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Clerkenwell design week – Sarah Wiestner's installation
The Clerkenwell design week is back again from tomorrow, the 24th May, and will result in an exciting buzz where art meets design and vice versa. Not less than 60 showrooms and a pile of events (over 150 events) such pop up exhibitions, installations, talks, performances, music and workshops, the area is where to be for the next couple of days.
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Sarah Wiestner
One of the exhibitions that got me excited at this year’s Clerkenwell design week, is Sarah Wiestner’s axcrylics mirrors, MDF (Medium Density Fibreboard) and LEDs lights installation or make over of the infamous House of Detention known to be haunted. The prison was demolished in 1890, but an entire underground section survived and lay undisturbed until the bombs of the Blitz saw it reopened as an air-raid shelter. After World War II it was again largely forgotten until, in 1993, it became a museum.
How Sarah plays with mirrors and make the space transparent is often deceived or shaken by the encounter of a dead end paths. Many openings were sealed off last century. The LEDs lights give back the light to this place once in a the complete dark. I have not been yet but can already sense a very interesting and exciting mix of elements and feelings.
Read more
> The website and blog of Sarah Wiestner (some awesome stuff) – http://maisdsarahwiestner.blogspot.com
> Cklerkenwell design week – http://www.clerkenwelldesignweek.com
> The House of Detention – http://www.london-ghost-tour.com/houseofdetention.htm
Wanderlust Hotel, a show by Pam Glew at Woolff gallery
Pam Glew is a well-established, contemporary British artist, best known for her unique bleaching technique on fabric, vintage flags, and handmade vintage quilts. We’ve written about her previously and are excited to again with her fourth London Show since 2011, Wanderlust Hotel.
Wanderlust hotel?
Inspired by the goings on in legendary hotels such as Chelsea Hotel and Hotel Marmont,’Wanderlust Hotel’ is a fictional guest house frequented by illicit overnight guests and dark secrets. Self-staged photo shoots make up the majority of the subjects.
Populated by the weekend girlfriend, the bride, the maid, the mixologist, the sleeping porter, the receptionist and the VIP guest all swapping roles and sweeping in and out of the pictures frames.
Formerly trained in Theatre Design, in this series the artist explores an imaginary world; a fictional hotel, an invented environment and a narrative where the players in the hotel encounter each other within the hotel. The archetypes are empathetically reflected on in the Bellboy sleeping, and the melancholic maid, sometimes humourous (the Call Girl on a visit to Vegas encounters the ‘Glitter Gulch’ signage), and turned on their head (the bride has a revolver, who is also the same model as the call girl).
Acting is a common theme, and the ‘play’ idea is explored in the miniature hotel model. Here the hotel is bereft of people as if the residents are now only present in the paintings. The models in the work occupy more than one role, as a metaphor for how fate and luck play a part in our lives. In ‘Sisters’ the artist explores a meeting of 2 estranged identical twins. One of which is the maid, one the VIP. An imagined rift is between them as if they have not spoken in years. The heavy quilt is embellished with swarovski crystals which appears to elevate the characters appearance, the maid’s headpiece appearing more like a crown.
Let’s get technical
The medium Glew uses is dye and bleach. The use of fabric, and dyeing, washing and sewing is used as a metaphor for ‘women’s work’. Glew celebrates women in the history of art who have been overlooked due to an element of ‘craft’ in their work. Sourcing antique and vintage american quilts and national flags, the fabric of the work is as important as the image itself. Using quilts to insinuate sleep and slumber, the textiles are rich in both history and texture. Decontructing large American flags to just the stars they become less about the location and more visceral.
For further details contact +44 (0) 20 7631 0551 / info@woolffgallery.co.uk
When just interesting isn't enough – breathing new life into the artbook. An interview with French-Belgian media artist Gaston Gouron
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.
http://metropolism.com/features/on-kawara-at-the-stedelijk-museu/english
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.
Joan Miro at Andipa gallery
Andipa Gallery is delighted to announce a selling exhibition of unique works and rare graphics by Joan Miro.
Taking place from 7 April to 7 May 2011 the show coincides with the first major London retrospective of Miro’s work for almost 50 years, The Ladder of Escape at the Tate Modern, and will offer a rare opportunity to acquire some of the finest original works by this master of 20th Century art.
The exhibition will show rare works on paper, including some of Miro’s 1965 Le Courtisan Grotesque series. Works described as displaying “the most genuine Miro, the one of the astral signs (and) symbolic objects… who uses his own mature language, without hesitations.” Daniel Giralt-Miracle (art critic and historian).
Miro’s most iconic and admired engravings, lithography and etchings will also be on display. Pieces will include the original lithograph Montroig 2, named after the Catalan village to which Miro felt a deep connection, returning to throughout his life, and which inspired some of his most seminal works. These highly sought after brightly coloured pieces make up an integral part of the artist’s oeuvre and demonstrate Miro’s expert use of carborundum to produce richly textural pieces that reflect the original qualities of painting.
