You may have heard that Absolut has launched a limited-edition of city series which Gorillaz’ Jamie Hewlett has produced an amazing design for. It celebrates the vibrant cultural city, capturing London’s creativity and rich style heritage in a unique bottle design which goes on sale in Selfridges and Harvey Nichols on 1st March 2012.
Set against a London backdrop, the bottle introduces key characters from the past who have influenced and shaped London’s present fashion scene. The seven characters encapsulate the city’s diverse heritage, spanning the ages from Dickensian and 18th Century Dandy, through to Pinstripe gent, 60’s chick, SKA, Punk and 80’s Casual.
To celebrate the launch, ABSOLUT will be offering consumers the chance to win one of 50 bottles via Instagram from the 9th of Feb. There will also be the chance to buy one of only 50 unique ABSOLUT London collectors gift packs, which go on sale on 22nd March. More information can be found on Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/ABSOLUTUK
This week debuts the 2016 London Art Fair at the Business Design Centre in Islington, running from Thursday January 20th – Sunday the 24th.
Find out what’s being said about this year’s Fair – #LAF16
The London Art Fair 2016 features 126 carefully selected modern British and contemporary galleries, displaying work by over 1,000 artists covering the period from the early 20th century to the present day.
Educational talks, insightful tours and interactive events
Highlights include:
Thursday 21 January including Thursday Late in association with Peroni Nastro Azzurro
The Fair stays open until 9pm for a special programme including a performance and a PLAY ART DATA MONEY game jam. More information
Friday 22 January
Find out how artists are responding to today’s migrant crisis and whether London’s international reputation as a city of culture is at risk due to soaring rental prices. More information
Saturday 23 January
Key stakeholders in the UK contemporary gallery sector discuss the affect that increasing adoption of social media is having on art buying behaviour and Magnum photographer Olivia Arthur reveals her Desert Island Pics. More information
Sunday 24 January
Family-friendly workshops inspired by Julian Charriere’s current exhibition at Parasol unit for contemporary art. More information
VETA GORNER at the BEN OAKLEY GALLERY, Greenwich
Preview Evening 9th November 2012, 6.30pm – 9.30pm
A fresh and exciting solo exhibition of new works by Veta Gorner. Veta is a multi-instrumentalist high quality Printmaker. Using her own Press she creates unique etchings, lithographs drypoint, screenprints, colographs and processes that have not even been named yet.
Technically excellent her works are strong in colour and delicate in content, they carry a dense raw energy that are aesthetically balanced, some built up from layers of the finest hand made papers with waxes and thread woven through, it is in the detail that you can read the time consuming journey that goes into each individual piece.
Ben Oakley comments: “This new body of work sees Veta experimenting on an open brief with no real narrative, some natural abstract fluid forms effortlessly merging with bolder but subtle architectural influences.
Veta shares time between her London & Swedish Studios always observing the cultural differences in each country and around the world, she is engaged and fascinated in the parallels of life as they overwhelm and delight us simultaneously.”
VISITOR INFORMATION
BEN OAKLEY GALLERY
9 Turnpin Lane, Greenwich, London SE10 9JA
DLR: Cutty Sark Greenwich ( 2 minutes walk )
Overground Train: Greenwich Station ( 5 minutes walk )
Opening Times: Thursday –Sunday 11-6pm
Monday –Wednesday by appointment.
All media enquiries /invitations: contact Ben Oakley:
Aww Easter… Always a good time, not so much for the religious aspect but rather more for the bank holiday weekend and looming indulgence of chocolate bunnies and eggs.
Another thing to look out for are many Easter-themed street art and graffiti works. We browsed the web and compiled a small collection for your eyes only.
And for those who don’t know what Easter is, this below is for you – thanks Wikipedia
Gaston Gouron is a visual media artist based in Brussels. His work caught my attention at a show about art books. Not by surprise, yet I think more by design, I had picked out each of Gaston’s three artworks on display before swooping in to catch a word with him. I arranged to meet two days later in Bar De Matin – BDM to those in the know – a chatty bar in Place Eugéne. I went in with having noted down a few choice questions and also the book ‘The Secret War between Downloading and Uploading’. I’d intended this as a visual prompt to get us going on a Sunday morning. Luckily too we’re both keen on our coffee! Gaston launched in by telling me that notorious mega-uploads site had just been killed-off by the US government’s new anti-piracy laws.
