GRAVITY LECTURE SERIES

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27th November 2014

Andrew Burton 

Sculpture. architecture, craft/ re-use. recycle 

leaving traces on landscape. worked over by man. landscape or man made? 

improvised sculpture. spontaneity. evocative buildings - washed away. attracting and repelling at the same time. 

Delhi - brick making. atmospheric. brick farms -ruin type form. Human form, human aspect. encoded number/colours on bricks - resemble something. 

narratives in structures - indintation in walls. something taken or added? 

fixed forms? emblams, motifs. bamboo - manipulative. large baskets and structures. 

reconstruting and remaking brick sculptures using other materials? combine cheap bricks with nice glaze. miniturized version of adriano wall. Vandalised by professional Graffiti artists. 

finished by destruction. turned the destroyed bricks into another piece - coloured graffiti bricks become something else. 

Sculpture constrating with sleek, modern glass building. canary wharf. 

works with life size bricks. working with narratives in graffiti. story onto bricks.curved piece - plain outside, stories/colour on bricks inside. 

putting graffiti in different contexts. 

glass brick sculptures

India, cow pat pancakes. made into sculptures. Hand made. quintisential. (they weren't celebrated sculptures) technologically beautiful. human scale. elbow to finger etc. 

China 

Bricks dumped into the sea. different process of history. 

Brownfield: site specific. derilict site. taken over by natives.

flowers turning purple to brown. evocative transformation. fragility. 

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20th November 2014

Thomas Yeomans

video - stop kony 2012

viral video, invisible children, black and white picture, simplification, misleading impressions. 

videos edited from found footage (web) physical and emotional responses from viewers. 

audio samples. understandable and accessible. exaggeration, ambiguous. Post cinematic. 

Film - 'We're both alive!' (14 mins) 

Themes of struggle, identity, beauty, vulnerability, ephipnany, obvious - reflects nostalgia and accomplishment (we're both alive) 

Music - form, expression - emotionally exploiting material. 

Social media - click baits. x factor auditions -emotional response. genuinely happy/sad in a condensed space?

music - minimal rock. foreboding anticipation - threat- build ups. 

EDM/track music. digital maximalism? moving through emotions at an accelerating rate. 

Excerpt from pacific Rim - Guilermo del toro 2013. 

Simple romantic narratives. easily recognised characters and archetypes. 

abstract ideas rather than pictographic - exotic, hollywood bloc busters. attacking senses. 

video 'Escape' (31 mins) 

post cinema, multiple genres, platforms, multiple genres. 

Health Goth Aesthetic - sea punk 

Appropriation, cut up, collage, montage authorship questions. re-purposing material - main stream activity. enjoys restrictions, validations, value, co-authorship, what is new and original. 

vine videos - 7 person boat crash - holy grail 

less american (dream) - evolving technology, losing oneself. 

choosing chips? intuition, scrolling, no methodology

doesn't reference/cite others. minimal alterations - changes/ authorship - harder to locate. 

hard to detect an artists sincerity when deconstructing authorship. Thomasyoemans.com 

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Colloquium

gravity. Burden of art practice. complexity of being weighed down. lightness of ideas. talking about visual. talking about visual. 

How vital is it that the theme is followed? 20 percent related? influence of the title/ theme/context. 

could it be less formal? need formality? positions of authority. understanding the audience. Change of venue? 

What can artists contribute to out understanding of time in comparison to other fields? what is it that artists do (ways of working materials, processes; ethics?)  that allows this? 

Value of art doesn't correlate to amount of time making value of not knowing. value of play. value imagination. make imaginative leaps. 

can you get away from nostalgia - is it possible to make work that is not nostalgic? reflect of past. identity - understanding the self. Burden of having to express yourself. 

opinions on david cleggs comment. that our earliest memories are constructed. all out memories are implanted/constructed. 

are certain media more able to explore/ articulate time than others? are certain media more able to explore/ articulate time more than others? Is there a 'grand plan' to the themes over the years? deeply unfashionable topics.

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30th October 2014

David Clegg

Temporality, fractured time, narrative time, memory, loss

Dementia, how they understand time, Alziemers, stories told by people with dementia. People who share the same first memories - are they true? Revisit and re-imagine memories changing memories. Does stored memory exist? 

Sensory memories. Repetition - patterns, music, etc. Music, suicide, band

Work going through dimensional change. Burning a piece - the ashes spread around the place. Same as it was before, but now massively different. 

Artists: disconnected and arrogant.

Life stories f people, accessing memories, recollection of events, stories

last words before death, signs (stop signs, wash your hands etc)

space changing conceptually, losing sense/perception of space

Self awareness. do you forget you're forgetting? speaking in metaphors (crystal clear etc) visually seeing the world, drawings

The life story transcript turned into an object

Paul lighthouse - sixth story. fragments being accessed over and over again. As other fragments dissolve - his mum in a bomb raid sticks - obsessing over it

Sid and prudence. stories from room 21 'i've been in this room before.' - repetition. variations of the same story. comedic yet the story isnt comedic. speaker doesnt feel trauma. 

