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Showing posts with label Charlotte Law. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Charlotte Law. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 31, 2015
Tuesday, March 31, 2015
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Bloody pavement greeted me as I left Peckham Rye station on Saturday afternoon. Moments before I arrived, some guy had his hand chopped off by unknown assailants. Now, with the street festooned with POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS tape, forensic detectives swabbed blood off the concrete. Twenty minutes later everything was back to normal; smiling shoppers wandering down the street, over the rapidly coagulating bloodstains. It was a dislocating experience: I'd come for art, not mutilation.
Tucked away in the shadow of the attractively crumbling Bussey Building, between warehouses that ship goods to sub-Saharan Africa and optimistically affluent pop-up cocktail bars, Bosse & Baum isn't the easiest place to find. I'm helped when, as I'm wandering around, I'm accosted by a silent Romanian-looking woman wearing a leering mask of Nigel Farage.
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| There There (from their website) |
Discombobulated, I was led into a warehouse and into a small tent. Shoved inside, the door was zipped up tight. Within sat a similarly dressed woman, this time wearing a David Cameron mask. She popped some headphones on me, from which burbled a robotic drawl. She then performed a silent palm reading before instructing me to clap my hands like a seal, then ushered me from the tent. My initial reaction? "What the hell was that?!"
Later research revealed this to be There There, performing a piece called Text Home to 78070 (the name taken from the famously crap Home Office campaign of the same name). Jamming together a stereotypical Romanian outfit with the faces of the politicians who'd use their presence for political gain, this work aims to jolt its audience into a new mindset. There's something quietly terrifying about being snatched off the street, shoved somewhere confusing and being given an obtuse lecture, the experience giving the tiniest of tiny tastes of the worst fears of illegal immigrants.
Best of all is the conflation of monstrous, Daily Mail cartoon-ish visual stereotypes of Romanian-as-monster and the actual monsters of Cameron and Farage. Their smugly satisfied faces peering out from patterned headscarves chill the viewer to the bone; eyes like sharks and jaws locked in mock humour. This is my kind of performance; aggressive, ragged and intensely political.
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| Charlotte Law |
After a quick pop out for some dinner, during which I unfortunately missed Ana Mendes' Self Portrait, I returned just in time for Charlotte Law's Ode Action. I'm friends with Charlotte and have attended a number of her performances over the last few years. Judging from what I've seen she's locked in a neverending loop - rigorously reconfiguring and reworking ever more worn materials.
From within a crinkled space blanket emerge what I'm pretty sure are the remnants of a burnt piano. This together with other junkyard ephemera, is placed on bungee cords suspended from the ceiling. Soon a row of gently bobbing Blair-Witch-a-like mobiles is improvised, weird new structures created from trash. Law continues this across the space; new shapes popping up, things being speared on one another or carefully balanced, before collapsing with a wooden clunk.
She's accompanied by another performer, who contributes apparently random barks of noise, before bending over to twiddle with a variety of gadgets, all of which emit ominous sounding voices. By way of reply, Law occasionally vocalises a stream of guttural sounds in a language I either don't recognise, or that's made up. There's a quiet aggressiveness to this that borders in nihilism, as if Law is playing in the ashes of a burnt world. Here form, language and architecture have deteriorated to their base elements, being cut up into jagged and unfamiliar new shapes.
Following that was Justyna Scheuring's Didn't you know that. Scheuring bores holes in the audience with a baleful glare, apparently regarding us with a mixture of contempt and disappointment. Wearing a superhero-styled black body suit and silver top she stands atop a small step and says either "Yes. Yes." or "No. No.". As she does this an assistant activates a smoke machine, sending polite plumes of dry ice into the audience.
Two things can happen after this. If Scheuring says 'Yes', she will find a place to pose in the gallery space, often imitating the body language of action of someone in the audience. If she says 'No', she will find a spot and let out a bloodcurdling scream. She's got a deadpan poker face throughout, the ridiculousness of what we're watching eventually sending rippled giggles around the hushed crowd.
Easy highlights are the held moments when she picks on someone and maliciously eyes them, conducting a clinical dissection with her gaze alone. Next is when she's stalking the room looking for a space to scream. At one point we hear a timid knock on the gallery door. Like a shark scenting blood she makes a beeline for it, and presently we hear her yelling into the Peckham dusk. After this she dons protective pads, thumping herself around on the floor and walls before tottering about in heels with a piece of tinfoil in her mouth.
