Twin Magazine: Nicky Deeley, Flights of Fantasy

Originally published in Twin Magazine.

Nicky Deeley plunders her deepest subconscious to tease characters from her imagination and dreams. The mythical identities in her work personify archetypes that she sees as living within the collective unconscious. “The language of our unconscious is something that we dismiss far too readily,” says Deeley. “I find it really strange that we do that. It’s a language through which your brain is trying to communicate, and a channel to understanding more about ourselves.”

Her 2013 artwork Island Year was a marathon month-long performance piece inspired by a child’s naïve curiosity. “I was reading a science column in a national newspaper in which children send in questions and experts respond. Because the children are really young, they ask the most beautiful, poetic things. My favourite was a young boy who wanted to know what was underneath an island—did it float?”

For the work Deeley created an enclosed community of five eccentric characters who repeat ritualistic movements around a constructed space. Incorporating elements of folklore, ancient ceremonies and tribal rituals, she generated a tension between the known and the imagined, leaving her audience teetering on the brink of fascination and repulsion.

For the coming summer Deeley is taking her artwork outside, with an immersive experiential event taking place in a village in Ireland. This artwork is mythology in the making.

For more from Nicky Deeley see www.nickydeeley.com.

Twin Magazine, Peter Linde Busk, Flights of Fantasy

Originally published in Twin Magazine.

Peter Linde Busk depicts failed heroes of myth, legend and popular culture—inadequate icons that struggle to live up to the expectations of their status. Kings, princes and soldiers are rendered pathetic, debased by scribbled marks and tangled limbs. They drown under the weight of detail, their bodies melting into a background that threatens to engulf them. “Sometimes I feel quite overwhelmed by the world, like everyone else,” Busk says. His figures look out at us with pleading stares. Their twisted faces exposing internal struggles with anxiety, dejection, neurosis and alienation.

“There is also something else at stake here,” he says. “My general concerns about the state of man in the late capitalist society we live in, and all the casualties thereof: the people left behind, the people who don’t fit in or can’t cope with the brutal business of society today, the people who suddenly find themselves useless and unwanted.”

With paintings, collage, ceramics and prints, Busk creates his own museum of the fallen, as though attempting to single-handedly balance out the endless portraits of the successful and wealthy in museums around the world. “History is, as we know, if not always then most of the time written by the victors. It’s like, not so much giving voice to the people who have fallen through the cracks of society, but giving them a face.”

Like an avid hoarder pillaging history for stylistic influences, his works are a mesh of styles, cultural references and abstract pattern, with characters that emerge ambiguous from this poetic jumble.

For more information about Peter Linde Busk’s work see joshlilleygallery.com/peter-linde-busk.

Twin Magazine: Annabelle Guetatra, Flights of Fantasy

Originally published in Twin Magazine.

Annabelle Guetatra invites her audience onto the surreal merry-go-round that is her imagination. Using elegant gestures, fluid lines and pure colours, her gentle style depicts figures frolicking in woodland. But her whimsical world is infected with a dark malice. The characters are hybrid creatures afflicted with the torments of inharmonious love. Stripped of their clothes they abuse each other as they fumble together in the undergrowth. Guetatra uses her naïve style to explore the sinister undercurrent of desire—conflict, jealousy and power.

Her work is informed by her extensive travel. Guetatra collects references to the ritualistic, the theatrical and the ceremonial, for what she calls her “private museum”, which is a source of continuing inspiration. This lends her characters the menacing familiarity of some half-remembered dream, creating a sense of the personal that entices.

For her Jesters series Guetatra added physicality to her work, creating grinning papier mâché heads full of her deceitfully child-like aesthetic. With huge eyes, bright colours and rounded, imprecise features the faces hover between distinct emotions. “They laugh at us,” Guetatra explains. “They shine, they glow gold and glitter, they attract but when we approach they reveal to us the terrible secret behind their frozen smiles.”

For more about Annabelle Guetatra’s work see www.annabelleguetatra.com.

Flight of Fantasy: Four Emerging Artists, Twin Magazine

The current edition of Twin Magazine features ‘Flight of Fantasy’ my piece on four emerging artists that prove powerful responses to reality can be drawn from the imagination. It features profiles on Annabelle Guetatra, Peter Linde Busk, Nicky Deeley and Rachel Maclean.

Mark Flood, Modern Art, London, 21 February – 22 March 2014

Originally published on this is tomorrow, March 2014.

Mark Flood was a relatively unknown artist, showing almost exclusively in his hometown of Houston, Texas, until he developed a winning formula. Frustrated by routine rejections of his conceptual, provocative work by the art establishment, Flood resolved to bypass the need for its approval. On reading critic Dave Hickey’s essays defending ‘beauty’ in art as a source of pleasure and an agent for change, Flood set out for the first time to intentionally make work that simply looked good. In 2000, his ‘lace paintings’ were born, and collectors loved them.

