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Showing posts with label alice woods. Show all posts
Showing posts with label alice woods. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 24, 2014
Wednesday, December 24, 2014
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I've had a kickin' year in art. Over the last 12 months I've performed in the Victoria & Albert Museum, at Institut für Alles Mögliche in Berlin and, my favourite, at Hackney WickED festival, where I made a political statement by being pelted with 150 eggs as a political statement. That was the best artistic thing I did this year but it feels somehow egotistical to award myself top prize in my own contest. So here's the tastiest fruits I discovered while out and about in London in 2014:
Honourable Mentions:
Live In Your Dreams!', The Crypt of St Pancras Church, 26th February 2014
I am not a difficult man to please. Give me a subterranean labyrinth to wander about and I'm yours. Even better if it's a spooky church crypt. Even even better if it's jampacked full of interesting art. I saw some great work by Central St. Martin's students this year, including some ace works by artists like Boris Raux, whose molecular art exploits damn near every sense; Charlotte Wendy Law, who reconfigures objects in fascinating new ways, drawing new materials from the ether; and Susan Beattie, who seems to find endless ways to utilise a piece of pig's gut. The sense of atmosphere and occasion here was outstanding, the pieces slotting beautifully into the musty space.
'The Choreography of Things', meeting Choy Ka Fai at arebyte Gallery, 18 January 2014
Give me something new to see or hear and I'll dance a jig of joy. So when I was invited to meet Choy Ka Fai at arebyte Gallery, with the goa of being hooked up to shock pads and plugged into his mind control device I jumped at the chance. He didn't disappoint. As I noted at the time there's something of the mad scientist to him but maybe that's inescapable when you write a programme ominously titled 'Mind Control Interface'. When was hooked up to his device and the juice was flowing through me, the feeling of my arm jumping around and curling up was utterly alien - the experience of someone else's brainwaves manipulating my arm and giving me a taste of some disturbing future. Check out the video.
'Dead Cat Bounce' by Alice Woods at Light Eye Mind, 14th November 2014
Any exhibition that leaves you feeling smarter than when you went in is worth a shake in my book. Alice Woods' Dead Cat Bounce made the complex world of financial chicanery navigable by the layman (me). Despite trying to keep abreast of what the hell is happening in the economy, there seem to be infinitely complex layers of jargon that, if I was a paranoid man, would seem suspiciously like they don't want people to understand it. Woods busted through all that, representing this world with style and visual panache. I particularly dug the chilling deck of cards that listed every part of the state that'd been privatised over the last 20 years, a piece that cements in the observer's mind just how much we've lost.
WINNER:
'Cornershop' by Lucy Sparrow, 26th August 2014
Having been running this site for a couple of years now, it's been deeply satisfying to meet artists contributing to group shows, being invited by them to see what they've been up to and finally see them gain some modicum of attention from the wider world. After meeting Lucy in 2013 at the Whitecross Street festival, where she was exhibiting a felt portrait of Rose West (to mixed reactions from the public), I resolved to keep an eye on what she was heading towards
The pinnacle of these was Cornershop: an entire shop constructed from felt situated in the East End of London. It was an eye-catching work, gaining attention from around the world and being featured in all major newspapers, on loads of art sites and all over social media. It's weird to see something you like being praised by The Daily Mail of all places, but, importantly, in gaining attention from the mainsteam media Lucy didn't sell out. Lurking just beneath soft felt is razor-sharp satire and a keenly political eye.
I dug Cornershop so much a felt tube of K.Y. Jelly now sits proudly on top of my mantlepiece. Can't wait to see what she does next.
23rd December: Gigs
29th December: Best films
Sunday, November 16, 2014
Sunday, November 16, 2014
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"Even a dead cat will bounce if it falls from a great enough height." A quote from a creepy, morbid weirdo? Nope. It's from the world of finance, referring to stock prices briefly resurging during or following a severe decline.
The world felt like an increasingly shitty place in the latter half of 2008. Ashen faced financiers trooped from skyscrapers clutching boxes of their stuff, politicians uselessly flapped their mouths and public services everywhere had a slowly tightening noose slipped around their neck. But in 2014 the "green shoots of recovery" are apparently all around us.
Headlines bleat "UK ECONOMY GROWS BY FASTEST RATE" and "UK GDP DATA TO SHOW RECOVERY CONTINUED". Well that's a relief. So we can exhale, smiling ruefully as we remember a difficult few years before sliding back into familiar old financial patterns. Or is this a dead cat ascendant? A lifeless, floppy feline body briefly arcing upwards from the ground before splatting back down in a crunched up boneheap?