‘Tutt!!’ He mentioned also the group called Script-Kiddies who work anonymously, and how he was fond of subverting the hacking potential of freewares like Keylogger to the advantage of as a tool for making artwork. He also threw in the word Caviarder – but not to be cast aside, really that word defines Gaston Gouron’s working process – which for him is to make things in a simple way or with no design.
Maybe this makes him a censor of what he considers to be an over-design of things? I asked him how much he thought his work to take refuge in and show hallmarks of the graffiti artist – expressive, edgy, playful? Here is the interview.
PW: Please describe your working method relating to the artwork Never-ending Conversation, exhibited in 50 Livres d’ Artistes at ARA (Amis de la Reliure d’Art) Belgica in January.
GG: It’s totally process driven, and it’s about finding a moment when something flips into being interesting, no; in fact, amazing. I do this on the web, chasing links that may have been sparked by a conversations with friends or a hangover from a previous idea.
Never-ending Conversation comes off the back of me buzzing around the internet and settling on something amazing. An example is when I discovered Chatbot, a web-based AI that you can talk with. I like to have fun with things so I was cutting & pasting text between the two conversation boxes to see how absurd it could be. But instead, Chatbot was sufficiently intelligent enough and made responses to expressions how you’d expect a human conversation to go.
That conversation became the default material I wanted to work with for one of my projects. As a bee might extract and pollinate, I wanted to do the same. Taking from one place and have it settle in another. Pollinating might be stretching the bee analogy too far though. It’s not that serious, really I’m simply interested in making things feel new.
PW: The artwork which you called Never-ending Conversation is very sculptural and invades the exhibition space but also plays with text that came literally out of thin air (or more aptly, it came virtually from the chatbot’s AI). So, how do you deal with the ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ and did that affect the way you chose to exhibit the artwork at 50 Livres d’Artistes?
GG: On the one hand I’m not proud to see the work presented. In reality it should appear more disordered. I created the original version in my bedroom which is more a workspace. I’m a collector too, collecting documentation about programming language and old network cables.
In a more common workspace environment Never-ending Conversation looks more ‘gutsy’ – how you’d expect a living machine should be. But when I saw it set-up in the exhibition space it looked, well… Naked! but I understand that the conditions – or restrictions – between workspace and exhibition space are very different.
In the stark, brightly lit – and clean! – exhibition space of ARA (a space with an orthodox for presenting aesthetically-biased artbook artists) I imagine my work is more readable to an audience. But It would be a great idea to have the work redone – simply to make the sprawling technology in the sculpture more obvious, revealing more about how it was put together. I’m really aware that I don’t want to conceal any part of the process.
PW: Which technological forms tend to produce the best renditions of language or ‘text-sampling’ that you’ve seen recently?
GG: Basic plain text.
I prefer reading rather than to listen to spoken words.
I just love data.
It’s strange I know, but more recently I’ve been understanding why my work borders on being seen as simplistic – which is a good thing. One thing is knowing about a study a friend sent to me. It shows that we read in contours – going from the corner of a page to the centre. So I think I’m interested in written material. Then I think about if it should be offered up as a bound-book, a pamphlet, a techno-language-sculpture. These are vessels and simply carry the language, I’m not even sure they’re that an important part of the process. The finding and discovering is more what I’m into.
PW: What’s interesting or peculiar that you’ve discovered about the ins and outs of language when you’re thinking how it needs to appear in or affect a piece of work?
GG: It’s that English language is most important in the creation process. It’s the language of IT and because I’m working a lot with script languages, English is most widely used. My mother tongue is French, but it’s not the language of IT and because I’m into revealing all of the process I’m always going to be showing parts of script and programming language.
One other thing is that using the French language this might make my work appear to be more exotic and specialist. It’s the opposite – I want to hit on an international crowd with an equally international language and for them to read the words. If they admire the vessel in which it’s concealed, then great, but for me it’s about getting the language to speak for itself.
PW: Who has done the most, or been most instinctive, in making the printed word part of their bank of visual language?
GG: I have several references. I would say the graphic works of Marcel Broadthaer’s and he’s Belgian. Japanese artist On Kawara is a big inspiration. He made two books retracing one million years – making the words and numbers from the dates into material – which then could be bound in a book, spoken out aloud and painted on a canvas (then, showing me on the screen of his laptop) like this.
I also can’t forget North Amercian artist Ed Ruscha for his famous graphics and text paintings. In England there’s Daniel Eatock – I love his work; well more than love. It’s his approach – easy and efficient. Then there’s Vaska who is Eatock’s founding partner of the web-building-platform Indexhibit. He came into my school last year. Working together they made the most clean of interfaces.