I have no idea what the hell this means - but I'm guessing this is a catharsis that can only be achieved with the hungry eyes of an audience upon the artist. I hopegenerally doomy presence was an act. If so, it's an impressive one. If it's not I hope that the performance - whatever it meant - helped in some way. Either way it was a pleasantly baffling experience.
A pretty neat evening of performance art in a pretty neat place. And, vicious street amputations aside, a wonderful time was had in Peckham.
Tuesday, May 27, 2014
Tuesday, May 27, 2014
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All too often the art world can seem fragmented and transitional. You wander off the street into an interesting exhibition and vow that you're going to keep track of this artist, only to find that they promptly vanish into thin air. Not so with the Art & Science group at Central St Martins. In November 2013 I visited Experimentations; an exhibition held by a group of art students probing the divide between the two disciplines. It was promising stuff. In February I attended another: Live In Your Dreams, down in the crypt of St Pancras Church. This makes Heteroglossia the final instalment of a trilogy, the progression through the exhibitions leaving me with a much clearer sense of what makes these artists tick.
Here the edges of art and science are blurred, tangled and torn. Weird odours bubble from steaming pools, organs float in blissful suspended animation, proteins knot up into new materials, metal deforms around light and hard sterile glass becomes furry and plush. The science that the artists of Central St Martins have cottoned onto is the transmutation of materials, many of the pieces capturing or freezing the exact moment in which change occurs. This is alchemy - the primordial soup of modern science - and it's alchemical symbols, philosophy and rituals that this exhibition returns to time and time again.
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| Alchemist Laboratory - Jaden JA Hastings & Amy Congdon |
The most literal interpretation is Jaden J.A. Hastings and Amy Congdon's Alchemist Laboratory. Here a labcoat has mutated into the occult robes of a magician, the table covered in glass flasks arranged to form a semi-symmetric sigil. It's an approach to science by way of magical thinking. This train of thought continues in Hastings' excellent Vitalitas, with a decellularised pig's heart preserved in formaldehyde within a pagoda-like reliquary. Decellularisation is the process by which the cells are stripped from an organ, leaving behind the extracellular matrix. This lowers the risk of transplant rejection, meaning the heart in Vitalitas sits right on the fence between its donor and its intended origin; frozen in time, space and biology.
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| Vitalitus - Jaden JA Hastings |
Charlotte Wendy Law continues this exploration into changing materials. Her pieces features a collection of objects seemingly flash-frozen between states. Lumps of jagged slag dot the work, the products of metallurgic experiments that bristle with danger and potential energy. Much these are remains, the viewer unconsciously forensically engaging with them them and deducing the processes by which they were created. In Action/Ode (Performance Remains) we see the charred remains of a piano, A Table is speckled with shattered detritus, smashed TVs glare out with imploded angry stares from beneath and A Metallurgic Sutra projects onto a curved, blasted piece of scrap metal. This is post apocalyptic art; the ruins of the old world repurposed for the artistic needs of the new. Viewed within this shiny new building it's a faintly sinister premonition of future disaster to come, occupying past and future simultaneously.
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| A Table - Charlotte Wendy Law |
The idea of an object being neither one thing nor another, to be stuck in a transitional state is realised in a quite different way in Roderick MacLeod's Tempete du Monde (Bis). Here we have a furry white box with an inviting opening in the middle. You stick your hand inside and... hello what's this? It's rubbery, weirdly textured, kinda firm.. Yup. It's a big fat dildo! I always appreciate work that has the balls (no pun intended) to just straightforwardly be what it's about without hiding meaning under layers of obfuscation.
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| Tempete du Monde (Bis) |
Stick your hand in a yonic slit and get a hard cock in the hand for your trouble. The piece is a collision of the sexes, forcing whoever interacts with it to confront the hermaphrodite inside them. It's a piece with a punchline - you can get just as much fun out of experiencing it yourself as watching others pop their hand inside, their faces lighting up with a mixture of shock, surprise and excitement as they grasp the cock.