It's a thorny question, and one that Alice Woods is eager to explore. Now, artists can be a solipsistic bunch; their work an echo of their internal preoccupations. Not so here, Woods sets out to "address the UK's economic knowledge deficit and elucidate the relationships between cultural and economic decision-making". Fuel for her fire comes from her participation in the Occupy movement and her personal observations of the recession on the North East.
The work takes the form of one room-sized piece supported by three more towards the back of the gallery. All four share a four-object branding; a stylised bomb, tie, floppy disc and padlock, and all are rendered in pure slabs of bright primary colour.
Most obviously eye-catching is the room sized installation. Gigantic pieces of latex stretch across the room, gently curving under their own weight and spilling onto the floor. The room is filled with the chemical tang of freshly cut plastic and this, coupled with the white gallery walls and tiled floor, brings to mind surgical sterility. I am later to learn that this space was once the front window of a butchers, the heavy red plastic flush against the floor quietly recalls the flow of blood.
These gentle arcs echo the graphs of the financial sector, reducing information to minimalist lines and dots. It's all too easy to take the peaks and troughs of these graphs for granted without considering the processes by which they're created. Behind every point of data are infinitely granular analogue events; lorries speeding down motorways, container ships making their way through stormy seas, African miners chipping away at subterranean mineral seams or sunburnt peasant workers harvesting coffee crops.
Woods understands the process of collating this mountain of economic information into one place as a kind of X-Ray vision. You have to see through the human activity and convert the analogue to digital. This makes the choice of materials particularly appropriate; the plastic sheeting gently reflective, super slick and utterly emotionless; or if you're prepared to stretch a little further, even a little erotically sadistic with BDSM-chic undertones.
As a statement it's a powerful in its simplicity and directness. However, if it were presented in isolation I'd criticise it as lacking context and detail. Fortunately, this is provided in the accompanying pieces, both of which are crammed with data.
My favourite of these was a deck of cards that take us through the companies, utilities and public services that have been privatised. There's an instinctive sense of disappointment when you read in the paper that yet another slice of the state has been chopped up and parcelled off to private investors, but it happens so often that it's difficult to remember exactly what has been privatised and to whom. These cards, taken as a whole, represent a dizzying dismemberment of the state. Flicking them open you're confronted with, for example, London Buses or the National Engineering Laboratory or even something as innocuous sounding as The Stationary Office. There's so many here that you marvel that we even have any part of the state still under public ownership.
Getting even further into the complexity that underlies all this are three small books; A Pocket Guide to the Euro. Presented in the now familiar primary colours, these are exhaustively researched and annotated guides to the tangle of dead European currencies like the Franc or Drachma and the country's current relationship to the European single currency and European history in total. This complex information neatly contrasts against the 'big' message of the central installation; giving the exhibition an almost fractal quality - the closer you examine it the more detail you discover.
The final summary comes in a 'curtain' of Woods' interlocking symbols. These bombs, discs, ties and locks are analogues for the suits in a deck of cards. Taken straightforwardly they represent various aspects of institutionalism, anarchism, security and information, all which coalesces to some level around the City of London on any given day of the week (or, most powerfully, during the Occupy movement). It's here that we see the binding together of philosophies, politics and emotion that form the unpredictable financial markets that, like it or not, control our lives.
Tackling a subject this complex is pretty damn brave, yet Woods has pulled it off. She's had clear political, intellectual, aesthetic and intellectual hurdles, but she's done it in style. It's a damn neat exhibition, one that rewards close attention and is fuelled by pragmatism and the desire to comprehend systems that often seem arcane to the point of mysticism.
Are we in the middle of a dead cat bounce? No-one know. And *shiver* that's scary.
Dead Cat Bounce is at Light Eye Mind, 176 Blackstock Road N5 1HA until 29th November, 11-6pm
Photos by Paul Clarke
Friday, November 22, 2013
Friday, November 22, 2013
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The deserted hulks that haunt our streets fill me with curiosity. When you've lived in a place long enough you learn which shops are permanent, which change hands every year and which are the slowly collapsing no-hope wrecks. Whitecross Street used to be notorious for these, film companies coming here to capture authentic urban decay. Peek through windows of these abandoned buildings and you'd see nature versus valuable Central London real-estate. Collapsed ceilings let you look right through the building to the grey sky behind it, the neverending rain creating impromptu water features - obscenely swelling piles of newspapers with a datemark of 1995. It was kind of cool in a slum-chic sort of way but boy did it stink - god knows what was breeding in that decade-deep layer of rotting trash. Perhaps it's for the best that they're gone. Yet one remains...
