Work in Progress

A pretty standard week last week. I spent most of my studio time working on the two boards that I made up and prepared the week before. I attempted to give them the feel of time passing or of time having passed. It’s not that successful yet, probably because of the smaller scale that I have been working on for these pieces. One of them is quite colourful too, and then distrurbed by a big block of cement.

I’ve also had confirmation of what I can do for the interim show, which is a wall length drawing piece, so I’m going to be flat out doing that for the next week or so. My other idea at the moment is to make a broken stretcher piece which plays with the space in which the work occupies.

I also had my first critical practice tutorial last week which was great and I have now got a much clearer direction of where to take my studio practice and my research and I’m quite excited by it. I plan to get through ‘The End of Temporality’ by Fredric Jameson at some point today. In the meantime, I need to get cracking on my 5 metre drawing.

I was and still am reflecting on the assessment feedback from the last couple of weeks. I spent Tuesday building supports for new pieces of work and then an absolute age preparing chalk and half chalk grounds for them. It was very time consuming but very nice to work on. I am just working my way through my ideas at the moment and seeing how they materialise in the work. I’ve been thinking about things that have partially collapsed, like half demolished buildings that are crumbling away. I took a saw and cut a painting in half. I am interested in the exposed structure and the way that the cement and plaster that I used as paint are crumbling away. Half a painting works better than the two halves together, or the piece as a whole. It’s got me thinking.

It’s a small world

On Thursday, a load of us from Wimbledon headed across the river to the interim MA show at Chelsea. We had been to St. Martins’ show a couple of weeks before, at the Bargehouse. It was quite a mix of work that I enjoyed, and the building lent itself to the experimental nature of the work. The space was huge, and seemed to go on forever, floor after floor. For Chelsea, they had the Triangle space, and each artist was given a triangle shaped space to present their work. It seemed to work quite well, and was refreshing not to have work on the walls, but either placed or suspended with the triangles. The highlight of my evening was literally bumping into Tom, my friend from my BA in Exeter, with whom I’d shared a great studio space in the Spacex Gallery throughout our final year. I hadn’t seen him since 2005, and we lost touch a couple of years ago when he liberated himself from Facebook. It turns out that he is doing his MA at Chelsea, we had a quick catch up and compared our recent postgrad experiences. It was a nice suprise.

Friday was quite intense with a lecture about capitalism and communism and how art fights against it, or something along those lines, followed by a reading group about the gaze, which was rather good as I was able to relate it to my studio practice.

The curators for our interim show visited us on Friday to select who would be in which show. I am going to be in Futura Oblique, the second of the two exhbitions which is being curated by Julia Alvarez. The private view is the 10th of March at the Nunnery, please feel free to come along. There is loads of other info about it and or course the first show here: http://www.wimbledonma2011.com

On Saturday I made the most of the nice(ish) weather for a walk around Hyde Park on my way to the Serpentine to catch the Philippe Parreno exhibition before it ended. I first came across Philippe Parreno’s work in 2002 when I went on a trip to Paris when I was on my Foundation course. He had No Ghost Just a Shell in the Paris Museum of Modern Art, and it just really struck a chord with me, and I’ve been unable to forget that piece of work since. The Serpentine Show was ace, each video had it’s own room, and it was a great example of how an artist can control the way a viewer sees the work as only one room had a video playing at any given time, once it ended, you followed the sound to the next room. It worked really well and related back to Firdays reading group. Invisibleboy and June 8 were my favourite pieces.

Interim Show at the Nunnery

Now that our assessment is all out of the way, our focus has shifted to our interim show ‘Futura Bold/Futura Oblique’, which is at the Nunnery in March. We’re splitting into two shows for this as there are so many of us! It’s quite exciting as we have manged to get two external curators on board, one for each week. We’ve sorted out our proposals and such for the show, and I am currently trying to establish a web/social network gathering for the show. The first of the private views is goning to take place during the next First Thursday! Here is some info anyway from our press release:

This annual show showcases work from new artists working in a range of media. The show comprises two semi-independent exhibitions: Futura Bold and Futura Oblique, spanning two consecutive weeks. Part of the experimental nature of this year’s show lies in the decision to invite two guest curators, Juan Bolivar and Julia Alvarez, to negotiate relationships between what will inevitably be a diverse selection of works.

The choice of external curators reflects a desire to encourage an open dialogue between subject and media, whether painting, film, installation, drawing, animation, or sound, while exposing the work to wider critical and artistic contexts.

Wimbledon College of Art’s MA Fine Art interim show falls at an exciting stage of the MA course. The artists involved take this as an opportunity to showcase their evolving ideas ahead of their final exhibition in September 2011. The show provides an opportunity for visitors to engage with the new work and fresh ideas of a dynamic group of emerging young artists.

Here is some more info:

Futura Bold/ Futura Oblique – Wimbledon MA Fine Art Interim Show 2011

Private Views:
Exhibition 1 – Thursday 3rd March, 7pm – 9pm
Exhibition 2 – Thursday 10th March, 7pm – 9pm

Open Thursday – Sunday 1pm – 5pm

Exhibition 1 – Thursday 3rd March – Sunday 6th March
Exhibition 2 – Thursday 10th March – Sunday 13th March

Travel Information:
Tube – Bow Road (District Line)
DLR – Bow Church
Bus – 8, 25, 108, S2 & D8

Finally we have a twitter account and a work in progress website too:

http://twitter.com/WimbledonMA2011

http://www.wimbledonma2011.com

I hope some of you can make it! We should know which week what artists are in later this week.

Assessment Feedback

Today was assessment feedback day, after we did the peer assessments, the tutors assessed us and our feedback forms were waiting for us in the office this morning before our one to ones. We were assessed on our critical practice, studio practice and our research folios.

In terms of the results, it was kind of what I expected and a bit of a relief. Critical practice wise, I need to clarify my questions concerning fragmented imagery, confinement and nostalgia as ‘states of being’ in their relationships to geometric and grid-like structures. In terms of my new found interest in space, it’s been suggested that I look at the writings of Einstein, and his concept of space and time and how they are relative to the observer, Herman Minkowski’s conceptions of time as a fourth dimension of space. Also, Martin Heidegger’s essay on the ‘Concept of Time’ and Frederick Jamieson’s essay ‘The End of Temporality’.

For my studio practice, my peers had given me some feedback. They ask if the illuminosity changes the painting and the space and is it to contrast colour of geometry? They said that it feels very site specific, which it isn’t really, but I kind of get what they meant. They said that the work was aesthetically good in relation to space and that it is influecnced by architecture. It was noted that my strongest work (the work I had done a week prior in the project space) was stronger, but I made the decision to make a new piece for the wall space that I had. It has also been suggested that I experiement more with material play.

My one to one also gave me lots of suggestion. Artist’s such as Richard Ducker, Bram Bogart and Simon Callary were brought up in our conversation. I need to dig deep into my reasons for using my materials, such as the cement. There is the spiritual/personal reason, like Beuy’s use of wax to the more brutal use of materials like the bricks used by Carl Andre. My next few pieces of work need to deliberately challenge the ideas/comments brought up during this assessment process. All in all, it was refreshing for me to go through an assessment process for the first time in many years.