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| The one who feels like a fish in the water - Boris Raux |
Also taking gender as a point of division is the always excellent Boris Raux, who's as much scientist as he is artist. In two neighbouring pieces he explores gender through smell. The feminine is symbolised by a bubbling, circular pool of water - steam billowing out over the rippling surface. Masculinity is a meticulously constructed wooden box, reeking of rigidity and permanence. Both emit wafts of carefully composed smells intended to symbolise the genders. Smell is rarely exploited in art, it's abstract, technically difficult to create and unable to be replicated either in print or online. This means Raux's work charts relatively new territory, finding a space somewhere in the middle of our senses; artwork we inhale, that lodges deep within our own bodies.
These were just a few of the works on display, but walking around you quickly understand how beautifully the cool, unemotional sterility of science complements the reflexive and wild chaos of art. Both disciplines require a fierce intelligence to function at their best, and both require participants to be able to analyse and process the world around them into something fresh. As a bit of a confession, when I first read about a group of art students tackling scientific means I feared the worst; expecting a naive gaggle of pieces that would tend towards woolly pseudoscience.
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| The Point of Departure - Jaden JA Hastings |
I shouldn't have worried. After three exhibitions I can see how well these artists have understood the potential of the crossroads they stand at, fully grasping the intrinsic beauty of understanding, the thrill of deduction and the wonder of transforming the world around you into something fresh, new and fascinating. If these works are the conclusion to a strand of their education, it's an endpoint derived of methodical, analytical thinking coupled with an keen eye for stimulating the senses of the audience. Colour me both impressed and happy that I got to see this body of work evolve over the last six months.
Thursday, February 27, 2014
Thursday, February 27, 2014
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When someone asks you if you want to wear a mask made of human hair and stalk around a crypt distributing pomegranate seeds to people there's really only one answer - YES! This is how I wound up spending my Wednesday night; sequestered in a brick-line, corpse-vacated vault, spookily tip-toeing about, shoving a plate piled high with sticky chunks of redness under innocent noses and demanding they have a gobble. All this was in service of Live In Your Dreams!, an exhibition that aims to reimagine this crypt as a "collective dream", an underworld where subconscious symbols can frolic in the moody subterranean halflight.
This is a mini-labyrinth, a tangle of curved corridors and dusty alcoves. This space once contained the coffins of those notable enough to be bunged underneath a central London church. They've all gone now, dispatched to wherever it is they send the dead when those in charge want to get rid of a load of dusty bones. Tonight they've been replaced with an art pic n' mix; every nook and cranny home to work covering a vast amount of mediums. This was a high quality exhibition, but though I liked damn near everything on display I don't have time to write about every little thing - so here's my personal highlights.
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| Susan Beattie - Loop Curtain |
First up a big pile of guts. Susan Beattie's Loop Curtain lurks just inside the entrance. Composed of sheep's intestine, ox bung and raw sheep's fleece it lies in an organic, slightly nauseating, tangle. The whole thing looks maggotty to me; especially the large ox bung (which I think is a cow's rectum/anus) sitting in the middle. A big old heap of maggots isn't exactly a pleasant sight to come across, but then we're in a place expressly designed to accommodate the process of decomposition. As gross as maggots are they're a direct manifestation of new life from death. It's interesting to look at this place as the home of the evicted dead tenants - and what would the dead have bouncing around their skulls if not maggots?
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| Susie Calvert - Microcosm |
Though a morbid shroud hangs over the crypt there's pinpoints of brightness glimmering in the gloom. Susie Calvert's Microcosm consists of pop-inflected urban environments drawn in crayon on plywood. Using a chunk of masonry as a stage they're a shattered kaleidoscope; an individual's snatched memories of a city able to be assembled in infinite configurations. When we dream of a physical place we assemble it from a jigsaw puzzle of subconscious details. A half-glance at a lamp-post, a broken window that catches our eye, the way the sunlight casts shadows across the frontage of buildings - all of these become recombined in our dreams to form a shade: our individual impression of a location. Purely on an aesthetic level it's a breath of fresh air nestled deep in the dank grey and browns of the crypt.
