Posts Tagged ‘Charley Peters’
Saturation Point Projects present Clear Sight at Sluice_ 2015
Saturation Point Projects present Clear Sight at Sluice_ 2015
Judith Duquemin / Hanz Hancock / Patrick Morrissey / Laurence Noga / Andy Parkinson / Charley Peters
“The more stuff in it, the busier the work of art, the worse it is. More is less. Less is more. The eye is a menace to clear sight.” – Ad Reinhardt
This exhibition will show a selection of work by contemporary artists who all adopt a reductive position in the context of current art practice. ‘Reduction’ as a term is not limited to defining a single artistic movement, but the threads or references contained within the semiotics of their work demonstrate a consistency – in the use of geometric metaphor, iconographic presence, systems-related elements, and other characteristics associated with the methodology of constructivism and its stylistic/intellectual descendants. The exhibition seeks to demonstrate that this genre has a strong, ongoing presence and that its traditions continue to be developed and explored.
16 – 18 October 2015, 11 – 6pm. Bargehouse, OXO Tower Wharf, South Bank.
Reception: 15 October, 5 – 8.30pm
Generator Discussion
On the final day of the Generator exhibition, Duncan Brennan from Kaleidoscope Gallery, posed a few questions for discussion by the artists. Here is an attempt at recovering some of the conversation from notes. I wasn’t actually there. Think of it as an exercise in constructed memory. I have also taken the liberty of adding some thoughts of my own. I think that the questions alone are generative enough to be worth a post.
DB: How would you define the type of work in this exhibition?
HH: It is work that is created by using a mathematical or logical system
CP (from the exhibition introduction): artwork that is by nature ‘generative’, created once an artist cedes control to an external system or set of rules. The artwork thus results not from the wholly instinctive decisions of the artist, but is formed by objective rules or logical instructions that shape its process or material outcome.
Andy Parkinson, Six Hexagons, 2015, acrylic on six canvases, total 77 x 79 cm
DB: Can you talk about some of the defining characteristics of generative work?
AP: In his 2010 paper Program, be Programmed or Fade Away: Computers and the Death of Constructivist Art, Richard Wright summarises Kenneth Martin’s division of systematic work into three types : 1) the completely predefined system which once set in motion can generate work independently of any further input from the artist. 2) a system that may be initially predefined but is then constantly altered through feedback, bringing into contact with other systems, the ‘program’ thereby being written in conjunction with the work itself. 3) the system which builds up from a primary act without any previous planning, like a self propelled aggregation of logical steps. The works in Generator may be closest to the first of these three definitions.
Charley Peters, Configuration #30, 2014, acrylic on plywood, 25 x 50 x 3 cm
DB: What makes this different to other forms of abstraction, such as constructivism?
AP: I think it is situated within the Constructivist tradition, though that historical moment has passed. British Constructionist and Systems Group artists saw the need to abandon its utopianism and showed how art could be generated by a numerical or mathematical system. It is different from expressionism, which has been another strand within abstraction.
HH: Constructivism was /is a more political form of creation. Generative art has its own roots, the methodology and interpretatons are unique to the individual
Patrick Morrissey, Indeterminant, 2011, Acrylic on linen, 6’ x 4’
DB: Would you agree that rules need to be constructive rather than restrictive?
HH: Everything in the world is generated by rules. Painting a landscape has rules that govern the outcome of what will be a recognisable presentation. Working in the constraints of rules or systems allows the artist to interpret data and input in many ways. I use a system at work which plots the movement of the railways in graphic representation. I use the variations in the programme to generate some of my own work, the patterns vary according to the input in spite of the fact that the system itself is governed or regulated by a computer.
Left Christina France, Equilibrium 1 and 2, pigment, archival digital print on German etching paper, 80 x 60 cm. Right Hanz Hancock, Untitled, 2015, mixed media, 51 x 51 cm
DB Can a computer make art?
HH: A computer can make extremely complex patterns/can create algorithmic sequences , it cannot make emotional decisions as to what looks good. That is down to human preference. I/we make sequences based on numerical systems, something working within the grid. Patrick created several works that generated themselves: a module was sent into rotation within a grid, in a concentric spiral and each module had a graphic relationship or difference to the positioning of the the other. However, because of the repetitive nature of the system, repeating aggregations became apparent, appearing almost at random within the matrix, i.e. the formation of pattern. This could then be sampled and magnified into groups and in turn, work was made from tha , a sort of generative mechanism or device to generate pattern.