You'd think that a shop on Old Street would be a prime business opportunity but Star Food & Wine has been a mummified corpse since I moved here four years ago, a disused and dirty full stop at the end of a kickin' cool street. But not this week! A group of artists have resuscitated the patient, jamming a transfusion of life into her dusty old veins - now what was decaying behind rusty shutters is brimming with life and creativity. Star Food & Wine now contains work by artists who've been involved in exchange at art schools around the world "from New York to Paris and Kyoto to Tallinn" as the material puts it. Packed into the three floors are a pleasingly wide variety of art; ranging from photography, to appropriated objects, interactive art, multimedia - even room size installations.
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| A Place I Thought Would be Our Future Home - Dorthe Slej Pederson |
Much of what I enjoyed here was a reflection on what it means to occupy a space and alter it purely by your presence. Up on the first floor was a huge photo-collage by Dorthe Slej Pedersen called A Place I Thought Would Be Our Future Home. This consists of a mosiac of over-lapping pictures that add up to a single room. The concept of "home" is deceptively slippery to pin down; something that has to be simultaneously fixed, firm and concrete, while also being ephemeral and transitional. As you move in and out of houses, forever dragging boxes and suitcases cross a blasted grey cityscape you leave marks on where you've stayed and they leave marks on you. Pedersen's piece compresses this idea into a single image, boiling down a series of locations and objects to show us what stays constant and what changes.
One consequence of displaying in a found space is the building becoming an important component of the work. Pieces like Yuki Kobayashi's The Community and Untitled gain new dimensions purely by being framed against shattered brickwork and exposed cement. In a traditional gallery space these plush, strawberry-headed figures could look a touch sugary-sweet. Here, slumped in the corner of a smashed building they look more like wiped out junkies. Intentionally or not, the work gains an edge purely by dint of where it is.
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| The Community and Untitled - Yuki Kobayashi |
I'm not going to pretend that holding an exhibition in an abandoned building is some bold new direction in art - you could probably attend ten other shows in similar surroundings right now - but though the general atmosphere is familiar I still get a tinge of excitement at being somewhere I shouldn't. Frankly I'd be happy as a clam here without the art, so what works best are the pieces that work with the surroundings rather than compete for attention with it.
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| Sous Les Paves, A Tree - Sidney Charity |
A good example of this is Sidney Charity's the understated and tucked away Sous Les Paves, A Tree - a piece of concrete that'd hardened around a tree. As the tree grew it cracked and broke away. When in spaces like this it's difficult not to have architectural decomposition at the forefront of your mind, and this piece neatly shows how apparent permanence crumbles against the simple formula 'nature+time'.
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| Scape - Angus Frost |
But the piece that best summarises the idea of urban exploration is Angus Frost's Scape. In a corner of the musty cellar is a corridor. As you venture down this low lit passage you find yourself enmeshed in a winding labyrinth of plastic sheeting, walls guiding you through a disorientating maze. Everything is lit in soft blue and there's a electronic whine emitting from parts unknown. You pass dirty pipes and crumbling cellar walls - eventually reaching an unexpected space. There's a large, wide hole in the ground with a plant hanging above it; bits of neighbouring buildings rudely intrude over our heads, blotting out the sky. It's difficult to say where we are geographically, but there's a spooksome 'wrongness' to this place, as if the world was a movie set and you've accidentally stepped behind the scenery.
Snooping around the mysterious basement of an abandoned newsagent is very much my kind of thing, more than satisfying my desire to poke my nose where it shouldn't be. It's slightly frustrating that Star Food & Wine is on for just four short days, it'll be sad to see the life breathed into the building quickly dissipate and the place return to moldering slumber.
There's a whole bunch of stuff to see other than what I've described here: I haven't even mentioned Alice Woods' Facebook-blue mannequins with security camera heads or the machine that prints out anonymous secrets or the sound-triggered installation or the... well you get the drift. If you're into any of this stuff you owe it yourself to get your ass down to Star Food & Wine before Tuesday and have a damn good poke around.
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