Flood lays torn fragments of lace over his canvas and pushes rich colorful acrylic paint through the gaps in the material, later peeling back the lace to reveal an intricate pattern formed underneath. The result is a richly detailed, textured and surprisingly seductive surface. Small dots of paint, created through tiny holes in the lace stand proud from the canvas like little coloured gems. Curious imperfections endlessly engage the eyes. The intricate lace patterning frames a deep blue centre to the canvas that acts as a window of respite from the richly textured exterior. There is no doubt that Flood has succeeded in creating something beautiful.

But beautiful as these canvasses are, their beauty derives solely from the accident of the intricacy of the lace. They are beautiful but they are also dumb - their conceptual basis lying in Flood’s calculated quest for beauty. No doubt exactly as he envisioned, the works have been condemned by critics. In Frieze Magazine, Elwyn Palmerton knowingly responds ‘Fuck you back “Lace Paintings”. Love the Art Bureaucracy.’ In an art world that values conceptual rigour above all else, these canvasses are a provocative statement.

Alongside the lace paintings Flood exhibits a series of deadpan text paintings more in tune with the work he was making before this revelation. As part of a series that lifts corporate logos from websites in low resolution, Flood prints the familiar ‘You Tube’ symbol directly onto his canvas. Its deteriorated form creates a sense of creeping infestation and a crass anti-corporate statement. A surfboard sits in the corner of the gallery with the stencilled message ‘Capitalism Hurts Trees’, a deliberately nonsensical statement. More than just anti-corporate, these works feel anti-[contemporary]-art. They poke fun at conceptual art, the current fascination with the digital, and by extension the art world itself.

Towards the end of 2012, Dave Hickey announced his retirement claiming the art world had become ‘self-reverential and a hostage to rich collectors’. Today the art world still feels in crisis, distorted by the influx of money driving production and influencing decisions. Flood’s most interesting artworks have always been challenges to the way the art world functions. These recent works are subtle thought-provoking jibes, playing with the art world but also playing along with it. Flood however, is having the last laugh, with this solo show in prestigious Fitzroy Square.

Dazed Magazine: Eddie Peake: Exhibition of the Month

The current edition of Dazed Magazine features my piece on Eddie Peake’s exhibition at Peres Projects in Berlin.

This is Tomorrow: Oscar Murillo at South London Gallery, 2013

Originally published on this is tomorrow, October 2013.

Oscar Murillo’s paintings are made of the detritus of performances and social situations. Whether they be small specks of dirt thrown up by mass skipping events or group yoga classes, the remnants of his socially-engaged practice become the stuff of his canvases. At the South London Gallery Murillo relocates the organised chaos of his studio space to the main gallery giving a sneak peek into his methods and techniques. We are invited to contribute to his process-led practice by walking over canvases strewn on the gallery floor, adding our own dirt and dust to the paintings of tomorrow.

Murillo’s starting point is his own Colombian culture. As a Colombian immigrant, he’s interested in the translation of that culture across borders, examining notions of transformation, commodification and authenticity. Amongst the dirt and abandoned sculptural experiments that contribute to the exhibition we find packaging from Colombian foodstuffs – cans of beans, cartons of coconut water, and even corn itself all manipulated and repurposed as sculptural materials. The playful nature of his practice is reflected elsewhere in ‘good times bad times fun times I-III’ (2013), three sculptures that resemble draughts boards with porcelain pre-Colombian vessels as their playing pieces.

Upstairs, in a room next door to a film that follows a man called Ramón as he hawks lottery tickets and attempts to blag himself a vehicle in Colombia, Murillo creates an art-world translation of the popular Colombian game. For the price of £2,500 he offers the chance to enter his own lottery, with prizes devised by him to be announced at a future date. Entry into this exclusive competition is a leap of faith as well as a public gesture of support since the entrant’s name is emblazoned on a ticket that is thereafter displayed as part of the show. To complete the circle of mixing social strata and conventions, Murillo invites his own family to the space to help manufacture the tickets. The work addresses notions of value, of class and intrinsically confronts the different public, private and commercial faces of the art world.

Murillo’s own acceptance into the art world has been whole-hearted. He completed his MFA at the Royal College of Art only last year, yet already he has had solo exhibitions in London, New York, Miami and Berlin, at prestigious public and private spaces. But the attention the artist has attracted has not only been critical acclaim. Murillo hit the headlines this year as his paintings smashed their estimates at auction and attracted a surge of bidding. The young artist’s work is very hot property.

Murillo’s exhibition at South London Gallery is a sensitive and exploratory response to his commercial success. With renewed confidence he folds up and abandons his paintings on the floor of the gallery, letting them take second place to new sculptural, video and event-based works. The only canvas that adorns the wall space is ‘night shift’ (2013) a jet-black painting that looms over us rather ominously as though designed to frustrate our viewing pleasure. For Murillo, the commercial clamour for his work seems to have offered another productive and interesting line of critical enquiry.

This is Tomorrow: Haroon Mirza: /o/o/o/o/ Lisson Gallery, 2013

Originally published on this is tomorrow, June 2013.

