as a puzzle piece within ‘l’escargot’, but instead as individual areas in grey gauche. This is not the usual experience of a map of Paris, but is probably closer to how the Arrondissements’ demarcating boarders are used to order Parisian civic life.  The latter shows the four main piazze of Tuscany’s major cities; each space the flash-point of the historical, religious and civic, and are painted in the umber and terracotta that colour the Tuscan landscape. 

Though conceptual, this exhibition is not alienating as it investigates the universal familiarity of civic life through the most basic of shapes.  The aesthetic is such that should the viewer be armed with only the title of the work, it is apparent what is being observed.

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Installation view of Mick Peter's monumental work 'Pyramid Selling' at the reopened and newly located @drawingroom_ldn Well worth a look! #bermondsey #galleries #southlondongallery #drawing #mickpeters (at Drawing Room)

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Aurélie Lagoutte - Lillie’s Birdcage

Above: Aurélie Lagoutte Window Bird 2015. Giclee Print on cotton rag. 600x840mm

Unit G 12 A Collent Street London, E9 6SG 7 - 31 January 2016

“Lillie’s Birdcage” is a set in which Lagoutte’s models “…come and go as they please… they pose whilst flapping their wings – and they leave.”

Though I appreciate the idea of the open birdcage as a metaphor for freedom and the specific birds entitling each image as representative of strength, I cannot help but associate ‘birds’ with a very particular form of sexism, reminiscent of 70’s television programmes and men’s mags.  I’m unsure if this is something which has been lost in translation, or if it’s a purposeful subversion of sexism in Lagoutte’s exploration of the female nude devoid of the male gaze.

However, these eight photographs celebrate the female form given freedom through the lens of a woman’s camera.  The nudes are not trapped within the bounds of the image’s frame, and move with inhibition - their bodies extending out into the world.  The subjects are not aggressed by the camera, but filled with confidence that comes from a collaborative process between artist and subject.

Shot on medium format they had a warmth and a feeling of depth that can only be gained from using film and available light.  Grainy, dynamic, with carefully controlled lighting, these images also achieve richness through the marriage of the physical medium of film, giclee printed upon cotton rag paper. The saturation of the prints with a slight yellow cross-cast is the result of the tungsten lighting, and the deep shadowing further enhances the dynamic movement as Lagoutte captured her ‘birds’ in flight.

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David Lynch's swan song for industry

David Lynch – The Factory Photographs

Above: Untitled (Berlin, 1999). Silver Gelatine print 11" x 14"

Photographers’ Gallery 16 - 18 Ramillies St  London W1F 7LW

  Thankfully I managed to catch the last day of David Lynch’s exhibition, entitled The Factory Photographs, at the Photographers’ Gallery.

This exhibition of 156 black and white images is too vast to concentrate on just one – it is a series, and should be considered in its entirety.  Shot with a nod to cinematic mies-en-scène, the New Objectivity movement, and the Becher's typologies, we see abstracts of the crumbling cathedrals of Twentieth Century industrialisation.  Taken across a twenty-year period from 1980 – 2000 in the United States, UK and Eastern Europe, I see the images depicting the beginning-of-the-end of the two binaries of Twentieth Century socio-economic philosophy: Communism and Industrial Capitalism.

The factory acts as a signifier of the successes and failures of both modes.  As Communism declined during the 80s, as did collective State run industry.  In the US, the decline of the automotive vehicle industry beginning in the late 90s renders these signifiers of capitalism obsolete deserts of industry.

Grainy, high in contrast, with an emphasis on texture, we see disused three-phase power junction boxes with varicose veins of cables snaking out.  Decommissioned furnaces are silent black holes.  Graphic window frames, with backlit broken panes of glass are being covered by weeds reclaiming light from the factory's interior.  Steel girders arc like a rib cage, contrasted against an overcast sky.

The exhibition is accompanied by a sound installation of rumbling, clanging noises.  As with Lynch’s films, the holistic visual and sonic experience is designed to create a hyper-reality.

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Momentum - United Visual Artists

Installation view of Momentum – United Visual Artists

Barbican Curve gallery Silk Street London EC2Y 8DS

Continues 'til June 1st

United Visual Artists have produced the site specific Momentum, in response to the sweeping architecture of the Curve gallery at the Barbican Centre.  This installation with a nod to Foucault’s Pendulum in Paris’ Pantheon consists of twelve pendulums spread evenly along the ninety-metre expanse of the Curve.  Each pendulum is a meticulously designed and constructed apparatus of light and sound, tuned to the space to resonate both with the structure and with the participating viewer.

Yet, it is an ominous almost sinister experience walking into a darkened passage of swinging lights, beaming outwards like UFOs, or straight down like interrogative spotlights.  Like all good pendulums, they oscillate individually, finding a moment where they are in harmony with each other creating patterns of light upon the walls or floors of the gallery.  Similarly, the sonic element of the installation is either intermittent percussive sounds, or a gradually intensifying ringing as if a hundred hands were playing a thousand wineglasses. 

For me, it is how I image the inside of Orwell’s Ministry of Love to be.  Heightened by the Barbican’s Brutalist architecture, you enter a place of extreme sensory deprivation and hypnotic lighting; an experience that is simultaneously terrifying and calming.  It is as if the space was constructed for the indoctrination of its participants.  It was for me, a quiet cacophony that compelled me to sit on the ground with my back against the wall observing as the odd beam of light picked the others out in the darkness.

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Boomoon - perfect marriage of method to subject.