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| Boris Raux - the space divider - mushrooms version |
Similarly lightening things up is Boris Raux' the space divider - mushrooms version. I met Boris before at the Experimentations show last November; there he had condensed seawater into thousands of squishy spheres, here he's created a smell dispersal device: two tubs of coloured liquid with a fan blowing across the top. A sweet smell wafts around the entire gallery, apparently the smell of cave and psilocybin mushrooms. Boris has just a touch of the mad scientist to him, marrying an idiosyncratic personal alchemy onto new kinds of technology. The piece looks vaguely like a satellite, the two pools of liquid solar panels between them. Physically it's no great shakes; though the liquids glitter and swirl in enjoyable random fractal swirls. But this art doesn't stop at the borders of the installation, it hangs in the atmosphere - tiny molecules of vaguely hallucinogenic liquids suspended in the air, embedding themselves within the noses of all who enter. So Boris has literally succeeded in getting inside his audience's head; impregnating us with his ideas and philosophies.
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| Andy Flett - Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me |
In terms of work that creates an immediate physical impression, there's few things in the gallery that stood out as much as Andy Flett's Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me. Dreamland can be understood as an infinite land where anything is possible, where all the impulses, fears and desires that lurk within us come out to play without supervision. His piece, a roll of paper containing descriptions of his dreams in ever-decreasing type, is an unfiltered gate between his mind and the paper. His dreams, ranging from the banal to the bizarre, are thrown into one long stream of thought. The dreaming mind has no real concern over whether what it's putting out is fun, normal or pleasant - just spewing the disconnected detritus of what's rolling around in our brains back at us.
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| Mona Choo - Stuck |
The final piece I particularly dug was Mona Choo's Stuck. Here the passages of the crypt become home to small, tangled up doodles of people on twisted up acrylic. They cling to the walls, wrapped around each other with a childlike vulnerability - the plastic rolling up like one of those fortune-telling fish you find inside a Christmas cracker. The figures sway in the drafts that breeze through the tunnels, giving them a strangely quivering sort of life. One pair of tangled up people twirls in the breeze, intertwining in a vaguely Picasso-y way. This felt like the dream of the crypt itself; the spirits of the dead remaining in its memories even though their physical remains have long departed.
If you like exploring subterranean secrets and touching the fabric of the subconscious, then Live in Your Dreams! is easily worth checking out. The work on display complements the space fantastically, breathing some life and imagination into these dusty old bricks. Aside from what I've mentioned there's a tonne of other great stuff there, so pay a visit - you won't regret it!
Live in Your Dreams finishes on the 3rd of March - opening times 12-6pm.
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
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New lands, new spaces and new ambitions: ]performancespace[, cosily burrowed like a hermit crab into a warehouse near the Hackney Wick canal has upped sticks and moved to nearby Fish Island. Their new building, squirreled away within a maze of drab Victorian brickwork and sarcastic pop-inflected graffiti, feels like a rabbithole away from the frantic outside world. The decor here is so new you can smell the paint drying, the cushions unsullied by the crease of human backsides and the walls a pristine, virginal white. But they wouldn't be pristine for long!
Saturday was the inaugural event at this new location; the building freshly stocked with the fashionably dressed, the interestingly haircutted and the artistically open-minded. Waiting in the wings was a swarm of artists ready to unleash an embarrassment of performance art that would baptise this place with paint, spices, charcoal, makeup, minerals and marbles.
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| Sarah Zaltash |
Setting the tone for the night was Sara Zaltash, with a durational performance that lasted most of the night. Sat on the floor she recited a mantra while drawing a neverending charcoal circle around herself. Round and round she went, the circle getting thicker and more defined as she used more and more charcoal. In retrospect these marks outlined the themes we'd be seeing tonight; transforming the space into a canvas. There's something faintly magical about the idea of sitting within a self-made circle, the lines acting as a protective barrier against the outside world. For me this protection extends outwards; the walls of the gallery allowing the artists to safely explore concepts; the water surrounding Fish Island creating a bubble of artistic expression - we can even go so far as to say that Goldsmith's circles recall the M25 - a protective loop around London itself.
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| Marita Fox |
Marita Fox was up next. Dressed all in black with circular black shades on she moved with a wiry insectoid grace. With Kafka hanging gently in the air she writhed like a pupae in a bubble wrap chrysalis. Emerging from within she unfolded her limbs and with a sudden thump, elbow-dropped a cardboard box. Within was more bubble-wrap, cotton wool - and deep within that two white hands. She cradled these with her own black gloved hands, showing them to us with a look of incomprehension etched upon her face. Visually it was striking as hell, Fox mixing theatricality with the kind of style you'd usually expect to see staring out of a photoshoot from a mid 90s issue of Skin Two.