PW: ‘Artbook’ as a category seems an anathema to your visual language because you’re looking for ways of re-doing and re-showing printed texts. I can see a binary to the way you bulk-up on language and downplay the format (or vessel as you refer). You serve-up things leaving the text in it’s raw elemental form – to fend for itself. So, how do you think your work relates to the ready-made, or made-ready?
GG: I produced Never-ending Conversation on a course I was studying at Lacambre Artes Visuels in Brussels. It was only 3 months and the course was refreshing because of the trans-disciplinary interests of the students I was studying with. Everyone doing this short-course was coming from a bigger discipline including design, photography, typography, urban space and for me it’s graphic communication. A bias is coming in too from a fine-art background but I’m also a programmer.
The tutors were really supportive an encouraged us to explore ideas. It’s completely energizing to share ideas with such a diversity of artistic personalities.
My work relates to the ready-made in process really. I do things to get rid of some idea – maybe to bank them so I can buzz on the next amazing discovery.
PW: We could go on, but thanks Gaston for the giving a nice twist to thinking about the how artbooks can still be brought to life beyond the printed and bound page.
GG: That’s OK
Gaston Gouron is currently writing his transcript for application to RCA, London.
Related: From 26 January to 6 May 2012 MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna is delighted to present Marcel Broodthaers. L’espace de l’écriture, the first complete retrospective in Italy devoted to the Belgian artist, curated by Gloria Moure.
Light Painting WiFi is the creation of Timo Arnall, Jorn Knutsen, Einar Sneve Martinussen. Their work explores the invisible terrain of WiFi networks in Oslo urban spaces.
They put together a four-meter tall measuring rod with 80 points of light reveals cross-sections through WiFi networks using a photographic technique called light-painting. By the simple action of walking down streets, they are able to pick up the thousands of WiFi signals and with the help of a long exposure camera, transform them into wall, barriers of lights.
Beyond the art aspect of this work, this technique has also a research purpose as the data collected is used to evaluate the quality of the Oslo wireless networks.
Creativity is something to promote whenever you can, quirkiness is always something that will please the eye and mind of someone looking for something different. Takeshi Mazdakes is certainly one of these artists pushing the boundaries and being after something unique. He might just be achieving this with his exhibition ‘This is England 2010’. Continue reading This is England 2010: quirkiness on Bayswater road→
His name is Hal Lasko, his nickname Grandpa. What he did for living is something we will probably never see again – he was a graphic artist back when everything was done by hand. He then had to retired and his caring family had the genius idea to introduce him to the computer and especially to Microsoft Paint.
Since then Grandpa spends ten hours a day moving pixels around his computer paintings. Some would call his work pointillism, others 8-Bit art but it might be a bit of both.
Anyway, another inspiration that is Hal Lasko, The Pixel Painter. We have included below a video interview of the artist plus a few examples of his works.
Of all the public art on display at the St Pancras station in London (UK), one piece stands out.
I am talking about the bronze statue called The Meeting Place that proudly stands at the south end of the upper-level beneath the station clock. The numbers: 9-metre (29.5 ft) high, 20-tonne (19.7-long-ton; 22.0-short-ton), impressive isn’t it? But have you been near it and noticed the frieze, a myriad of smaller sculpture works all around the plinth?
No? I did and was genuinely seduced by it.
This whole sculpture is the work of British artist Paul Day, and is intended to evoke the romance of travel through the depiction of a couple locked in an amorous embrace. However this is for the main part of the work, the part that everyone can see from the window of the train…. but, what about the work located at the pedestal? At first glance, there is nothing romantic.
The frieze was actually added by the artists in 2008 and caused a stir as it was branded as ‘controversial’. It indeed originally depicted a commuter falling into the path of an underground train driven by the Grim Reaper (understand ‘Death). The image was one of many featured on a frieze for a controversial sculpture planned for St Pancras in London.
A spokesman for the company said: ‘The frieze as originally suggested will not go ahead and work on it has stopped.”
In his defence, the artist replied that the image was created in a tragi-comic style meant to be a metaphor for the way people’s imaginations ran wild. He added: ‘The imagination and real life are often intermingled.”
Day revised the frieze before the final version was installed and it can be seen today. No trace of Grim Reaper but a multitude of faces with strong or bold expressions, often hard to pin point. Are they sad, happy, tired, pained? I do not know, but what I do know is the artist mastered conveying feelings in this work.
Have you seen this work? What do you think?
If you’ve not seen it, please do as it’s worth the trip. Enjoy the photographs below in the meanwhile.