 Untitled #8790, 2007. C-Type Print, 120 x 180 cm

Flowers 21 Cork Street London W1S 3LZ

26 February – 5 April 2014

  It would be lazy to Orientalise South Korean artist Boomoon’s landscapes.  They do have certain qualities that invite a western viewer to do so: the atmospheric perspective; an inability to clearly read the images from left to right; the subject matter of snow blanketed mountain peaks, and crashing waves.  There is a lyrical and fundamental relationship with the sublime aspects of nature – an aesthetic ‘otherness’ that is not born from a Eurocentric artistic tradition.

However, what I drew from Boomoon’s work was as innate understanding of the materiality of his medium, executed through a perfection of technique and production.  This effectively positions the viewer in such away that it is impossible to be anything other than astounded and overwhelmed.

The four photographs of glaciers in the ‘Northscape’ series – and additionally the complimentary series of the sky as pure gradient ‘Up in the clouds’ – are an example of this attention to technique and production.  Saturated in brilliant cyan and cobalt blues, you can feel the glacier’s sub-zero temperature.  Their swirling crystalline form fills the whole frame, making it difficult to differentiate if they are a wave in motion or glaciers.  This ambiguity is only made possible through the pin sharp focus of the photographs, which are shot with such a shallow depth of field that every element of the surface is in focus.  To compliment the subject matter, the photographs are printed on cool toned C-Type metallic based paper, making the glaciers shimmer and glow from within.

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The Lenticular - naff trick of the advertising world is injected into the language of photography.

Above: Jeff Robb - Unnatural Causes 2.  Lenticular photograph

On my wanders through the London Art Fair earlier this year, I couldn’t help but notice there was quite the craze for lenticular photography- a kitsch relic of point of sale advertisements, 80s film posters, and cheap children's toys (remember Pogs?).  So much so, Damien Hirst had a lenticular photographic version of his shark in a vat (The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living - Paul Stolper Gallery). 

For those who aren't aware of what a lenticular is - though you've probably seen one at your local fish and chip shop - it is a form of 3D printing where a minimum of two images are interwoven, and overlaid with a regularly ridged plastic screen to either give the effect of animation or depth.  Almost like a physical forerunner of the GIF.

There are several artists who employ this technique to varying degrees of success, however I think it was most effectively used by Jeff Robb in his work Unnatural Causes 2 (represented by Mauger Modern Art stand G4).  In this work, the lenticular adds both movement and depth, as we are presented with a black and white photograph of naked women contained within hexagons and contorted into an uncomfortable position within the geometry of the space - reminiscent of a beehive.  The unnaturalness of this human apery is given a certain patina by the use of the lenticular, recalling a science fiction based dystopia.

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Sophie Bueno-Boutellier - Sing only a song that you can hear

Nonsense on my right, nonsense on my left, there is no justice, 2014 Wool tapestry, 180 x 250 cm

The Approach, London
 1st Floor 47 Approach Road E2 9LY

27th February – 6th April 2014

The performative aspect of Beuno-Boutellier’s practice is evident through all the works on exhibition at The Approach gallery; paintings that are worked on the floor, off-cuts of rough canvas and plastic that through inter-play of the two materials form the basis of large tapestries.  The work is considered, subtle, balanced and silent; beautifully orchestrated experiments in time and space.

Initially I found the work too silent, too subtle – I appreciate the grand, the bombastic and the sublime.  However, on reflection I understood that there is a tension that lies in this work tracking the movements of the body in space and its intervention upon the mediums of Beuno-Boutellier’s practice: the practical aesthetics of considered and quiet beauty.

What I found most interesting about this work was the translation of the artifacts of her practice into the large-scale tapestries. The multi-faceted, almost onion-skin like distillation from one media to another; the interplay with her body and within themselves, which was then photographed and closely cropped, translated into digital imagery, and condensed again to form the basis of the tapestry works. 

Tapestry weaving is performative in itself: loud, grand, and physical.  However, here we are presented with muted tones of beige, brown and white.  This, almost contradictory exploration of technique and image, and its relation to performance and the body, furthered to serve the flattening and flux of media at each stage of the process: from object to digital image, to cropped pixilation woven back into the physical world.

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Space is Ace and The Photocopy Club : Exhibition

The other Thursday, I had the pleasure of seeing the Space is Ace collective and the Photocopy Club's collaborative exhibition at Doomed gallery, Dalston.  Melanie King, co-founder of  Space is Ace explained her core philosophy around the exhibition:

[We are] exploring the glut of astronomical images... at our disposal, and how I don't feel as a culture that we are really processing the sheer scale and sublime nature of these photographs, so this exhibition intends to address these ideas.

Photocopying as an image manipulation technique has a particularly strong aesthetic.  It can run the risk of over-shadowing the image due to its reductive nature; tone is reduced and contrast increased describing the form but little of the detail.

However, with this exhibition the usage of photocopy serves to describe what is at the heart of astronomical photography: space and time, light and dark, presence and absence. The idea that - as Melanie points out - we are so used to seeing these images of  space we forget that  they have been transmitted from beyond the limits of spatial/temporal understanding.  

The formal manipulations that are achieved through the application of photocopy to these images have created a beautiful parallel.  They have become, in a way, both a disposable short hand and a guiding aesthetic in the last 45 years since the moon landing.

It was a shame that this show was not on for longer

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Doktor Schröder The Anatomy of Melancholy at the chapel of Saint Barnabas (at House of St Barnabas)