Liverpool's First International Photography Festival: Look11, Various Venues, Liverpool.

Review by Kenn Taylor

A new entry on Liverpool’s cultural calendar, Look11, is a vast photography festival encompassing exhibitions, events and projects taking place over several months. Like the similar but larger Liverpool Biennial, it has taken over many of the city’s arts venues for the duration and has an over-arching theme – ‘photography as a call to action’.

Open Eye Gallery has been promoting photography in Liverpool since it was founded in the 1980s. This will be the last exhibition in the Wood Street space that it has occupied since the early 90s, before it moves to a new, larger home on the waterfront. Appropriately, the exhibition features images chosen from Open Eye’s archive, curated by American photographer, Mitch Epstein, who will have his first UK solo show at their new space.

The shots are very much of their time, nearly all from the 1980s; they feature some of the most influential British photographers of the period, many of whom cut their teeth in Liverpool, including Tom Wood and Martin Parr. The lives of the working-class and the decaying fabric of the industrial north are the inevitable main themes of many of the images, with photographers like John Davies and Parr finding truth and beauty where others would see only ugliness and squalor. It’s a timely show, and you wonder what such photographers would think of Liverpool’s startling regeneration, and the Open Eye’s shiny new home.

Bluecoat has perhaps the most successful exhibition of the festival overall. Taking Containment as their own theme within a theme, the show is varied, but high-quality and coherent. Ben Graville’s In and out of the Old Bailey(2002-09) features ‘papped’ shots taken of prisoners through the mirrored glass of prison vans on their way into the UK’s central criminal courts. The images raise issues of privacy, media intrusion and voyeurism. Beyond this though, their power as portraits is undeniable; the garish colours, lack of focus and the candid poses, some defiant, others cowering, adding to their disconcerting fascination.

In total contrast, David Maisel’s project, Library of Dust (2006), records the corroded copper containers that hold the cremated remains of patients who died whilst in the Oregon State Mental Asylum. Dating from between 1883 and the 1970s, these ashes were never collected by the families of the deceased. The large and vivid images detail the copper decaying in rich greens and whites, only the faded institutional labels revealing their true grim purpose. That these works highlight the containment not only of human remains, but those who society deems as ‘other’, so much so that many were rejected by their own families even in death, is as poignant as it is troubling.

The vast Novas Contemporary Urban Centre is, as usual for festivals like this, filled to the brim with several different exhibitions. Its basement crypt holds the largest exhibition, which appears to have a documentary focus. Robert Polidori’s New Orleans After the Flood (2005-6) is a series of large images of the destruction wrought on domestic environments by Hurricane Katrina. Featuring the bright colours of family homes wrecked with the dank grey floodwater and filth, the images are shocking in their epicenes and fascinating in there detail.

On an even larger scale, are Ed Burtynsky’s trademark large-format photographs of landscapes altered by man. Oil Spill (2010) taken after last year’s Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, are some of his most recent images and, like so much of his work, are stunningly aesthetic in there approach, but terrible when you consider what they feature. His black and white images of ship-breaking in Bangladesh meanwhile, are even more gripping, featuring dirty, dishevelled human figures in a mess of mud and rotting metal, overwhelmed by the vast vessels they are dismantling. Closer to home, Ian Beesley’s shots from Hay Royds Colliery in Yorkshire highlight that similarly dirty work continues in the UK, despite what many think.

These are just three of the shows in Look11, whose venues encompass everything from Café walls to the city’s main Walker Art Gallery. It's interesting to consider these exhibitions under the umbrella of 'photography as a call to action' as while many of the photographers share this aim, many don't, instead wanting to represent the world in a certain way, a world that is complex and multifaceted. Aided by the curators decision to show differing work in pairs, or at least close context which helps to create dialogue and ask questions of different images and photographers, rather than presenting any views as a singular truth.

Look11 is an impressive programme and a must see for anyone with an interest in documentary photography. Despite the cuts to ACE funding, it's exciting to see Artistic Director, Stephen Snoddy and Festival Manager, Daniel Cutmore's vision come to the fore and it's even more exciting to think, about what this festival could develop into over the next few years, continuing to use photography as a tool to examine our complex, ever-shifting world.

Look11 continues until 26 June in various venues across Liverpool.

look2011.co.uk

Image:
New Orleans After the Floods - (c) Robert Polidori
The Crypt


Aesthetica Magazine
We hope you enjoying reading the Aesthetica Blog, if you want to explore more of the best in contemporary arts and culture you should read us in print too. In the spirit of celebration, Issue 41 includes a piece on Guggenheimn Bilbao where the Luminous Interval features internationally acclaimed artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Kiki Smith and Damien Hirst, ArtAngel's new commission at MIF, Bruce Nauman's retrospective at The Kunsthalle Mannheim and Cory Arcangel's Pro Tools at the Whitney in NYC. You can buy it today by calling +44(0)1904 479 168. Even better, subscribe to Aesthetica and save 20%. Go on, enjoy!