Miro was among the most prominent of modern artists, developing a unique Surrealist language that expressed freedom and energy through its fantastical imagery, vibrant use of colour and free use of paint, often splattered across his canvases creating an explosive effect. The more political side to Miro’s work reflects the turbulent times of the Spanish Civil War and repression under the Franco regime. His works express and react to conflict, protest and political upheaval. In our current instable and uncertain times, perhaps this more restless and anxious aspect of Miro’s practice is at its most resonant.
Words from Andipa gallery
Mehdi Ghadyanloo’s street art illusion
Meet Mehdi Ghadyanloo, a proficient street artist from Teheran, Israel.
The artist style is ‘illusion’ and his works always need you to look again and again to understand what it is all about but that illusional aspect is most definitely why so many people appreciate it.
Surreal scenes are often depicted in his murals such as a man floating up into the sky and holding on helium balloons.
Mehdi Ghadyanloo is a painter and designer based in Tehran, Israel. His street art is extensive. What makes his artworks particularly intriguing is that they are full of dimension that tricks the brain.
‘Portraits in Character’ by Alexander Newley at St Martin’s in-the-Fields
Artist Alexander Newley is delighted to announce his solo exhibition ‘Portraits in Character – supporting St Martin-in-the-Fields’, in the Crypt of St Martin’s, Trafalgar Square from 7th to 21st November. The exhibition is to run in partnership with St Martin-in-the-Fields, a fitting location for the exhibition, with its proximity to the National Portrait Gallery and National Gallery, and will mark Newley’s return to the London art world after several years in New York.
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Auction to support St Martin- in-the-Fields
In Spring 2017 the paintings and drawings featured in ‘Portraits in Character – supporting St Martin- in-the-Fields’, will be auctioned to benefit the work of St Martin-in-the-Fields, including their outreach with homeless people.
For more information about this auction in support of St Martin-in-the-Fields please contact StMartins@activ.org.uk
Portraits of comedians such as Dame Judi Dench
Newley collaborated with Kenneth Branagh to create a unique series of portraits of several of the leading cast from the Plays at the Garrick season, which comes to a close this November. Alexander Newley spent time with the cast over a period of one year, capturing the actors in character backstage after performances.
The result is a series of drawings and paintings capturing the aura of some of the UK’s most celebrated actors; Dame Judi Dench, Kenneth Branagh, Adrian Lester, Derek Jacobi, Richard Madden and Lily James.
Alexander Newley commented:
Painting an actor in character adds another layer of interest for me. I’ve always been fascinated by the unknowable human self and how it variously disguises and forms itself into the mask of personality. In a theatrical portrait, that self is further warped and refracted through the mask of portrayal. I am making a portrait of their portrait, in other words, which is a fascinating game of chess on many levels.
About Alexander Newley
Alexander Newley is a leading contemporary portrait artist working on both sides of the Atlantic, known for his iconic depictions of major figures in the Arts including; Gore Vidal, Billy Wilder, Christopher Reeve, Oliver Stone and Steven Berkoff. His portrait of Gore Vidal, America’s infamous polemicist and wit, and his dramatic triple-portrait of Actor, Activist and former Superman star Christopher Reeve, imprisoned in his life-supporting wheelchair, form part of the permanent collection of The National Portrait Gallery at The Smithsonian in Washington DC.
About St Martin-in-the-Fields
St Martin-in-the-Fields is a landmark church, which has been serving London for centuries. The iconic building stands as a beacon in Trafalgar Square, welcoming people through its doors for services, music or simply as a place of quiet sanctuary from the bustle of central London.
St Martin’s is famous for offering a welcome and practical support to some of the most vulnerable people in society. This December marks the 90th Anniversary of the BBC Radio 4 Christmas Appeal. The money raised helps homeless people who receive shelter, food, help and advice at The Connection at St Martin’s; as well as maintaining a special Vicar’s Relief Fund which makes thousands of one off grants to vulnerable people across the UK.
Neon Lit Acrylic Collection from www.pimpartworks.com
PimpArtworks cutting edge Acrylic artworks come complete with backlit neon Lighting.
The customised LED lighting has 8 changeable neon lighting effects via a RGB controller, including a rainbow effect which gradually cycles through all the electrifying colours.
Set it to your preference or let it cycle. Whatever option it will back light your artwork & wall in style.
These are limited. Once they are gone, they are gone…
Related link
See the whole Neon Lit Acrylic Collection – www.pimpartworks.com/artists_neon
Campaign against forest fires
We found this campaign created by Ad Agency DDB Uruguay for S.I.N.A.E. and Dirección Nacional de Bomberos which talks about forest fires.
The campaign was launched in summer to raise awareness on the importance of prevention as a means of stopping forest fires.
We liked a lot the creativity here!
More about the National Campaign Against Forest Fires
3d Sketches by Ramon Bruin
3D is spreading fast in the movie industry and everyone seems to embrace that technology and I certainly am. But I appreciate even more when it comes into some illustrated art.
Meet Dutch freelance artist Ramon Bruin and his new series of astonishing 3D pencil drawings. I do not need to say much about those, they are just out of this world. But what I would say is that these were made only with pencil, yes just ordinary pencils. Ok add a touch of genius from the artist and boom, see below.
First seen on Design Taxi