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.