Photographic Examinations of Femininity: Neeta Madahar & Madame Yevonde, PM Gallery & House, London.

Review by Sarah Richter, a candidate for the MA in Art History at Richmond the American International University in London.

The Role Play exhibit is situated in a section of the 19th century manor home and grand gardens of the Pitzhanger Manor-House located at Ealing Broadway in West London. The show features the work of both Neeta Madahar and Madame Yevonde. The show combines Madahar’s contemporary work with that of Madame Yevonde’s from the 1930s. Both explore the construction of female roles in photography and thus contemporary society, with Madhar’s contemporary series Flora drawing inspiration from the work of Madame Yevonde’s from the 1930s entitled Goddesses, their relationship is easily identifiable and the works have been interspersed, with a Madame Yevonda next to a Madahar and they blend seamlessly together as they depict photographic explorations of femininity in similar ways. Without reading the captions under the images, it's hard to discern which work belongs to which artist. The influence and legacy that influenced Madahar’s current work is palpable when examining Madame Yevonde’s visually stunning and emotionally gripping portraits of society women.

Madame Yevonde’s portraits of 1930s society women cast socialites in the role of goddesses from antiquity such as Europa, Diana, Medusa, Dido and Venus. Although the portraits were made in the thirties, they employ cutting edge techniques in the realm of photography and look as if they came from the same camera as that of Madahar’s portraits. Madame Yevonde pioneered the colour photographic portrait when people thought of it as just as a fad, and her photos emerge as contemporary examinations of the construction of feminine roles and stereotypes. Most of the women in the Goddesses series were well known women in society and are thus identified by the names of their husbands and not their own. Cast as goddesses, this omission of their names situates them as the ideal vision of feminine perfection. Although upon first examination the portraits seem to be keeping women in their stereotypical roles, there is something powerful and and assertive in these photographs. Seeming to emerge straight from the pages of contemporary Vogue the poses of the models, the solidity and authority that the women possess, seems to come from within and challenges the stereotypes placed upon them. Cast as contemporary versions of the ideal classical views of women, the goddesses, they are put on a pedestal and they conform while also challenging the idea of who women are supposed to be. Madame Yevonde’s Goddesses series covers well known goddesses to more obscure ones, speaking to an educated elite who would have been familiar with the mythology of antiquity, casting one of her subjects as Penthelisa. Lady Milbanke as Penthelisa from 1935 positions the women in a pose not commonly associated with portraits of women. Lady Milbanke has her head back, wearing animal furs and has a sharp spear seemingly piercing her neck. Cast as the Amazonian goddess who wanted only to die, but could only do so in battle, perhaps this role speaks to the difficulties that can come with being a women. The portrait, like all of the others doesn’t seem out of date in the 21st century, but seems to seamlessly fit right in, addressing contemporary issues and transcending the boundaries of time and space.

Drawing inspiration from the Goddesses series, Neeta Madahar is a contemporary photographer employing the same idea of using the female sitter as a character, not as herself. Madahar’s Flora series was created by her employment of seventeen female friends who posed for the portraits by choosing a flower that has been used as a woman’s name to thematize their portrait. By using floral names that double as female names, there are some preconceived notions going in as the viewer may know someone named Rose, Daisy or Lilly, but these issues of identity are challenged. When thinking of a flower, it is perceived as delicate, temporal and something to be admired, a mere object of decoration, but the women in Madahar’s portraits, like those in Madame Yevonde’s, challenge these notions of who and what women are supposed to be. The portrait of Sharon with Peonies from 2009 depicts a women with peonies in her hair against a white background that appears to crumpled paper. She wears a dress made of a metallic material that alludes to armor, she stands strong with one hand on her hip and one on her heart looking to the side, to the future perhaps. Despite how anyone feels about peonies, they are a delicate flower, but here they take on a new life of strength and determination.

This show is empowering and simply beautiful. It is wonderful to see a series alongside it’s inspiration and the seamless way that the two fit together and speak to the audience on a much deeper level than the magazine advertisements they reference.

For a further exploration of Madahar's work see Aesthetica's article Real Nature, Artificial Worlds from Issue 37 here.