Haroon Mirza’s second solo exhibition at Lisson Gallery features immersive, entangling installations. Using clicks, beats, and brilliant lights, he enchants with artworks designed to enthral and surprise. Mirza builds his installations within his own constructed spaces inside the gallery walls. Playing with the acoustics, he manipulates resonance and echoes, so that the sounds he creates have a physical impact. 

For ‘Pavilion for Optimisation’ (2013) Mirza has assembled a soundproof reverberation chamber into which entrance is limited to one viewer at a time. On stepping inside the tiny space, a strip of piercing bright light that provides the only illumination is steadily extinguished as a rushing noise becomes increasingly intense. As the sound gets louder it eventually leaves the viewer standing alone in darkness and in silence. The effect is disorientating, terrifying but compelling. Something like the feeling of being dragged under a wave only to emerge completely dry and unharmed and ready to be sucked under again. 

The rushing noise is later revealed to have been generated by a rather unglamorous construction set up around the back. A showerhead has been plumbed and fitted to the gallery wall and a microphone is positioned to pick up and amplify the noise of water dripping from the shower into the black dustbin just beneath. It is refreshing that Mirza is not afraid to incorporate these everyday objects into his work, and it comes as a nice surprise that such basic items can be used to such dramatic effect. 

In the upstairs gallery, for ‘Adam, Eve, others and a UFO’ (2013), Mirza has prepared his space with strips of foam spikes to absorb reverberations and provide the ideal echo-free environment. A collection of speakers is arranged in a circle with wires connecting them to LEDs placed in the centre of the room. As the speakers emit their familiar beats and clicks, the LEDs illuminate to highlight the speakers that are contributing to the beat. The setup allows us to visualise the rhythmic movement of the sound around the room as the momentum builds up. The beats, snaps and clicks are engineered to have a unifying visual presence and effect. 

While his materials often hark back to the vintage and embrace the simplistic, the sounds Mirza generates reflect the contemporary digital environment. His distorted noises are the musical equivalent of technical glitches, generated from interference between electronic devices or doctored mechanisms. They are organised into a disrupted rhythm creating interruptions and instability in his immersive environments. 

Mirza has embraced the digital for this exhibition, creating an online collaborative remix project to accompany it. The artist’s original recordings are available as sound samples on a website at o-o-o-o.co.uk for producers to rearrange and rework. Two official remixes, made in collaboration with Jellyman (aka Dave from Django Django) and Factory Floor, have so far been released by The Vinyl Factory. Since the launch of the site, more remixes have been uploaded online. This expansive approach to exhibition making is contemporary and refreshing. It reflects our present day environment and encourages our experimentation and collaboration.

This is Tomorrow, Yinka Shonibare MBE: Pop! Stephen Friedman Gallery, 2013

Originally published on this is tomorrow, April 2013.

A carnival of sumptuous colour draws us in to Stephen Friedman Gallery. Yinka Shonibare MBE has created his most ambitious sculptural assemblage to date: a life-sized re-imagination of Leonardo da Vinci’s fifteenth-century mural ‘The Last Supper’. Shonibare’s characters enjoy a lavish feast of oysters, wild boar, strawberries and champagne, dressed in chic Victorian suits fashioned from West African fabrics. Initially seductive and stimulating, the scene is, in an instant, repellent. Luxury begins to looks like extravagance. The protagonists have descended into lascivious, hedonistic behaviour. In place of Jesus, Bacchus, the Roman god of wine, reigns supreme, suggesting a comparison with the decadent final years of the Roman Empire. The air of imminent disaster is made all the more urgent by the decapitation of all characters present.

Shonibare’s exhibition ‘POP!’ provides a social commentary on the excesses of the financial industry and the pursuit of power and money that contributed to the current economic crisis. The artist does not shy away from dealing with the issues directly. In his series ‘Champagne Kid’ (2013) he arms his mannequins with empty bottles of Crystal and poses them falling unceremoniously from their wooden chairs. A certain anger and resentment comes across in his direct approach which will resonate with the viewer. 

Shonibare refuses to pander to antique Western expectations that, as an artist with roots in Africa, his art should somehow be concerned with specifically racial identity. Although initially appearing to adopt an African trope by using West African batik material in his work, Shonibare in fact makes a mockery of the idea. In reality, far from being a true signifier of African authenticity, the fabric has a chequered and international history. It only became popular in West Africa in the 1960s after being exported there by the British who had copied the design from its original manufacturers in Dutch Indonesia. Shonibare refutes ideas of cultural authenticity. He cuts the heads from the mannequins he dresses in the material in order to deny them racial identity. 

Instead, within western artistic tradition Shonibare’s work is deeply reliant on art history. Reconfiguring da Vinci, he makes a move to reclaim traditional Western art as his own. Elsewhere in the exhibition Shonibare creates his self-portrait in the style of Andy Warhol’s ‘Camouflage’ (1986). He uses patterns from his trademark batik textiles, as Warhol used military camouflage, to obscure his face. In both these theatrical reconstructions of art history, Shonibare questions art historical authenticity. Fake, fabrication and reproduction reveal art itself as a clumsy construction.

