Media Event: Art on New and Mass Media

Media Event: Art on New and Mass Media
Text by Laramie Shubber
Photography by Jack Nelson

Last Tuesday saw the opening of an art exhibition about new and mass media by Fine Art students at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. With stigma already attached to the media, creating an original and captivating exhibition was going to be a challenge but curator Jack Nelson, along with six fellow artists, pulled it off.

Yulong Wang used video to present poetic messages. He employed digital manipulation to make his actors into extensions of himself and gain ‘control’ of their interaction.

James Ravinet presented five photographic prints, which, according to Ravinet, present “aesthetically stimulated questions towards digital and physical construction, [examining] what’s real and what’s not.”

Yasmin Maksousa took a comical approach; she presented media images with beards. Of her work, Maksousa states: “I’m drawing a comparison as to what it means to be a journalist and how this affects our sexual behaviour.”

Lindsay McMillan and Bradley Steptoe joined forces and presented a hilarious film installation showing a dispute over money between Bradley and eBay user ‘pjbj43.’ The secretly captured footage was presented in a re-creation of the living room setting at the time.

A degradation process was shown in Arthur Girault’s etchings. Each plate was dipped in an acid bath, which modified the plate and the image, highlighting how consumerism is affecting our health.

Jack Nelson displayed work which looked at the disregard for nature’s power. His installation entitled Vacation acted as a reminder that whilst we revel in technology, nature is the world’s ruling force.

Speaking about the exhibition more broadly, Nelson says: “This show comes at a time when the ‘developed’ world is increasingly dependent on modern technology and continuously seduced by the visions of advertising, videogames and TV shows.”

It was a great night that had added entertainment from up-and-coming musical talent Heptathlon, as well as the fresh takes on the many forms of media.

The Media Event runs until the 26th March at the Central Saint Martins Gallery in Southampton Row. To contact Jack Nelson visit his website. See video below for Heptathlon’s performance.

Read more →

Re-interpreting Old Masters: Re-Mastered Exhibition

Re-interpreting Old Masters: Re-Mastered Exhibition
Text and photography by Xanthia Hallissey

How do you show rain, steam and speed? What makes you think of a Starry Night? Artists in an exhibition sponsored by Intel called Re-mastered have some ideas. Tasked with bringing to life the work of old masters for the digital generation, the exhibition hummed with technology. Better still, the traditional arches and columns of the venue provided an immediate contrast to the technological experimentation inside. The exhibition was held at Number One Marylebone Road, a church pitched as “Classic meets Contemporary,” casting a new light on much loved paintings.

A reinterpretation of Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night (1889) is positioned at the beginning of the exhibition and in many ways provides much needed context. Dusk-Dawn is Midnight Toastie’s response to van Gogh’s masterpiece, a design collective that includes Audrey Anastasy, MA Communication Design graduate from Central Saint Martins. Their version of the Starry Night is created using electronic lights, which map the positions of visitors to the gallery as they move around the space, using webcam technology. The activity in the room directly correlates to the activity in the piece, allowing the viewer to interact with the work without even realizing.

Midnight Toastie’s response uses recent technology to extend the idea of gallery and space, but the scale and composition of the piece can be directly linked to the original. Other work in the exhibition is less obvious in it’s source of inspiration. Robert Corish, another MA Communication Design, Digital Media graduate from Central Saint Martins, uses sound to explore the meaning behind Wassily Kandinsky’s painting On White II (1923). Kandinsky’s creative process included listening to music, and the shapes and gestures on the canvas are his representation of the audio. Corish extends this idea to include hearing as a sense, re-positing Kandinsky’s work for a 21st century audience.

Although some of the work relies on external references to complete the picture, the accompanying exhibition guide and website provide ample space for contextualization. It is here that the idea of Re-mastered is really explained and more importantly so are the artists’ intentions. It is the juxtaposition of the very modern, inside an old building, that really speaks about a process of re-mastering. Looking at something in a new light is a leap that can only be made with time.

Re-mastered, a Visibly Smart production from Intel, ran from 09th – 13th March 2011. For more information and artist profiles, visit the exhibition page and to see the exhibition space, visit the Number One website.

Read more →

Clara Turchi: Contemplating the Third Dimension

Clara Turchi: Contemplating the Third Dimension
Text by Laramie Shubber
Sculptures and photography by Clara Turchi

Clara Turchi, a photography student at London College of Communication, shrugs off any borders between mediums and works in a variety of different media that she sometimes overlaps, such as sculpture and photography.