Role Play: Neeta Madahar & Madame Yevonde continues at PM Gallery & House until 3 July.

ealing.gov.uk/pmgalleryandhouse

Aesthetica Magazine
We hope you enjoying reading the Aesthetica Blog, if you want to explore more of the best in contemporary arts and culture you should read us in print too. In the spirit of celebration, Issue 41 includes a piece on Guggenheimn Bilbao where the Luminous Interval features internationally acclaimed artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Kiki Smith and Damien Hirst, ArtAngel's new commission at MIF, Bruce Nauman's retrospective at The Kunsthalle Mannheim and Cory Arcangel's Pro Tools at the Whitney in NYC. You can buy it today by calling +44(0)1904 479 168. Even better, subscribe to Aesthetica and save 20%. Go on, enjoy!

Images:
Anna with Magnolias (2010)
Laura with Irises (2010)
Courtesy the Artist and Purdy Hicks Gallery, London

The Sly and Unseen Day: George Shaw, South London Gallery

Review by Paul Hardman

The most important thing to say about this George Shaw exhibition, The Sly and Unseen Day is that the paintings are incredible. Of course the subject matter is what would be considered ugly, or at best mundane, but since his images tend to look rather downbeat and dry in reproductions it should be emphasised that seeing the actual paintings is an unexpectedly rich experience.

Shaw has recently become much more high profile due to his nomination for the Turner Prize, and his selection is unusual in that he is a figurative painter, and so, superficially at least, he is not a challenging or radical artist of the type that the Turner Prize usually seems to promote. However, Shaw's work is constrained by two key restrictions, adding a conceptual element that strengthens the integrity of the work. First, his paintings exclusively depict the landscape of a half-mile radius around his childhood home on the Tile Hill estate in Coventry, second, he paints only in Humbrol enamel, the type of paint used by hobbyists to paint model aeroplanes. This choice of medium aligns his work both to childhood or adolescence, and away from the history of fine painting.

The results are not childish or naive, but mature and impressive. The slick nature of the paint creates a sleek smooth surface, closer to the surface of a photograph than to an oil painting. No trace of the texture of the board can be perceived. On close inspection the trace of the brush can be seen in the shape of the marks, but not through any disturbance of the surface. Shaw has achieved a unique light in these images, the pictures are both dull, dim and muted, while glowing with a suppressed light that perfectly depicts the sunlight behind clouds, the period of increased brightness after rain that is not yet a clear sky, which is a defining characteristic of this country. His skies take on a particularly uncanny sheen, rendered in this medium, when overcast they are like vast sheets of something leaden and seamless, when they are post-sunset skies they take on the glow of sheets of copper or zinc.

The presentation of the exhibition is extremely simple, the pictures are evenly spaced around the walls of the large central room of the gallery, subtly sequenced and grouped so that one composition may follow the previous image. For instance the central motif of a grid of window and door frames of what could be the side of a school or other council building in Poets Day (2005-6) is echoed in the adjacent painting, The Back that used to be the Front (2008), a painting of would seems to be a boarded up show unit. Both are in a direct front on composition that recalls the lines and rectangles of Piet Mondrian, except here we are shown not abstract constructions, but the scratched, neglected and graffiti covered surfaces of run down council estate buildings.

Elsewhere paintings are linked by other formal elements, a view of a mutely coloured estate with a post box in the centre of the frame, followed by the back of a spiked metal fence with a red phone box in the centre of the frame (this image has the title Time Machine, Shaw is happy to share his dry humour now and again). The following image again includes a similar fence. This repetition has been highlighted by the curators, but was clearly considered by Shaw as he went about his meticulous task. In fact Shaw has considered his selection of subjects extremely carefully. It is a delicate balance, as his places both seem to be inconsequential: they look as though they could be anywhere, as if they have been selected by some arbitrary method, in the way that say, the Boyle Family would randomly select nowhere places to reproduce. But each of Shaw's paintings are well considered, and the places are really quite specific, they are known to him intimately as the stomping grounds of his childhood.

The notion of returning to childhood or adolescence is perhaps a cliché, but never has the return been so rigorous, so dispassionate, and so sublime.

George Shaw The Sly and Unseen Day continues at South London Gallery until 3 July.

southlondongallery.org

Aesthetica Magazine
We hope you enjoying reading the Aesthetica Blog, if you want to explore more of the best in contemporary arts and culture you should read us in print too. In the spirit of celebration, Issue 41 includes a piece on Guggenheimn Bilbao where the Luminous Interval features internationally acclaimed artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Kiki Smith and Damien Hirst, ArtAngel's new commission at MIF, Bruce Nauman's retrospective at The Kunsthalle Mannheim and Cory Arcangel's Pro Tools at the Whitney in NYC. You can buy it today by calling +44(0)1904 479 168. Even better, subscribe to Aesthetica and save 20%. Go on, enjoy!

Image:
George Shaw, No Returns (2009)
Copyright the artist, courtesy Wilkinson Gallery, London