Shonibare addresses these big issues of power, identity and authenticity with his typical dose of irony and good humour to temper the blows. The exhibition is a fabulous visual feast as well as a welcome contemporary parody. Shonibare deals, tongue in cheek, with vital, relevant subjects and for that reason he is one of the public’s few heroes of British contemporary art. 

This is Tomorrow, Silvia Bächli and Eric Hattan: What about Sunday? MK Gallery, 2013

Originally published on this is tomorrow, February 2013.

A snowman sledges around in the snow, on a kamikaze venture that sees him lose his carrot nose. Not to worry, he gets up and has another go. Hattan and Bächli’s playful video collaboration ‘Snowhau’ (2003), depicting a snowman that learns to sledge, is the first work that greets us at the entrance to MK Gallery. It’s an appropriate start to the artists’ cheeky, thoughtful and engaging joint exhibition. The two Swiss artists actually produce quite diverse artwork in their separate careers, but it is work that is neatly connected by common themes of brevity, wit and an air of melancholic reflection. Beautifully curated in the space, the resulting exhibition is more than the sum of its parts.

Of the two artists’ work, Hattan’s stands out. Finding intrigue in the banal, Hattan plays with the Duchampian found object. In the first space we see his ‘Round and Round’ (2000-2012), a video installation composed of several looped films of urban scenes. One screen follows the path of an empty white plastic bag swirling in the air. The video brings to mind a scene from the film ‘American Beauty’ when teenager Ricky Flitts finds endless beauty in the world through his film of a plastic bag dancing in the wind. Hattan prefers a less hopeful interpretation of this mundane moment, presenting the bag caught in a cyclonic gust destined only to travel around in endless circles amongst the urban debris. The artist sits this scene with other videos featuring repeated journeys through anonymous locations of urban banal. He creates a melancholic atmosphere of a concrete environment offering no hope of salvation. Appropriately enough, those familiar with the city of Milton Keynes will recognise a notorious underpass amongst the videos.

Hattan’s ‘(Yes I) Can’ (2012) takes the idea a step further. Instead of a plastic bag, the camera follows a crumpled empty beer can that the artist himself kicks down the street in front of him as he films. It’s a quirky humorous piece, but another gloomy gesture, referencing homelessness, drunkenness and despair in urban living. The grating, unrelenting sound of the can rattling down the city’s paving stones echoes throughout the rest of the gallery space.

Bächli’s Indian ink drawings of dandelions provide some light relief in the next gallery. With easy gestural strokes Bächli describes the flowers on flimsy rolls of paper that echo the fragility of the plants themselves. She makes subtle observations and has a light touch. In the Long Gallery several museum-style display cabinets collect together works on paper arranged into groups. We discover collections labelled ‘Women’ and ‘Homes’, each of which combine diagrams, sketches and photographs, working together to build up a theme. Bächli acts almost as an archivist, gathering together observations into interesting compositions that echo Hattan’s video installation in the previous space.

In their strongest moments, both artists’ work is characterised by a lightness of touch, the minimal gesture, creating a wistful air of reflection. There are, however, a couple of more heavy-handed works that appear. A strange obsession with lampposts seems to dominate Hattan’s work and a full-size street lamp has been pulled out of the ground and hung in the show. In its Milton Keynes setting, a city of a thousand identical street lamps, the focus seems more poignant than it might elsewhere.

Hattan’s ‘Boy Band’ (2005) is the star of the show. It is a subversive work engaging his typical sardonic humour. The artist has taken five pieces of everyday product packaging, turned the packaging inside out, and simply presented all five pieces in a row for the viewer, balanced on five wooden sticks. In itself, it’s a bold artistic move to make such a minimal gesture. However, as if to intentionally challenge the traditionalists even further, the artist brazenly presents a video next to the objects, showing exactly how easily he ‘made’ them. With the camera on full zoom as though it were watching magician at his art, the artist shows in detail, his very simple technique of taking a piece of ordinary packaging and turning it in on itself. The joke is on us.

This exhibition is brave programming from MK Gallery. It is the artists’ first show in the UK and it’s not an exhibition that will appeal to everyone. There was only one comment pinned to the comments board in the gallery and it complained of the exhibition’s ‘utter banality’. Actually, ‘banality’ is a fair summary of the artists’ interests, but if you’re willing to engage with the subtleties of their artworks, you will come across some pertinent observations in their study of the mundanity of contemporary urban life.

Details of upcoming exhibitions at MK Gallery are available on their website.

An Interview with Emerging Artist Hanae Utamura

Hanae Utamura’s work combines a raw energy with a tightly scripted conceptual basis, two forces which play out to great emotional effect. In “Red Line” (2011) Utamura repeatedly runs back and forth towards the edge of a cliff throwing red paint in the face of a strong headwind acting against her. She is attempting to draw a red line in paint to connect the top of the white cliffs of Dover to the sea below. The work combines a visual drama with a dizzying sense of futility in the face of nature. Utamura has also made some poignant work in response to the damage caused by the Tsunami in her home country of Japan.