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| Zoya Sardashti |
Zoya Sardashti was on next, dancing to a projection of graffiti. The picture was of an emaciated, skull-like Statue of Liberty, and she danced an kind of aggressive, strutting semaphore at it. With a mean look on her face she stomped back and forth in front of the projection, daring it to respond. As she marched she kept a fixed, fierce look on her face, often making eye contact with the audience, implicating us within the work and subtly asking us which side of this conflict we're on. It looked cathartic and personal: an opportunity for her to work out her frustrations with a symbol of the unblinking might of cultural imperialism.
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| Charlotte Law |
Soon after was Charlotte Law with a brief (yet memorable) performance. Nearly naked, she picked up a handful of ochre (I later found out this was a combination of iron ore and olive oil) and rubbed it all over her body. Then she smooshed herself against the clean gallery pillars, using her body as a human potato printer and leaving a reddish-brown imperfect silhouette. Job complete she left, leaving us staring at the handprints and impressions she'd left behind. Once again we see the gallery undergoing some kind of weird blessing; the minerals Law slapped on inextricably melded with the sterile walls of the gallery. I'm a big fan of brevity, generally preferring the tightly focussed statement to the meandering and freeform, so I liked this. Within the space of a few quick actions Law created three striking images; first her own body covered in the ore, then her communing with the pillar; then finally the pillar on its own - pregnant with her presence.
Luisa Amorim's performance marked a bit of a change of pace. Miming to a backing track (of her own voice I think), she asked the crowd to perform various tasks while standing in a big tub of blue paint. Perhaps it was the young girl running around in front of Amorim, but there was an air of children's TV about this. The clear diction and friendly presence was simultaneously friendly and authoritative, and getting us involved in the various tasks she laid out kept everyone engaged. Throughout people around us unexpectedly piped up, having been given cue cards in advance - dragging us into her light, eccentrically creative and pleasant world.
Performance art generally concentrates on stimulating our eyes and ears, though the immediate aspect of the medium easily allows for all of our senses to come into play. With that in mind I always enjoy work that gets taste, touch and, in this performance, smell involved. Nicolina Stylianou's performance involved her mixing various spices with water and spitting that into a jug. I'm no spice expert, but I think I could detect the smell of cumin and cinnamon. When she left there were smears of spices mixed with water on the floor, laid out in mixtures like paint on an easel and a tangy whiff hanging in the air.
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| Tim Bromage |
After this we switched gears to Tim Bromage. Dressed in a smart suit he launched straight into a solemn poem about the story of Icarus. My heart sank a bit; "oh well, you can't win them all". But then with perfect comic timing he broke out of his reverie and flipped things around; raising his eyebrows and remarking candidly that this was all a bit too serious. En masse, we exhaled in a burst of relieved laughter. But it was what came next that was truly interesting. Picking up a banjo he began to play, but stopped mid-way through having, (as he put it) "lost it". Again he tried and again he stopped. And again. The crowd grew anxious. Tim seems like such a nice guy that we all wanted him to succeed - and then it struck me that this collective will for him to succeed might have been the whole point of the exercise.
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| Charlotte Hailey-Watts |
Next up was Charlotte Hailey-Watts with an audio piece. With butcher's grass lain on the floor, the scratchy sound of the inner loop of a Tears for Fears record infinitely brushing away, a backing track from a laptop playing and a mic in her hand she slowly constructed a sonic soundscape. The bit I found the most interesting was how she positioned herself within all this. Supplicated on a rectangular mat Hailey-Watts looked as if she was engaged in Salat - the Islamic prayer. It created a interesting frisson between her free-form, outsider style rubbing up against a thousand years of concrete institutionalism. At the conclusion of the performance she lay down and went to sleep on the mat, creating an oasis of calm. This dead stop was apparently the cue for another performer to begin, but for me it worked as a much needed meditative break.
