Narratives and Spaces

In the past few weeks I’ve tried to confront my anxiety about how to display my work by seeing a lot of exhibitions. These ones were particularly useful.

Annabel Dover: The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
Waterfront Galley, Ipswich. Annabel is interested in the stories objects tell. Here she was showing 135 paintings of objects, and had simply pinned them all on the main gallery wall. The effect was far more powerful and thought provoking than if they had been shown individually and more formally. I have wondered how to show my little original paintings, which are all different experiments, on different surface, because individually some look rather rough and insignificant. Annabel’s display proved how much more they might be able to convey if I decided to show them as a group in a similar simple way.

James Coleman at Marian Goodman Gallery, London This was totally inspiring! A fantastic gallery – in a georgian warehouse – with lovely varied spaces. Coleman was projecting or screening in every room including the stairwell, all the work dealing with how a photographic image gathers meaning over time and with the complicity of its viewers. His Untitled, 2011-15 was my favourite. This was a huge projection in dazzling colours of just a couple of clips of people on a carousel, hurtling towards us viewers to the soundtrack of a monster pulse. It was overwhelming and hypnotic, and joyful – made me amazed at what we can see and experience in life, and the power of a mere image to record, celebrate and share it. And it really convinced me that my projection is worth getting right.  I’d love to show a video,  but can’t find one to link to, and this one’s so good, you should really see it for yourselves!

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Thomas Mailaender, Gone Fishing, 2015 at Tate Modern’s Performing for the Camera exhibition I loved this piece. It is a tiny screen showing reconstructed found photos inside a plane tree with the artist reading fake letters on a sound track. All these elements construct a narrative that is so dominant that the screen and its images seem subordinate. However, seeing the tiny lit screen in its gloomy hollow gave the images a jewel like quality that made them seem super-important and truthful, even though they were not. My tutor Robin had suggested I check this one out, and I can see that an enclosed (treeless!) small screen could be a good way to show some of my pieces.

Electronic Superhighway at Whitechapel Gallery This exhibition was a collection of different artists’ works based on the internet, and included many different screen and projection based works. I was very interested in this one:

This was an image projected from behind onto perspex, and the woman moved slightly as a soundtrack of her voice played. I wonder whether I could project this way? And whether it would work well for my project. Maybe it would be a good way of showing all my little originals? It was not clear from the description in the gallery whether this was a hologram or a projection. I need to investigate projecting holograms.

What struck me looking at several other projections in this exhibition was how distracting some of the clutter included in the spaces was. A couple were set up like domestic rooms, and the furniture and collected viewers really dominated the spaces, like this:

I want to avoid this, keeping the viewing central to my show, but also intimate – which may be quite a challenge!

Finally I found the Wellcome Collection, and their exhibition ‘States of Mind’: Tracing the edges of consciousness which I had sought out because I thought it might have an interesting projection installation. In fact what really caught my eye was a pamphlet, A.R. HOPWOOD’S FALSE MEMORY ARCHIVE. The artist A.R.Hopwood, Wellcome Collection Engagement Fellow, has been collecting ‘false’ and ‘non-believed’ memories for a touring exhibition. It is fascinating, and made me consider my own work afresh and consider the difference in our projects. His deals with a very similar narrative issue to mine, but I’m looking at traces of the process of evolution of ‘memory’, and how that conjures validity, or gaps, or difference, whereas he is examining the fact that some memories are believed by their rememberer, when evidence proves they could not be true. He gave me a useful way to pin down my work and feel more directed, something that has been a worry.

It’s been an interesting few weeks.

Postgraduate RCA sculpture students visited to tell us about their practice, and then give tutorials. My tutorial with Luana Duvoisin Zanchi was really rewarding: the stop motion clip seemed to interest her, and reminded her of Christian Marclay’s ‘The Clock’, 2010, in the way it seemed to mark time, as well as Oliver Beer’s ‘Reanimation (Snow White), 2014, because of the way I’d reinterpreted original ciné frames to give them a new life. I’d never come across these before – they are fascinating as well as relevant!

‘The Clock’ is a spell-binding 24-hour long film montage that keeps time because all its scenes involve real-time references to actual time. It teems with the stories referenced by the films and characters Marclay has selected to fill his minutes, even though the clips are too small to tell more than fragments of narrative. You can see a clip here:

‘Reanimation (Snow White)’, which you can see here:

is also similar to the process I’ve been using with my images. Beer isolated the 500 frames of a 40 second scene from Disney’s ‘Snow White’, then persuaded 500 french school children to use tracings of these to reinvent the frames. He then reprinted their drawings onto film and reprojected the scene, filtered through the action and thinking of these children, using just their new images.

I am not doing exactly the same as these artists, but I’m playing with fragments of narrative, and traces of influence in a related way. Both these artists’ installations have strong narrative force that overrides new elements the artists have created, with the inexorable passage of 24 hours, and the force of an iconic near-universal fairy tale. My little clips do not. I wonder whether this matters? Should I impose a narrative? I am examining traces of story-making by taking my stories apart and playing with fragments that I have deliberately disconnected from any former meaning. I’m looking at our impulse to construct meaning, even when there is none. My stop motion clips interest me because they mimic the activity of story-making, but are actually only inexact copies of fragments of stories. Any sense of them having narrative is just constructed in the viewer’s head.