I met up with Hanae Utamura to learn more about her practice.

Kate Neave: Your artwork can be understood instinctively and doesn’t rely on the viewer’s knowledge of artistic traditions. I wondered if this immediacy is something that motivates you?

Hanae Utamura: I wanted to create art about life in general, not just about art. I studied for my BA at Goldsmiths between 2002-4 and then went back to Japan and worked there full-time for five years. I had studied only art but my gaze was towards society and I decided that I could not say anything through my work without having my own experience of working life. In Japan there are a lot of “salary men” who work from early in the morning until midnight. These people became my focus and I wanted to make art that could reach them. I had an unconscious rule that I should not make any work during this period because my aim was to understand how these people were feeling. I think of this period as part of my artistic practice.

Kate Neave: In the same way that you understand your working life as contributing to your artistic output, a lot of the work you produce today is performative. The energy and vitality in your work suggests a comparison with action painting of Jackson Pollock and the New York school of the 1950’s. Have you thought about that connection?

Hanae Utamura: One of my first works “Splashing Water at Trafalgar Square” (2010) involved spraying water on the ground in front of the National Gallery. I always think about energy and this work was a version of action painting. I was making an impermanent version in collaboration with the visitors’ footprints. This work aimed to deconstruct authenticity because it was not created by the artist alone. It was durational and ephemeral rather than a permanent oil painting.

Kate Neave: This concept of fragility is an interesting one. The performance “Red Line” appears documented on your website as a video. Were you tempted to go back and revisit the site to see if the rain has completed the line you began making?

Hanae Utamura: The work is the action itself – it’s durational. I’m going backwards and forwards, pouring the paint against the wind. I wasn’t interested in re-photographing the site as I wanted to create a narrative without a clear ending. I’m very interested in the concept of myth. Today you can never get to the core of an issue. There are so many sources of information, in news stories spread on the internet for example, you can never know the true story. I’m also interested in Christianity and how the narratives of that religion have created art. The art object itself also has a power. That is one of my central concerns.

Kate Neave: That concern is expressed in the materials that you use in your work which have an importance in themselves. The drawings “Ground Zero”, for example, are made with ash from the wood of houses burnt in the Tsunami disaster zone. How do you approach using materials in your work?

Hanae Utamura: I’m very analytical about my process and for me it is important to have a good reason to use a particular material in the work. The material has to make sense in the context of the work itself. I get lots of ideas from the materials themselves. When I was thinking about “Red Line” I initially considered using blood, but for some reason that collapsed the possibilities of the work. Using red paint was less literal. Red was symbolic and reminded me of abstract expressionist painting. Throwing the paint and painting with the force of the nature expanded the concept of painting itself.

Kate Neave: There is a lot of interest in “expanded painting” at the moment with artists exploring how far they can stretch the boundaries of painting itself. Bringing another force into the process of painting adds a whole new dimension. From where does your interest in painting originate?

Hanae Utamura: All of my works come from my background in painting. As an artist, painting was my medium until I studied at Goldsmiths. For me, “Red Line” is making a temporal painting on earth. My works with plaster such as “Drop” (2012) are born from layers of actions, pouring plaster from the top of a wall, scraping the plaster, and lots of repetition to create an installation. I see these works as three-dimensional paintings.

More details about Hanae Utamura’s artwork and upcoming exhibitions can be found on her website at www.hanaeutamura.com.

Anthony Gormley's Another Place at Crosby Beach

I had wanted to visit Anthony Gormley’s “Another Place” for some time but without much sense of what such a visit might be like. As a work set over a large expanse of landscape, minimal in its appearance and relying on a mastery of space and scale for its effect, before you see the work in person its impact really isn’t obvious.

The statues in question are familiar 6 foot 2 inches tall cast iron, simple models of the artists’ own naked body, here scattered along the long sandy beach at Crosby looking out to sea. The rawness and simplicity of the works first strike you when you come up close. You can connect with their stature, textures and heavy strength. But with the iron figures scattered over a two-mile area your relationship with the piece is necessarily time-based. At first, a tentative outsider, we begin to wander amongst the figures, touching them, examining them, familiarising ourselves with their quirks. What initially appear as an army of identical statues reveal themselves to be individuals with their own idiosyncrasies- some rusted by the tides, others with worn and delicate ankles, some sunken, some raised, and others whose features are all but obscured by parasitic crustaceans. Each man has his own personal histories.

Like some of the best examples of late 1960’s Land Art, the powerful dramatic interventions of Robert Smithson, Denis Oppenheim or Michael Hiezer, this piece pays a tribute to the natural environment in which it is situated. Due to the very shallow nature of the beach, the tide moves quickly across the sand and the area moves from completely exposed to completely underwater in a matter of hours. One figure you’ll be examining will be steeped in water at a moments notice. Gormley’s work though, offers a more contemplative, human interaction with nature than its predecessors. After examining the characters of the individual figures, we eventually find ourselves staring out to sea towards other sunken members of the group, finally participating in the same contemplative stance as the figures themselves. Gormley’s piece touches on that age-old urge to stand and stare into the abyss, to glimpse a vision of the sublime.