How to present materials, basically accessible. 

'make art that felt like getting hit over the head with a baseball bat' bruce nauman.

feelings when stepping into the carehome. 

physical quality to stories. are stories sculpture? archived stories is a kind of social sculpture. re-defining what sculpture is. 

Finishing stories, re-working stories. nothing is finished

architecture of memory - tunnels underground rivers and and hidden rooms. Time travel - worm holes and minimal spaces

beliefs of rivers under floor boards etc. visual hallucinations. 

cutting up and re-sticking poems together. different ways of making sense of space. picking up and re-placing objects. 

portrait changing over time. patients drawings. slowly face disappears. 

combining image of significant objects with a text. pages sodden with writing, becoming black, worn through, process keeps her going. pen gives her something. 

connection between language and object.

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23rd October 2014

Sophie Molins

Sophie Molin's photography explores nostalgia and time travel. She created different works based around her mother's shoe, which after her death, could no longer be worn. Using such a symbolic item triggered feelings of loss and grief, even to those who do not know the owner. The power than one item has and the history behind it can often be quite intense. It is as if we are stepping into another's shoes. I often use mundane objects and aim to give them a new meaning or highlight their original use/background/function. Perhaps by experimenting with items that hold personal meaning, audiences can become more connected, excited, triggered, moves or attached to them. 

images from her website here

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16th October 2014

Dawn Mellor

Dawn Mellor’s book entitled Michael Jackson and Other Men, features her early teenage drawings primarily of singer Michael Jackson as well as other famous males. The book itself acts as a narrative of her childhood, documenting her fascination of these influential figures. They are born out of magazine images and newspaper clippings as this was Mellor's main source of image at the time. The Access to images and film now is much more accessible due to the internet, especially inappropriate content. Then,  a moral panic would have been caused had anything deemed inappropriate was exposed. There was less of an understanding as no conversations or discussions were happening in regards to the media. There was a political ignorance to the topic. Mellor’s artworks somewhat connect to other forms of media such as video and film, for example Michael Jackson’s Thriller.

Mellor creates series of paintings, primarily of well known figures, which she describes as 'constructed personal transformations of the self'. They are a series of characters. Her paintings allow her to access emotional states and political positions that she may not already hold. It allows her to become someone or something else.

Her paintings also relate to other original images and real life events. Her paintings of Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz document real life events in Kansas, where people were exploited and soldiers were at war. As Dorothy is also famously known for living in Kansas, the contrast between her innocence and the brutality that was happening at the time creates a contextualised image. It explores positions of pure hatred.

Although she does not consider he paintings to be controversial, they interrupt orthodox and challenge the opinions of what painting really is. Her influence of film continues in a series of paintings which show popular female role models and figures from films - turned horror. She exploits these women, portraying the unpleasant aspects of admiration and fandom. On the one hand they could be seen as feminist, yet on the other hand they could be promoting violence against women. Mellor is noting the censorship of unattractive women and highlights her issues with galleries concerns and limitations as to what she can exhibit in galleries. 

images:

Michael Jackson, 2007, oil on canvas 

Yellow Bricks Dorothy, 2008, oil on canvas 

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9th October 2014

Penny McCarthy

An image as conversation, form of material, beginning of an idea and a visual process. You need 10,000 hours of practice to become a master of anything and everything. Goof are is a mixture of the calculated and the instinctual. It’s normal and right o feel despair. Making art is a love affair. You don’t need a complicated backstory. If you make an exhibition of failures, you will probably pass.

Jerome Harrington

Jerome explores various aspects of time, temporarily and duration through painting, and touches on the theme of nostalgia. He experiments with perspectives in paintings, both the linear and non linear. How we navigate the mind differs in all of us, and it appears that now we are quick to analyse and give our perspectives. However, if we take time to reflect and consider a painting or piece of artwork, we may come to a different perspective. 

Peter Lanyon

Peter Lanyon’s work explores different perspectives and viewpoints in painting. He makes references to different landscapes, exploring aspects such as seas, cliffs, the human body and places. Although his paintings may seem abstract and expressive, if taken the time to reflect on a piece, one can gather various points of view. Time documents contemporary art and some paintings demand that we slow down to consider what is in front of us. 

 Andrew Sneddon

Andrew touched upon objects and how our minds work when looking at at approaching an object. We may get a sense of nostalgia when looking at an object, place or time. Transparent things through which the past shines. 

For example the Ruins of Hiroshima, a memorial for the people who died in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. The ruins are nostalgic to those who lost someone, and the atmosphere is very much melancholic. There is a history in objects and places. There is almost a disease in nostalgia as the melancholy creates an illness.

The Ruins of Hiroshima

Nostalgia stops progression, as if we are trapped in a time that we need to move on from. Could this need to hold onto things suggest that the momentum of development has slowed? We are somewhat living in the past, developing the past to fit in with our future. For example showing past television programmes now in HD, or popular musicians from the past, such as Kate Bush, reappearing just as popular as ever. 

Readings:

After Future - Franco Beradi

Mark Fisher - Ghosts Of My Life

Vladimir Nabokov - Transparent Things