Flu has laid low most of our class. As a result, I had tutorials with three L6 tutors this week! They seem to agree that projecting my stop motion clips should be central to my degree show. The clips appear to have a conceptual energy that my paintings lack, however visually appealing the paintings might be. I have to find the best way to show the clips, and decide how to put them together, and need to see how other projected installations work. I hope to experiment with scales of projection too. It is unsettling to have spent so many months playing with sensual materials and surfaces, and making some images that I really like, only to turn away and give all my attention to technology. Like my tutor Robin, I get a headache if I spend too long with a projector… But only these clips seem to get near to the ideas that interest me.

So I’m setting up a production line. Here are time-lapse clips showing me printing,

and trimming and scanning,
to create the copied images that will go together to make new clips. This is dull, slow preparatory work compared with the fun of bringing them together with my iPhone stop motion app!

And here are my latest finished clips:

and

I’ve been projecting these in our studios’ black space. The more I look at them, the more difficult it is to decide whether it matters that I am not imposing or using a coherent narrative with them. My instinct at this stage is that I should let their uncertainty be more important, because it is the unreliability of memory and visible narrative that interests me. It is tempting to chase this issue, but finding an answer would be to pin down something that is all about imprecision and the viewer’s unseen action, and that feels wrong. I need to be patient, make more clips, and see what they do together.

Well, my project this week was to use photos of the prints I made and blogged about for my last post to make an animation of the original image. I scanned them into my computer, and then set about creating a moving film with them as I have been doing with the lost and damaged ciné film frames.

Sadly I recently updated my computer to Apple’s latest operating system, and the new versions of the software I had used before utterly defeated me. I must have spent three hours creating projects of blank frames, scouring google for solutions and cursing every technology that used to be my friend… Until I decided to have a go with my phone using an app called Stop Motion.

It sounded too good to be true. But thankfully this app did everything I needed as swiftly and slick as I could ever have wished. There was a nasty moment when it looked like my animation might have cartoon curtains, but I’ve managed to avert them, and here is my new video:

It is short, but I’m very proud of it. Should we suffer for art? I think life’s too short.

After tucking up my roll of pastel picture, I’ve decided it is time to tackle a new image from the cine films. One has a brilliant blue singe mark across it, and some interesting life going on ambiguously across it. I’ve decided to make this on an A4 sheet of 90g tracing paper. This is an odd composition with trees in it – I never manage to get trees to look like trees. There is a dog in the original moving cine sequence, but in this damaged frame it happens to be behind the foreground tree, and indistinguishable from the tree trunk. Anyway, I make the pastel painting. Here it is:

I think it works well. The colours are brightly contrasting, and lead you to think this is definitely a meaningful image, but the figure contradicts this. Red clothing makes the figure stand out significantly, yet it is crouched, and this posture says it is also still, and oddly directionless: it faces in a direction, but without an object of real interest to hold its gaze because there is no dog, just a tree. The blue mist of the frame’s singe mark looks bright and cheery, but also other-worldly. I fix it to the studio window and sun streams through it:

I hadn’t realised how little pigment I had applied round the winter trees and the figure. Now they look odder with a bright halo. The trees look spookily alive. I was concerned that this paper bears its wetting with fixer very well, and after lots of handling it has barely buckled. This works well with the image, though. The steadiness of the painting’s surface says this is an important image being treated with respect, but the image itself is difficult to understand.

I had been wondering whether I should move on from working with these tracing paper and soft pastel images, but I don’t think I can. There is something delicious about handling the pastels and the brittle paper, and athough I always start off confident I know how they will turn out, these paintings keep surprising me.

 

 

 

The big soft pastel image has been an interesting adventure.

– I’ve experimented with stump blenders, in an effort to reduce an accumulation of finger grease that might have reduced the image’s surface bite, and prevented me adding more layers of pigment. In the end, I have used mainly my fingers, as they’ve been too dry with chalks to be particularly greasy, and I can keep the finish smooth, which seemed to look better. The stumps had a tendency to bite and disrupt the pigments, leaving a visible scratchy effect that did not suit the tracing paper.

– I’ve struggled to work my image horizontally, knowing I will display it vertically.

– I’ve had to cope with the paper buckling under layers of fixer, and develop a plan to counteract this. I spent time considering why this bugged me – after all, I like the buckling and tearing in some of the smaller images I have made. Finally I decided that I rather liked a gentle buckling, but still wanted the image to hang reasonably true once it was vertical, so I tried to keep buckling to a minimum.

– I’ve had to continue building the image on its fragile support not knowing how rich it will be once I separate it from its board and let light flow through it.

And, once I finally finished it, I had to separate it from the board, spray fixer to its wrong-side in the hope that buckling would settle, protect its surfaces then weigh the whole thing down to help the paper relax.

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The image has a slight ripple, but is rich in colours yet translucent and vivid with light behind. I’m rather pleased with it. However I have a new issue. This is a fragile thing. I want to include it in my degree show next June (well, I think I do at this stage), and I need to keep it in good condition. For now I decide to roll the image and its long trailing end and pack it away in a cardboard tube for now. After all the fuss and effort of making it, this seems a weirdly final end to the process, but seems the best way to look after the piece until I have decided how to display it.