Last Chance To See | Compulsive, Obsessive, Repetitive | Towner | Eastbourne

Seven artists – Susie MacMurray, Brendan Jamison, Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva, Jill Townsley, Claire Morgan and the duo Henry Seaton have been asked to produce work that challenges the commonly considered belief that repetition is purely a means to an end or a device. Here repetition opens up debates about authorship, failure through repetition and the role of labour.

Compulsive, Obsessive, Repetitive is a group show of five new commissions (and one earlier work) by a group of sculptors who use small scale repetitive processes to create large scale sculptural installations. The common characteristic is the need to compulsively repeat an action – by hand, in a labour intensive and painstaking way – to create a large scale work composed of multiple elements.Presented on an expansive scale, individual elements are transformed through repetition into something more than the sum of the parts. Whether through accident or design the slippages and leakage between each repetition reveal something surprising and unexpected.

In her work, Susie MacMurray questions at what point drawing becomes sculpture, or vice versa, and whether such delineations are meaningful. A new ‘sculptural drawing’ across one large wall of the gallery comprises corrugated hose extruding from the wall, in a piece that is both formal and industrial whilst also unavoidably unruly and visceral.

A new large-scale installation by Brendan Jamison (known for his sugar cube scale models of Tate Modern and NEO Bankside for the London Festival of Architecture 2010) combines elements from the architecture of local landmarks Beachy Head Lighthouse, Redoubt Fortress and the Martello Towers. Tower (2011) is 5m high and constructed from over a quarter of a million sugar cubes, weighing over 500kg. The built structure is surrounded by a sea of loose sugar crystals, rippling in waves across the gallery floor.

Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva often endures months of repetitive and nauseating labour in her process. Reoccurring Undulation is made out of 1,100 salmon and trout skin tiles which have been previously cleaned and preserved. The skin tiles are arranged to form an intriguing and dynamic pattern, taking over the full length of the wall, filing the space from floor to ceiling like a tapestry. The light reflecting on the material and its patterns makes further references to its richness and beauty.

In Claire Morgan’s Machine Says No (2007), a wild rat, preserved using traditional taxidermy techniques, is suspended and appears to be falling through geometric forms created from stretched pieces of plastic bag. Morgan is concerned with the process of life and death and the interaction between man and nature, in all its perfection and ugliness. The passage of viewers through the space creates constant and subtle movement.

Jill Townsley’s work is repetitive to the point of obsession. Using common and everyday objects, she strives for a geometric perfection in her process yet knows it is impossible to achieve. Till Rolls (2011) is a large floor-based installation consisting of 9,375 paper rolls, each extruded from its centre to form vertical cones of varying height (up to 12ft). The rolls recall the countless transactions of trade and industry and interactions between individuals. The result is an undulating structure reminiscent of a three-dimensional graph – but no clue is given as to whether the peaks and troughs of this structure represent good or bad results; the paper is blank.

Finally, a new commission by Henry Seaton (Rex Henry and Graham Seaton), known for their interest in the city, its narrative and its built forms, integrates elements of the gallery’s architecture into a field of objects.

Compulsive, Obsessive, Repetitive continues at Towner, Eastbourne until 18 September.

townereastbourne.org.uk

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Image:
Jill Townsley, Till Rolls (2011) (detail).

Maybe We'll Be Soldiers | Gawain Barnard | Ffotogallery | Cardiff

This summer, Ffotogallery turns the spotlight onto new photographic and lens-based media work in Wales. In a series of exhibitions and events across two spaces, the main gallery in Turner House, Penarth and The Dairy in Cardiff, an off-site venue, Wish You Were Here is dedicated to nurturing and foregrounding emerging artists in Wales. The season reflects the concerns - social, conceptual and technical - of a new generation of photographic artists. Whether challenging cultural stereotypes of offering glimpses into unseen worlds, the artists offer fresh perspectives on photography whilst exploring the expressive potential of the medium. The latest solo exhibition in this series sees Cardiff-based artist, Gawain Barnard present Maybe We'll Be Soldiers at The Dairy in Cardiff.

Maybe We'll Be Soldiers is a story of realisation, self-doubt, expectations and coming of age. A young person's sense of invincibility fades as they reach adulthood and the naivety of youth gives way to uncertainty around future plans. Barnard has captured that moment in his intimate portraits of young teenagers in Wales, juxtaposed here with images of forests, housing estates and underground passes.

The exhibition title was inspired by the artist’s memory of the armed forces coming to his school and talking only to children from the ‘middle’ to ‘lower’ classes, being the most likely potential recruits. Barnard remarks, “It just seemed odd that the decision to join or not join the armed forces should be made at an age when we have no idea what to do with ourselves and are quite susceptible”.