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| Emma Louvelle |
Entering the final stretch was Emma Louvelle's dance piece, set to Madonna and a musician I didn't recognise (if anyone knows please comment, it was a nice song!). Louvelle frolicked within symbols of mainstream femininity: makeup, body hair removal, cuddly toys and pop music; transforming mundanity and fluffy stereotypes into a viciously sharp weapon. Lit from behind like a detective conducting an interrogation she ran a razor over her legs and smeared rouge over her face, ending up as a shamanic, over-the-top caricature of what a woman 'should' be.
After that was Christian Patracchini, who rolled a series of silver-spray painted marbles against a wall. After the vicious energy of what had just come before this felt a little too austere for my liking. Sure you can get a dab of kinetic enjoyment from the clickety-clack of the marbles bumping into each other and the randomness of their interactions was at least pretty interesting to look at, but it seemed oddly subdued compared to what had comed before. We were heading towards the end of the night now, so this sudden drop in momentum was a bit disappointing. That said, towards the end he started hurling the marbles at the wall so hard that they pinged back towards the us at high velocity. That's the kind of stuff I enjoy: particularly watching members of the audience quietly yelping in surprise as they took a high velocity marble to the shin.
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| Ram Samocha & Gerald Royston Curtis |
The final performance was a joint work between Ram Samocha and Gerald Royston Curtis. They popped up two black and white sheets of paper on the wall and began to draw on them with huge, exaggerated motions. I think Gerald was writing 'zapamiętać' in overlaid letters on his (Polish for 'memorise') while Ram was running through a numeric sequence. As the drawings became more built up the meanings collapsed into a tangled pile of loops and lines, something compounded when they switched sides and began to draw on each other's work. Consciously or not, these pictures summed up many of the marks we'd already seen made that night; the loops of Sara Zaltash, the smeared iron ore of Charlotte Law, the dust in the air the spice of Nicolina Stylianou and the painted footprints of Luisa Amorim.
At the end of the night the gallery felt properly inaugurated, the space now inhabited by the same spirit of playful adventurousness that characterised everything I enjoyed about the old warehouse. I'm already looking forward to the next time I'm there!
(apologies for anyone's performance I didn't cover - I had to pop out for a bit and I think I missed at least one. Let me know if I've gotten anyone's name wrong.)
Thursday, November 7, 2013
Thursday, November 7, 2013
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A couple of weeks ago I visited the Royal Institution to attend their Research as Art exhibition. This exhibition was the end product of scientists working at Swansea University being encouraged to interpret their work as art, creating an exhibition of evocative and informative imagery. Experimentations at Saint Martins is aiming at the same target from the opposite direction: artists investigating science. Both exhibitions meet at approximately the same place, tracing the intertwining of art (the ultimate subjective) and science (the ultimate objective).
On entering I immediately felt overwhelmed - every surface was bristling with countless works - how on earth am I supposed to process all this? The walls are crammed, the floor is busy, art hangs from the ceiling, is strapped to the artists or hides tucked behind dark curtains. This is a tornado of ideas - there's almost too much to keep track of. A stiff drink might help...
Thankfully, the nucleus of the room is a cocktail bar, there's four on offer, each linked to one of the four medieval humors (I love a drink that comes with an explanatory leaflet). So we have the Melancholic (rosemary-infused white wine granita), Phlegmatic (a cucumber gin tonic), Sanguine (mulled red wine) and Choleric (beer with lime and chilli). I grabbed a Choleric - a cocktail with a mean kick to it. The chilli powder settles at the bottom, so as you glug it down it gets spicier and spicier, until the last gulp which feels like you're being very mildly maced.
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| by Libby Heaney |
Drink in hand, throat pleasantly tingling, I went a-wandering. Tucked away in one of the offices was this piece by Libby Heaney. The white pyramids softly tumbling out of the white walls reminded me of CG polygons, the room itself becoming a decaying virtual space. Five minutes in the future is augmented reality, a smudging of the lines between the real and the virtual. Here, we see possible consequences, structures around us collapsing into avalanche of geometric shapes - both beautiful and disturbing.
