Celestial Talking

Artist Profiles

Alex Bunn

Alex Bunn’s work combines a role as producer; working with diverse groups of specialists, with his own artistic activity. Typically an artwork may necessarily draw on skills as diverse as radiography, prop-making, pyrotechnics, prosthetics, sculpture, haberdashery, electronics and cooking. Because of the often transient nature of the materials and occurrences, the results are usually displayed as staged photographs or custom-made illuminated cabinets. In broad terms, his thematic predilections are science, philosophy and Epicureanism. Fascinated with the converging paradigms of science, the supernatural, the superstitious and the absurd, his work meditates on the subjectivity of truth and its fluctuating points of reference. He uses science as a springboard for his imagination, discarding more formal representations to produce a body of work that playfully manipulates and transforms known objects to produce unsettling combinations. Through reclassification, and the rearrangement of order, he acknowledges scientific methods, but the results are more akin to that of a “mad Scientist” than the clean and precise methods of a modern technician. In an era of Biotechnological modification, his sculpture Quabrid imaginatively explores the reshaping of the human form. The bust is formed by using multiple high-resolution medical scan topography of different tissues of the body and is then fused with architectural components to create a unique hybrid portrait. Alex Bunn has recently exhibited at the Royal Institute of Great Britain, Candid Arts Trustand The Victoria & Albert Museum.

Jonas Ranson

Work in progress for Celestial Contrakt .

*Apotropaic ( Working title )

 Screenprint on mirror

test October 2009

*

“Apotropaic” is an adjective that means “intended to ward off evil” or “averting or deflecting evil” and commonly refers to objects such as amulets or other symbols. The word is of Greek origin: apotrope literally means “turning away” or averting (as in “averting the evil eye“). The Greeks propitiated the chthonic “Gods of Aversion”—the apotropaioi.

Artist Profile

Jonas Ranson

Achieved through treatment in both digital conversion and photographic silkscreen technique, Jonas Ranson’s compositions describe imagined algorithmic and structural ‘episodes’. Slyly garish black interstices, a representative veiling and distorting, the print works act as codes that signal an elegant mathematics and geometry that renders not merely objects or visual representations, but dynamic, responsive systems. Using permutations of iconographic and architectural languages, the structures take the form of totemic frieze. The style is characterized by a stripped-down, geometric structure of repetitive forms. There is an instinct for half-tone which attempts to bring balance and unity to the picture surface. This is the chief means of giving solidity to the forms and creating the fictive space. The successive planes, independents circuits which cancel each other out, contradict each other. The work simultaneously constitutes the layers of one and the same physical reality, and the levels of one and the same mental reality, memory and spirit. With a ‘Computery’, architectonic aesthetic, the works can be viewed as a kind of entropy, seen as an emergence in reverse, a procedural approach to decay rather than regeneration. This procedural entropy is used as a means of simulating or stimulating a form of ‘computational’ breakdown. Jonas Ranson is a print graduate of the Royal College of Art, currently living and working in Hackney, East London. Recent exhibitions have include Tableau Vivant, Aquarium Gallery, Bloomsbury 2007, Terra Extremitas Multi Disciplinary Event NDSM–WerfAmsterdam 2008, Impromptu, collaborative groupshow at Schwartz Gallery, Hackney and morerecently Deus Ex Machina, solo show at NO:IDGallery Whitechapel.

www.jonasranson.co.uk

Artist Profile

Marc Wayland

Marc Wayland’s work Beyond the Hungry Away further develops the subjects Wayland explores through photography and printmaking. The difference between living and dying is thought of as a fragile membrane. It is that proximity to death and the corresponding vibration of the human soul that is a constantly re-occurring theme.  Beyond the Hungry Away  represented a continuation of his two-year investigation into portraiture of the spirit. What began as a series of portraits of dead friends developed into turning the camera on the beauty and vitality of those alive.  ‘Capture the death of me and mirror it back to me lest I forget how to live’.  Merely approaching that work created sufficient turbulence to disturb its material nature and give it a life beyond itself.  Beyond the Hungry Away  comprised of large photographic images printed on layers of fabric and exploited both natural and artificial light in the installation. Wayland studied combined arts at Brighton in the late eighties, and upon moving to London became intrigued by the sex industry and its power dynamics. He also worked as a story board artist, art director and director on a variety of music promo projects, and during subsequent years performed with Aiden Shaw’s  Whatever throughout the USA and Europe. In 2002 whilst at the Royal College of Art he received the Alf Dunn Printmaking Award and the Helen Chadwick travel Award. MA Fine Art Print Making, The Royal College of Art, London. Marc has recently exhibited at Werkstatt Galerie in Berlin as part of Comet Prussia group show, an attempt to show what the Prussian state-idea has become today, purging it of nostalgia and projecting it on to a contemporary screen.

Artist Profiles

Nikos Alexiou

Nikos Alexiou, is a Greek artists and collector most known for his installation The End exhibited at Venice Biennale, Greek Pavilion in 2007. His most obvious signature is the use of fragile, lightweight materials (bamboo shoots in his early work and now semi-transparent paper ) which he combines to form geometric patterns. For the Celestial Contrakt he has created an installation that pulls together the various strands that have run through his work for more than two decades. Each part of this installation is a link in a chain. Images are deconstructed and then reassembled, suggesting that art is a self-sustaining, orderly, closed circuit. Suspended grid-like structures, made from coloured cotton threads, creating a heraldic yet ethereal effect that is enhanced by the light streaking through the patterns. His use of such ephemera accentuates a feeling of playful vulnerability and lends his surfaces a warm, evanescent quality. Alexiou often returns to early ideas taken from his visits to the Iviron monastery on Mount Athos, some with Byzantine references. He employs a cut-and-paste technique to transform the original images of the floor plan into abstract, interrelated motifs. Alexiou traces these images which he then pieced together to form a curtain before presenting them as the set design for a theatre adaptation of a folk tale.