Lucy Whitford, Chelsea School of Art, MA Fine Art Interim Show, May 2012

The jumbled mix of approaches at the Chelsea School of Art, MA Interim Show, Part 1, speaks to the strength of the art school in encouraging their artists to pursue their own directions. Attending such an exhibition feels like being on a treasure hunt - a mix of styles struggle for attention but hidden gems shine through the confusion. 

The minimal and dispassionate appearance of “Penumbra” by Lucy Whitford betrays its deep emotional impact. Laid out scientifically and precisely, the sculpture at first presents itself as a clinical conceptual assembly. Selected organ pipes are held at arms length from the wall by metal fastenings. Sitting discretely below them, two plain concrete slabs are held up by metal stands - the spindly legs baring their weight hardly serving to accommodate them. A fragile organic structure sits delicately on one of the slabs, we feel its frailty on the heavy base.

Whitford’s combination of raw and simple materials, with precise placement and tidy construction brings a piercing emotional resonance to her work. These worn pipes speak of their histories - muffled choirs and heartfelt occasions are all locked up in their steely metal exterior.  The combination of fragility and strength encourages a feeling of vulnerability in the viewer, and the delicate organic structure is notably appearing only on one plinth, bringing to mind its absence on the second.

This is work which has a powerful impact on an intuitive level. Recently Whitford has been paring down her sculpture, and this work speaks of the resulting increased impact and subtlety she has brought to it. It is work which speaks of futility, fragility and loss with poetic metaphor. Her work is a breath of fresh air amongst the masses of self-reflective highly conceptual work we often see on the London art scene. It is work which resonates long after you’ve encountered it.

More of Lucy Whitford’s work can be see on her blog. The three Chelsea School of Art MA Fine Art 2012 interim shows continue with Part 3 opening on Thursday 10 May 2012, 6–8pm. See the Chelsea website for details.

Emma Hart gives an interview ahead of her solo exhibition “TO DO” at Matt's Gallery, London

Kate Neave: Emma, you have said your work is concerned with freeing the camera from its association with the past. Could explain what you feel the constraints on the camera are?

Emma Hart: The British philosopher JL Austin noticed in “How to Do Things With Words” that although we had previously thought of speech as descriptive, there are some aspects of language that produce rather than describe reality, a famous example being the couple saying “I do” at a wedding ceremony. These words affect reality rather than describing something. So we always think of the camera as reporting on reality but can the camera produce a reality?

If we took the family album obviously you could talk about that in terms of it being a load of lies. You wouldn’t take a photo of anything sad happening and people will put on a false smile for the camera. So already the photograph is being used to set up a situation which is false. As well as that, it puts a demand on behavior, why do people really go to the Eiffel Tower? Probably it’s to get the photograph… so not only does the camera lie, it takes a snapshot of reality and presents that as the truth but it also makes us do things. So, for me photography is wound up with power and control and I’m interested in destroying all the preconceived conventions of photography.

Kate Neave: In your work, the camera becomes performative, you’re letting the camera take over, what is your part in this? Are you stepping away?

Emma Hart: Maybe that’s how it really is, the cameras are in charge in the real world. So my relationship to the camera is a micro example of how cameras control. They function as if they’re above the world. The new work I’m doing integrates cameras into the work so they no longer hover above the world.

Kate Neave: There is a relationship to humour in your work. Watching some of the videos of performances on your website some people are laughing because they’re in this moment of confusion.

Emma Hart: I’m interested in that moment of confusion as something powerful. The moment we don’t recognise something is the moment there is the most potential for change. I really don’t try to be funny, it just happens. I’d like to consider myself more absurd. In my work for Matt’s Gallery I want to try and get rid of playful humour and tip it into being absurd. I don’t really try to make things funny, it’s just what happens when you’re celebrating freedom.

Emma Hart’s exhibition at Matt’s Gallery will run from 28 September – 20 November 2011. You can see more of Emma’s work on her website www.emmahart.info.

Jaime Miranda at Chelsea College of Art and Design, PgDip Fine Art Interim Exhibition, May 2011

In this interim exhibition of work by post-graduate students of Chelsea College of Art and Design, Peruvian artist Jaime Miranda’s photographs stand out for their direct engagement with our city and the powerful challenge they make to our belief systems.

Miranda photographs a project space he has created for himself in a secret location under a pier on the banks of the river Thames. Working with the space as his studio, Miranda carves into the wooden remains of a pier, which stand out of the ground like reminders of a past civilisation. Working at low tide he makes himself at home, being pushed out by the river itself when the water rises to cover his creations. With the business centre of Canary Wharf towering over him as a backdrop Miranda, in his carvings, seeks to reignite a connection with the city around us by working directly on its features.

Using the traditional tools of a chisel and hammer Miranda carves into the wood, to reveal its hidden personality and spirit. He peels back the accumulated moss and chisels away at the structures as though he is only intervening to set free a face that always existed within it. It is as though Miranda serves only to uncover the hidden energy and personality beneath the surface of the structure, revealing a spirit that has in recent years become obscured.