Barnard sees the work as partly autobiographical, evoking a time when he came to view the towns and villages he grew up in as a psychological barrier that was very difficult to see past. Being unable to drive and too young to move away, these familiar landscapes can become an obstruction to seeing a future beyond one’s immediate situation. 
Maybe We'll Be Soldiers opens on Thursday 8 September and continues until 24 September and is accompanied by an Artist Talk on Thursday 15 September at 6.30pm.

ffotogallery.org

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We hope you enjoy 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. You can buy it today by calling +44(0)1904 479 168. Even better, subscribe to Aesthetica and save 20%. Go on, enjoy!

Image:
Gawain Barnard Tonisha (2011)
Courtesy the artist.

Out of the Dark Room | PhotoIreland 2011 | Various Locations | Dublin

Text by Rosa Abbott

Following on from the success of last year’s inaugural edition, the PhotoIreland Festival returned to Dublin in 2011 with a bolstered programme and the duration doubled from two weeks to a month. The festival seeks to promote photography from all levels, with participating artists ranging from internationally respected photographers to new graduates and amateurs - perhaps the most egalitarian event being the un-curated was Homeless Gallery, in which would-be photographers are given the opportunity present their work wherever they see fit in a sizable exhibition space with no gallery fees. The result of this all-encompassing approach is a festival programme that is difficult to navigate for the sheer volume of events. There are far worse complaints that could be made about a festival, however – especially considering that even some of the smallest, least publicised exhibitions I’ve attended were of a high standard. The gap in quality between the big names and the emerging artists being satisfyingly small.

By far the biggest name on the bill was the controversial Magnum documentary photographer Martin Parr. Unfortunately, though, none of Parr’s own photographic works are on display. He is instead exhibiting items from his own collection, presenting his favourite photo books from the past decade. Parr’s critical opinion on this matter is probably well worth heeding to: an avid collector of the medium, Parr has traveled to far-flung corners of the globe to source these books, and the selection on show at the National Photographic Archives is diverse and engaging. The exhibition excels in its interactive nature: each book, though attached to the display with wire, is meant to be picked up and flicked through, introducing a kinetic and textural element usually unattainable in art exhibitions. The physical qualities of photography books – from paper type to page dimensions – are of course carefully selected, and form a central part of the overall aesthetic. By presenting a selection side by side, these differences in tactile qualities are fore-grounded – the rough, grainy pages of Scrapbook create quite a different effect to the ultra-silky gloss paper of the adjacent Temporary Discomfort, for example.

Scrapbook also appears in an exhibition in the nearby Gallery of Photography as part of The Long View, which ran until 28 August 28. This time, it is dismantled, and it’s pages arranged faux-chaotically across a long white wall – the pleasing textural qualities of the book in Parr’s exhibition giving way to the visual dynamism of this alternative arrangement. Despite Scrapbook’s nostalgic title and hippy-ish floral cover, its subject matter is subversive and politically charged, dealing primarily with The Troubles (this element of deception created by the cover gives the book format seen in Parr’s exhibition an edge over the wall-mounted version, if you’re interested in comparing display formats). The theme of Northern Irish conflict appears in many of the works in The Long View, a group exhibition of six Irish photographers making an impact on the international photography world.

Despite expectations that may arise from the name PhotoIreland, this is actually one of the few exhibitions running as part of the festival to focus specifically on Irish photography. The exhibition programme is predominantly very internationally focused, with other ‘headline’ exhibitions including a retrospective of Spanish press photographer Luis Ramón Marín; a showcase of twenty-five Mexican photographers in Mexican Worlds and an exhibition of works by the Polish artist Zofia Rydet. Though it would be nice to see more Irish photography on the billing – particularly from more established names – the opportunity to catch stellar displays of international photography like these are fairly few in Dublin, so PhotoIreland still doesn’t disappoint. Rydet’s The Arc of Realism in particular was well worth visiting – her oeuvre is an ambivalent mixture of simple documentary style photographs, usually of lowly European peasants in their domestic environments, and dynamic, surrealist photo-collages. Though it’s the latter group of works that are the most instant and visually arresting, the subtleties of Rydet’s photographic sociological studies add layers of depth, especially when presented alongside their more experimental counterparts.

Happily, PhotoIreland this year also sees Dublin’s acquisition of noteworthy photographic works on a more permanent level. The Irish Museum of Modern Art’s offering, Out of the Dark Room, is an exhibition of the extensive collection of Dublin-born physician David Kronn. It includes photographs by the likes of Irving Penn, Robert Mapplethorpe, Diane Arbus and Herb Ritts, with works from the collection to be donated to the gallery on an annual basis - beginning with an Annie Leibovitz portrait of Louise Bourgeois. So not only will Dubliners be able to look forward to ever-bigger editions of the PhotoIreland Festival each summer (going by the success of this one), there will be a new piece from the Kronn bequest to visit each year as well. 

PhotoIreland ran from 1 - 31 July. Many of the individual exhibitions are still running. See individual websites for further details.

photoireland.org

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We hope you enjoy 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. You can buy it today by calling +44(0)1904 479 168. Even better, subscribe to Aesthetica and save 20%. Go on, enjoy!