For example, Turchi’s Untitled series of white sculptures are presented as images rather than objects. This adds an extra dimension to their visual story. These sculptures have an uneasy, eerie quality due to the anonymity of the subjects and the unusual abstract shapes of the heads. The imperfect heads could also be seen as a reflection of society and people. Turchi explains: “I wanted to explore the process of the disappearance of the face as a further consequence in the process of disappearance of the real.”

The piece doesn’t have a set meaning as Clara says she wants instead to “stimulate a variety of answers…the whiteness of the images and the fact that gender, age or race are sometimes uncertain, make it a series that is open to different interpretations.”

The artist is also currently working on a new piece with the working title of Degree of Disappearance. Turchi provides an introduction: “The digital creates, doesn’t procreate: Mother Earth withdraws and light is lost with no purpose at the border of the abyss.” This new work will consist of photographic sculptures: “Each one is composed by a photograph of the English Channel at night inspired by Turner. Above which lies, hung on a rope, a bulb painted black,” Turchi explains.

Turchi also experiments with long exposures, which propose their own ephemerality. Her work, London Eye, was inspired by Futurism, so the panoramic wheel of the London Eye was perfect. The multiple exposures complement the structure of the image to suggest the concept of the persistence of the image on the retina. This piece was also shortlisted for The Renaissance Arts Prize 2009.

See more of Clara Turchi’s work on her website.

Read more →

John Robinson: A Limited Engagement

John Robinson: A Limited Engagement
Interview by Grace M-n

Interview with Byam Shaw-trained artist John Robinson, MA Fine Art CSM alumni 2008, on his pop-up exhibition A Limited Engagement at High Holborn on 11 March, 2011.

To see more of John Robinson’s work, visit his website.

Read more →

Stand Out Prints: The Camberwell MA Printmaking Interim Show

Stand Out Prints: The Camberwell MA Printmaking Interim Show
Text and photography by Xanthia Hallissey

Last week House Gallery in Camberwell became home to work by MA Printmaking students from Camberwell College of Arts. It was not a permanent residency but it was a suitably intimate space for an interim show. The show may have been small, but that’s not to say the students were lacking in ambition.

The use of different, unexpected materials could lead the viewer to ask the question: what is printmaking? In Alfonsina Capurro’s work Collective Behaviour, the materials used are listed as if ingredients in a recipe she has devised: perspex, earth, grass seeds, pipette, water. Soil is sprinkled in the gutters of a perspex map where grass is encouraged to grow with hourly watering. Indeed it does, on the evening of the private view the grass seems shy, barely poking it’s head, but when I revisit on the day of closing the blades are an inch tall. Alfonsina’s experiment seems to typify a new approach to printmaking as a way of making marks, a physical imprint in the broadest sense.

Another highlight is Paul Wye’s New Provenance: hand printed, hand sewn, hand made medallions hanging from hand crafted hooks. Paul demonstrates how involved an artist can be in every aspect of the crafting of a piece of work; printmaking doesn’t necessarily have to sit on the surface.

In contrast, Julia R. Gallego’s piece Divine Fabrica could not have more traditional subjects: Adam and Eve. Utilising the traditional printing methods of screen printing and etching, Julia’s piece could run the risk of looking old fashioned, but this is an Adam and Eve you won’t have seen before: she has turned their bodies inside out.

One piece that seems rooted in the present is Nicola O’Byrne’s I Hope You Get Rich and Famous etching, which highlights an interesting dresser in a crowd of people. Nicola’s piece is perhaps the only one in the room that makes a social commentary on what it is to be different, perhaps what it is to be an art student, or what it is to be printmaking in the age of digital technology. Students of MA Printmaking stand out, they are making a stand and proving the value of print in contemporary society. I hope they get rich and famous.

For more information see the Camberwell online events page.

Read more →
« Previous Entries
Next Entries »

About FEATURED ARTICLES

Our diverse team of editors and commissioned authors contribute to FEATURED ARTICLES, showcasing outstanding work, opportunities, and generally talking about what’s happening in the world of the arts.

Get the FEATURED ARTICLES RSS feed.

If you’d like to get involved, why not join our team or contribute?

Recent posts

Browse by month