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| by Boris Raux |
I love a bit of tactility in art, so I'm immediately enamoured with what Boris Raux' has produced. Laying on the floor is the shape of a boat, and filling the interior are thousands of clear, soft spheres. These spheres are made of seawater, existing in some mysterious state somewhere between liquid and solid. Raux explains to me that he made a pilgrimage down to Brighton beach to gather seawater, adding a chemical to it that transformed it into these gorgeous spheres. He encourages me to run my hands through them, it's like fondling frogspawn, soft, slippery and wet - and yet your hand comes up dry. Raux even encourages me to eat one to prove that it's seawater. I politely decline this invitation.
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| by Charlotte Law |
The process of transforming one substance into another runs right through the exhibition. Modern science has some roots in alchemy, which is now a vestigial organ, useless and discredited but fascinating nonetheless. You can see an alchemical metamorphosis in Charlotte Law's piece here, taking heaping lumps of dung and turning them into building materials. The idea of taking waste and making something beautiful out of it appeals to my optimistic side - if life hands you a big heaping pile of crap then put it on your flowers!
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| by Rebecca Price |
Rebecca Price's eggs work similarly, connecting hen's eggs with the embryos inside them. We work very hard to maintain the disconnect between animals and what we eat - the abstraction between chicks and eggs is one of the most powerful. Though we chuck them on our breakfasts, the egg is an incubator, created to nurse an organism to life. Images of very recently conceived embryos show remarkable similarities right across the animal kingdom, be they fish, bird, reptile or human. The pictures here could be of any creature, the artist sharply drawing a link between chicken, egg and observer.
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| Daniel Nutt and his prototype neural network. |
Similarly transformative is Daniel Nutt's work with neural networks. I don't know too much about neural networks, but it's safe to assume they're pretty complicated. Nutt is making his out of polystyrene cups and bits of rubber tubing. He explained that the cups represent individual neurons and that he eventually intends to build a device capable of learning lessons and repeating actions. Out of foam cups. And I don't think he's kidding. It sounds bonkers, but he had just the right kind of glint in his eye to make me think maybe, just maybe, he can pull this off. Whether he can or not, I really want to see him try. Again, the art takes the mundane and imbues it with semi-life, breathing some basic intelligence into inanimate, 'trash' objects.
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| by Keivan Sarrafan |
The most intricate and carefully constructed piece was by Keivan Sarrafan. Behind a black curtain lay darkened room. Gently revolving in the centre, suspended from the ceiling by a chain, was a dangling piece of metal. This was lit in a spotlight, framing it within a circle of light on the wall. On the metal was written algebra in mirrored writing, and as it span the words were reflected onto the darkened walls, creeping a path across those present. The cherry on the cake was another mirror on the wall. Once every rotation everything would align and "laboARTory" would be projected onto the floor for a brief second.
The way the precision of the arrangement echoed the exactitude of mathematic language was great. It takes a moment to figure out just how everything fits together, what light is bouncing where and how the words appear so briefly on the floor. The rotation and graceful motion was hypnotic, the central spinning plate reminiscent of a mandala, a dark, dense star illuminating the room.
After a few more Cholerics I was feeling pretty good about myself, yet just as I was getting into it the lights started flashing - the indicator that we had to clear off into the night. But I obstinately planted my bum on the floor. Charlotte Law was topping the night with a performance piece and I wasn't about to miss it. At the entrance to the gallery was a typewriter, and throughout the night those passing were encouraged to tap out a few words. As a finale, brandishing the sheets of typewritten paper she lay down on a shiny silver sheet and began reciting the combined mental gibberish of an art gallery crowd.
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| Charlotte Law |
Charlotte sounded like a malfunctioning computer and looked like Evelyn McHale, her voice sounding out long strings of "aaaaaa"s and the occasional string of garbled coherence. It didn't feel particularly insightful, but I don't think that was the aim. We swim through a tangle of etheric signals every second of the way, text messages, love notes, emails, phone calls all flying past and through us on electromagnetic wings - a jumbled, jangled chaotic soup of information, too bitty and coded to make any sense to us. It's that livewire current that Charlotte was tapping into, the information age spiritual plane.
So, all told, I had a good time. There's a ton of stuff I don't have time to mention, but it was a pleasure poking around and finding new works tucked away in corners and on ceilings. The gallery isn't open to the public, though the exhibition is set up until the 14th. If you're dying to see it, get in contact with the artists via Facebook or Twitter and I'm sure they'll point you in the right direction.
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