Miranda taps into a different, perhaps more primitive, more direct relationship with nature and a society’s deeper connection with its surroundings. In these photographs nature emerges with its own force and the wooden structure becomes a totem to a lost society and belief system. Miranda highlights our contemporary disconnection with nature and our ignorance of its power and personality.

Floating above Miranda, working at his sculptures, is that powerful British emblem of business and the capitalist agenda, Canary Wharf. In the business world there is no space for Miranda’s excavations. Time itself has become a commodity and capitalist priorities surpass concerns with the natural environment around us. The buildings float above Miranda’s head almost as a threat and we are made aware of their controlling power in our world.

Miranda comes from Peru where capitalism has had a huge impact on the local way of life and environment of the people seen, for example, in the commodification and loss of large sections of the Amazon rainforest. In these photographs Miranda addresses one of the centres of that ideology and seeks to question its dominance. He sets up a narrative whereby our relationship to the natural world has changed. He asks us to look at how we live, at our concept of time, at our concept of nature and he questions how we arrived there. 

For more of Jaime Miranda’s works see his website www.jaimemiranda.com.

Cory Arcangel: Beat the Champ, The Curve, 10 February 2011 — 22 May 2011

Archangel adopts the unique corridor space of The Curve to present a chronological sequence of projections of 10 pin bowling video games continuously throwing gutter balls. As we progress through the space, we move forward chronologically, from the bleeps and flashing cursors of 1970s games through to ever more sophisticated technology. Although the graphics and player guiding systems progress, the gutter balls continue to roll. We are faced with ever more elaborate expressions of exasperation from the characters on screen. The irony of a population engaged in playing a physical sport in a virtual world is not lost on Arcangel. He uses this piece, and the feelings of frustration and futility it provokes, to question our habits and use of technology.

As we continue to move through the piece, the speed and power of play rises to a crescendo and we are immersed in a deafening cacophony of artificial sounds. It’s a dizzying experience to be surrounded by such noise in combination with repeated images of failure. Our thoughts move from the specific to the abstract in considering the wider implications of the dominance of American culture.

At the somewhat anticlimactic finale of our journey, we are confronted with a line up of the tiny consoles responsible for creating the bewildering environment in which we find ourselves. With a critical touch, Archangel leaves visible a small circuit board delicately inserted into the game controllers. The circuit board takes the place of the game player and sends signals to the game consoles of a player repeatedly failing to hit his target. Far from a passive documentation, the exhibition reveals itself to be a live demonstration of failure taking place before our eyes. The line up of consoles recalls the inevitable progression of technology, new models replacing old, rendering previous consoles out of date and inadequate. In fact all of the consoles used by Arcangel are out of date such that in this exhibition, even the most recent models are exposed as hopeless and pathetic.

In his intervention with the machines Arcangel critically engages with his medium, the 8-bit video game. He also refers to the tradition of “glitch art”, a type of net art which has developed an interest in subverting the proper functioning of web pages and programmes. Arcangel’s work, along with glitch art, net art and some other new media art has a tendency to come across as crass and one-dimensional when presented in the gallery space. The crude arrangement of Arcangel’s work in the contemporary exhibition “Here Comes Everybody” at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin renders his work hollow and unsatisfying. What elevates “Beat the Champ” is the fact the work was conceived specifically for The Curve’s space. More so than traditional art forms, new media art demands astute and careful curation. The present exhibition is conceived as a journey on which we encounter stages of effect and realisation. It’s this site-specific conception of the work that gives Cory Arcangel’s work an unexpected but very welcome sophistication.

For visiting information see the Barbican website.

Jake and Dinos Chapman "Exquisite Corpse" series at Tate Modern

‘Exquisite Corpse’ is a game that was invented by the Surrealists in 1925 as a means to allow the artist’s mind to roam free and explore the unconscious. It is a pictorial version of the game ‘Consequences’ in which players take turns to draw sections of a body before folding the paper over and passing the paper on to the next player. The Chapman brothers develop the Surrealists’ invention in their set of twenty etchings. To create their version they prepared ten head sections and an assistant covered their contribution before they exchanged plates and worked on the next sections of the body.

The Chapmans’ Exquisite Corpse etchings however markedly differ from the surrealist works created using the same method. Whereas many of the Surrealist works are pastel or pencil drawings, the Chapman brothers revel in the precise detail afforded by the etching technique they adopt and produce a more grotesque and sometimes darkly comical effect. The minute details of the etchings are both repellant and engrossing at the same time. We cannot help but peer more closely at meticulously rendered details which include deformed and mutated human genitalia and dripping blood and wounds.

Georges Bataille effectively describes this idea which is apparent in their work: ‘The painter is condemned to please. By no means can he make a painting an object of aversion. The purpose of a scarecrow is to frighten birds, to keep them away from the field where it stands, but even the most terrifying painting is there to attract visitors.’ (Bataille, Georges “The Cruel Practice of Art”) We can’t help but admire at the same time as being revolted by this series. 

