"Life without sheets of paper to be scribbled on is masterpiece" Moira Davey at Camden Arts Centre

Camden Arts Centre is an interesting complex comprising several spacious galleries, artist’s studio, reading room, café and a large range of art books for sale in the foyer.  Primarily I went to see the artist Moira Davey’s show “Life without sheets of paper to be scribbled on is masterpiece.”

Davey is a Canadian artist working in photography, film and writing.  The three for her are intertwined.  She creates what the curator describes as “intimate visual essays”, recycling and reusing her old photo stock to make new narratives.  As part of my art installation involves Mail art postcards, I wanted to look at her use of this approach.  I was intrigued by how she takes a series of her photographs of ordinary objects, close-ups, letters, writings, and posts each of them to other’s addresses or to the Arts Centre.  The stamped mailed objects take on the battered imprints, creases and folds of the journeys they make, adding to their stories.  She writes stickers or uses ink to mark the returned objects adding further narrative layers.  As she says “All stories are somehow survival stories…with good or bad futures.” 

Man/Boy/Woman/Paris 2009/14

This has sparked an idea for my own Mail-Art project.  I am examining Sheppey identity as my project theme.  I have created postcards which are self-addressed and stamped.  I am inviting people on the Island to take a postcard and tell a Sheppey story on the back in whatever way they wish, then return it to me.  I thought it would be interesting to explore this idea of a layering of stories on these returned postcards.  I will do this by creating hand-written notes of participant’s responses to the project, and stick these on the postcards, to create a kind of story collage.  One of Davey’s films was also screened as part of the exhibition, which I found rather less accessible, partly I think because I disliked her droning narrator voice.  However, one quote struck me…“Why does everyone want to tell a story?” she asks, and giving one possible reply she quotes from Goethe, “The reward of storytelling is to be able to let go.”

http://www.camdenartscentre.org/whats-on/view/m-Davey

 

 

Saskia Olde Wolbers: “Yes, these Eyes are the Windows (2014)”

I was interested in experiencing this new installation piece commissioned by Artangel from Saskia Olde Wolbers as I am seeking inspiration for a sound piece to accompany my Caravan installation.  For my piece, I am creating a fictional male alter ego character, who will be conjured from facts and fantasy.

Olde Wolbers is a London-based Dutch-born artist who studied at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, The Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and Chelsea College of Art and Design.

As her website states “Since the mid-1990s Olde Wolbers has been working in video, combining analogue imagery with fictional narration. The videos are shot under water in handmade model sets that are dipped in paint to create unstable environments. In the most recent works the music soundtrack has been composed by Daniel Pemberton.”

The artist is interested in weaving together fact and fiction into narrative pieces. She examines the “tendency of human perception to discover meaning in random structures”.  She creates fragmentary and disorienting worlds in which it is difficult to distinguish truth from fiction, where “reality” is depicted as fluid.

In her works, physical or virtual structures like houses or trailers speak in voices telling the experiencer the stories of themselves.  For example, “Placebo 2002” is a fictional based on the medical syndrome Pseudologica Phantastica where invented experiences are presented as reality.

It was necessary to book the visit to this event in advance.  It is set in a dilapidated house, 87 Hackford Road London SW9 ORE in Brixton near Stockwell tube.  There is a blue plaque on the wall which says that Vincent Van Gogh was a tenant there from 1873 to 1874.  The plaque was added after a local postman traced Van Gogh’s history, and it was saved from demolition.

Olde Wolbers found fragments of this story from newspapers, oral histories, and literary works which she uses to create a broken, untrustworthy narrative which is recounted by the house itself.  The piece uses the recorded voices of actors playing the different characters, combined with music and disturbing natural sounds which help to create an insubstantial, ghostly atmosphere.  I felt I was on un-solid ground literally, and metaphorically.

I found this an interesting piece, and I was struck by the reactions of some of the other visitors.  Some found it frustrating because they couldn’t understand “the whole narrative” and they “missed pieces of the story”.  I think this was exactly what the artist was attempting to do, in suggesting that no “historical truth” is complete, that every person’s story and identity is an invented one.  I recommend a visit.

http://www.artangel.org.uk/projects/2014/yes_these_eyes/about_the_project/yes_these_eyes

 

 

Andreas Gursky at White Cube Bermondsey

I visited White Cube gallery in Bermondsey to see Andreas Gursky’s exhibition, his first in London since 2007.  Gursky is a visual artist creates very large format photographs of landscapes, and the structures of industrial capitalism.  He uses aspects of high and low visual culture, to examine industry, leisure and consumerism.  “…ideas of authenticity, ownership and control in our increasingly digitised age.

I was fascinated by the high-viewpoint and panoramic scope of his photographs, and the way he creates intricate composites and layers which caused me to want to keep on looking and searching through his works.  He plays with the very large against the very tiny, in a dizzying way.  I am intrigued as to how he makes his constructions.

I liked the uneasy “Kathedrale” in particular, a composite of giant stained glass windows that are shown in black and white.  On first glance, they appear repetitive until you look closer.  In the foreground, are a set of tiny figures dwarfed by and seemingly gazing up at the glass structure.  Two of the figures are “photographing” it, next to a pile of dirt? a grave?.  I think of the worship of icons and Biblical references to the worship of Mammon.

In his series of “May Day” pieces, he photographs an overwhelming mass of people who seem to be at a music festival.  The sense of distance and depth in May Day IV is particularly striking.  There are groups of people in tight circles of light, looking inwards to each other, but all are looking off into the side distance at something.    I think of constellations, dislocation, disorientation, and rubbish piles simultaneously, “the flotsam and jetsam of daily life.” 

I find the White Cube space quite intimidating due to its size and its doors which are really hard to open!  However, I can see how these works need to be displayed in this kind of space, and I recommend a visit to this exhibition.

 

Edwin Burdis at the Vitrine Gallery

Last week I visited the Vitrine Gallery in Bermondsey Street, round the corner from London Bridge station.  I went to see the work of London-based artist Edwin Burdis because my project this term concerns my creation of a character with an imagined identity.   His paintings are life-sized plywood painted and collaged figures depicting a tribe of plumbers with names and crude characteristics.   The figures are chimeras made up of “tools of the plumber’s trade”, animal parts, and costumes, and are sexually and physically ambiguous.  Each unsettling character is a role-player with multiple personalities in some sort of performance, and is given a description in the artist’s notes.  “Plumbarius U Bend wants to fuck the Plumbers: Flecher so badly, but he is way too shy to try.”

This is described in his write-up as “the worker, the farmer and the plumber form the highest priesthood.”   He emphasizes the plumbers provide us with “clean water in the home, clean water forever..which enables everything on this planet to live.”  He is comparing this idea of an essential life-giving network to the network of the Internet.  His preliminary drawings for the final pieces are displayed in the adjoining room.

The artist works in a variety of styles – painting, sound, sculpture, and drawing, as well as operatic film.

I was not impressed with these works, which I found derivative.  Although I quite enjoyed the surreal elements, I didn’t follow his rationale regarding “clean water”.  His write-up goes on to talk about Aby Warburg an influential art historian who was diagnosed with schizophrenia and manic depression and escaped the institution by “performing” his insanity, which I guess is what these characters are doing. 

The gallery itself is a pretty non-descript, two-roomed white-walled space, but it is welcoming, and they are happy for you to take photographs.