The Stair Show is all up and ready. Officially opens on Friday but we have already had positive feedback from the tenants within Leroy House (office block aimed at creative businesses). The group exhibition is part of Islington Exhibits ‘ an initiative to unlock hidden venues in Islington and give artists and craft persons a space to display their work..’
Everything was hung in two evenings, was secretly relieved that the others were apprehensive about hanging the work ourselves. The walls are made out of something stronger than what walls are normally made out of (technical huh?), so harder to drill. It all came together and has transformed a no space into a dynamic space for art whilst maintaining its functionality. Details of the show and other exhibitors can be found here.
The white space is here to stay and but there are other platforms that can be explored as well. Within a gallery, an artwork sits upon historic rules constructed by artists, art institutions and the viewers themselves; these rules are both accidental and intentional. Perhaps outside the usual gallery space the boundaries of art are less defined. Both types of space are important to my practice.
Without a gallery setting, I was reminded of all the processes, decision making and roles involved in the organisation of an exhibition. At times we are technicians, handypersons, web-designers, photographers, marketeers, advertisers, secretaries, health & safety officers, accountants, critics, writers, invigilators, IT technicians, couriers (recently I lived close enough to transport my work to a gallery by bus – reckless but brilliant), fund raisers, researchers oh yeah and artists. I’m sure the list is endless …
Really pleased Something’s happening was in Junes top 10 Artist talking blogs and was selected as a Choice blog by Tim Ridley.
I like the fact that Artists talking is a space for the other stuff. The important/unimportant strands, strands that we don’t always allow/have time or space for. Here doubts and questions can be addressed, picked up and put down, as and when.
Attended a portrait class this week, completely different to life drawing. Trying to find, then steal, and finally hold the visual identity of the sitter in a two dimensional form; really challenging.
The sitters weren’t professional (no offence!), we sat for each other. It was different to the scenario of an actor getting into character. Here it seemed a case of getting out of character, perhaps even a tendency to try and hide the personality, to display only the physical. Are both the physical and the psychological needed? – hypothetical I guess, it would be difficult to sit completely as a piece of flesh; void of psychological traits.
My recent paintings are absent of figures, the aim is to fill the absence of a figure with what I imagine the absent figure would sense; a psychological familiarity.
This is a painting of a sewing machine.
(Oil on canvas, 18 x 14 in, 2011)
I am considering titling it Ghost light.
Here’s a link to an entry on Wikipedia for Ghost light (theatre):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_light_(theatre)
Spoken and written influences of the week…
On ‘This is Magritte’ [1] a radio programme, Gavin Turk suggested that being labelled an ‘artist’ could be restrictive. When discussing how the surrealist artist René Magritte would categorise himself Gavin Turk said ‘I think [at] the moment that Magritte would quite easily confess to be being an artist he would feel something would be lost‘ The choice of the word ‘confess’ was interesting. Could it be the risk of being labelled an artist? The risk of the negative connotations, such as narcissism or sentimentality. It can be difficult to use creative ability to express the individual experience; there is the risk the ‘expressed’ could appear separate to or above the common shared experience. I suppose the thing that can be unique is the creative ability. Narcissistic?
The following is taken from Doris Lessings (1972) preface to her novel The Golden Notebook [2]:
‘At last I understood that the way over, or through this dilemma, the unease at writing about ‘petty personal problems’ was to recognize that nothing is personal, in the sense that it is uniquely one’s own. Writing about oneself, one is writing about others, since your problems, pains, pleasures, emotions – and your extraordinary and remarkable ideas – can’t be yours alone. The way to deal with the problem of ‘subjectivity’, that shocking business of being preoccupied with the tiny individual who is at the same time caught up in such an explosion of terrible and marvellous possibilities, is to see him as a microcosm and in this way to break through the personal, the subjective, making the personal general, as indeed life always does, transforming a private experience – or so you think of it when still a child, ‘I am falling in love’, ‘I am feeling this or that emotion, or thinking that or the other thought’ – into something much larger: growing up is after all only understanding that one’s unique and incredible experience is what everyone shares.’ (LESSING 1972, p. 13)
[1] BBC RADIO 4. 2011. This is not Magritte, [radio programme]. BBC Radio 4. 16 June 2011
http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/b011vh4t/
[2] LESSING, D. 1972. The Golden Notebook, London: Harper Perennial.
This is brilliant. Its from Alistair Gentry’s blog and is a post about the cuts to organisations such as as Artsway. The quote by Anne Herbert is also brilliant:
“Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries.”
http://careersuicideblog.wordpress.com/2011/06/16/…