There is another disturbing contradiction in the fact that these grotesque monsters are presented as having originated from a playful childlike game. Some of the images are made from childish marks and features which contrast with the more adult scenes. Contradiction and unease is central to the effect and intention of these works. The Chapman brothers have said “We want to slow down acceptance of our work so you can’t just absorb it and move on, and anything you can’t resolve your response to is transfixing.”

As much as they are horrible, these images are also ironic and humorous, their details playing on unlikely juxtapositions and surprising the viewer: one of the monstrous creations is wearing a watch. The Chapman brothers have described laughter “as a convulsive reaction; “convulsion is that inability to make a rational response or where the linguistic response is woefully inadequate”. Here they adopt this approach to laughter making the viewer uncomfortable, we smirk nervously at the details which contrast uneasily with grotesque and violent content.

The series is currently on display in the ‘Poetry and Dream’ section of Tate Modern. Do check their website before you visit as they rotate their collection frequently: www.tate.org.uk/modern/explore

Rachel Whiteread: Gagosian Gallery, 7 September — 2 October 2010

The Gagosian Gallery space on Davies Street is a single white clean rectangular room, devoid of any distractions.The cuboid gallery space sets up an interesting play with the sculptures of this exhibition which are carefully, diagrammatically, arranged inside it.We enter into a meditational space where the formal simplicity of the sculptures is given prominence and resonance.

The show presents new work by Rachel Whiteread.It is work which rethinks a theme explored in one of her best known pieces “One Hundred Spaces” exhibited in the Sensation exhibition in 1997- that is the creation of a cast of the space beneath a chair.  This time, instead of using resin, Whiteread makes her casts from stone and concrete and even a plaster composite.This experimentation with material creates blocks which have a more palpable presence. One which is less ephemeral, more balanced and contemplative. 

Critics often note that Whiteread’s work suggests the notion of absence; we think of the person who is suggested but missing from the sculptures created.These more recent sculptures seem to me to be more ambiguous.All of the sculptural works on show are untitled.Whiteread leaves the viewer to project their own interpretation onto the works.We walk around the pieces and our relationship with them is brought to the fore.Whiteread sets up a poetic and playful dialogue with the viewer in rendering an immaterial space concrete, playful and poetic.

Whiteread’s interest in the exhibition has moved from the individual casts to the relationship of the casts to each other.This interest is reflected in the curation of the show itself which has a successfully strong formal layout.The coloured casts are placed down the centre of the rectangular space and are neatly balanced by white casts at either end.The sculpture creates its own rhythm through the space of the gallery.

For more information see the Gagosian Gallery website.

Anish Kapoor: The Royal Academy of Arts, 26 September — 11 December 2009

Anish Kapoor claims that he has as little to say as possible to say in his art. Instead of communicating a message directly, he stands back and leaves the viewer to create meaning through interaction with the works. As visitors to this exhibition we peer into voids, tiptoe amongst piles of concrete and look back at warped reflections of ourselves. Each artwork is a personal voyage of discovery and each work is only made complete when we engage with it.  

Kapoor’s work “Svayambh” is a huge block of red wax, Vaseline and paint which moves slowly and deliberately on its tracks through five linked rooms of the gallery. It scrapes against the walls as it passes through the arches between the rooms and leaves behind a debris of sticky residue. There is something horrifying about its scale and the inevitability with which it endlessly moves along its pre-determined route at an almost imperceptible speed.The title of the work derives from a Sanskrit word which means “self-generated”. Like an automatous machine it creates its own shape as we look on in wonderment. The big red block moves so slowly that we can walk from room to room, overtaking it and viewing it from different angles. However, despite beating its speed, we can have no effect on this relentless machine which continues on its path. Kapoor chooses this red sticky substance to play on our association with blood and organic form. This serves to encourage our interaction with the piece reminding us as it does of our own body.

“Shooting into the Corner” (2008-9) makes further use of both movement and blood red wax. Heavy shells are projected at high speed and at regular intervals from a canon onto the white walls of the gallery. The used shells accumulate in a bloody pile on the floor and over time compress and mutate into a thick red mess adding to the work over time. First exhibited in Vienna, the city in which Freud invented psychoanalysis. It is violent, has sexual connotations, and its constant repetition and insistence is unnerving.

It cannot have escaped Kapoor’s notice that to exhibit such a violent work shooting as it does at the walls of the Royal Academy, that temple of academic values, serves to suggest an aggressive attack on the cannon of the Royal Academy itself. Even though he is a Royal Academician himself, Kapoor subtly challenges the Royal Academy’s traditional values. Certainly Kapoor’s approach does not slot seamlessly within its tradition. Kapoor does away with subject matter and asks the viewer to contribute meaning through experience. He attempts to hide any evidence of the artist’s hand, and reduces the prominence of the artist’s place. This stands in stark opposition to the Royal Academy’s traditional emphasis on subject matter, technique, and the cult of the artist.

For more information see the Royal Academy website.