JI: Yes, computers can make art but humans make computers. The computer is just a tool. An algorithm, performed by a computer, is just a mirror of a set of processes condensed in time and space. It is in this compression that the art lies.
AP: Your question reminds me of a story told by that great systems thinker Gregory Bateson, of a computer programmer in the days of big mainframe computing, who wanted to know about mind in his private large computer. He asked it, “Do you compute that you will ever think like a human being?” The machine then set to work to analyse its own computational habits. Finally, the machine printed the answer ticker tape style, as such machines used to do. The programmer ran to get the answer and found, neatly typed, the words: THAT REMINDS ME OF A STORY”.
James Irwin, Silicon Binary Progression (ii), 2014, HD video, monitor, media player, dexuob speed frame, MDF, 4 mins 15 secs
DB: Has the computer changed the focus of generative art? Is the computer to generative art what the camera was to representational art?
JI: Good question and there’s probably the same analogue relationship between the computer and generative work, and the camera’s photographic image. It’s not that simple though. Using the computer is just one way of working generatively. It isn’t definitive of generative art.
HH: Human beings create programs by which the computer will create images, but the camera can only record the image which can then be manipulated both outside of the camera and electronically inside. The human brain has always generated images and pattern forming/art. The computers is a tool not a focus, as is the camera for human imagination.
AP: I have my doubts about that little word “just”, as much as I do also about the idea of the computer as a tool. It seems to me that the computer, and indeed technology more generally, gets characterised as just a tool to make it seem smaller than us and in our control, like a spanner, a hammer or a paint brush, when in fact, as a system it obeys its own rules, and incorporates us into its usage. Nevertheless, in Generator it is the contemporary analogue, rather than digital, ‘programmatic’ that is being explored. The computer programme is often used as a metaphor for the human processes of thinking/doing, so we might wonder what the programme is for activities like walking, or breathing, or even attempt to codify neuro-linguistic programmes for performance excellence in any particularly field. In this exhibition the systems that generates the artwork are thought of as analogue programmes, which have clearly been around a lot longer than have computer programmes, but only now that we have the computer are we able to utilise the metaphor for thinking about thinking. I like the circularity of it.
Left, Mary Yacoob, Modular Hakka House, 2014, ink and graphite on paper, 50.8 x 40.6 cm, Right, Katrina Blannin, blackgreyblackgreyblackwhiteblackwhiteblackwhite-orange 50, 2015, acrylic on linen, 70 x 70 cm
DB: What characterises good generative art? Is it necessary to be either or both conceptually and aesthetically strong?
AP: I think Natalie Dower and Jeffrey Steele answer this best. Here’s Dower in an interview with Patrick Morrissey: “If the input that has generated the idea does not translate into valid visual terms I do not accept it. I have had intellectually interesting ideas that I have had to abandon for that reason”. And here’s Steele in an interview with Katrina Blannin: “…something has good Gestalt or bad Gestalt — has it got a clear shape to it? I can look at one of my paintings and see whether it has good Gestalt or bad, and this has happened occasionally. A clear process of abstract thinking should lead to a satisfying visual Gestalt. I don’t necessarily “reject” or stop working on a project when this is not happening, but it bothers me, and I want to know what is going wrong”.
DB: Are you looking to formalise the human aesthetic?
JI: A human aesthetic is wide reaching and all encompassing. Defining a human aesthetic as work that shows signs of ‘the hand’if that’s what the question suggests, is too limiting”
AP: Maybe formal logic and formal linguistics, abstract languages, like mathematics, all pertinent to computer programming, have close connections to the formal ‘language’ of abstract painting.
DB: Does any of your work explore any of the hypotheses, the rules and processes of the scientist? Do you think generative art work like this can inform scientific study?
AP: I was going to say that whilst likely to have been informed by scientific study, the relationship is unlikely to be reciprocal, but then I remembered that some of the truly fascinating discoveries made in the last few decades in the science of visual cognition was discovered by map makers in the seventeenth century, so I guess you never know!
Generator print by MuirMcNeil (2015), edition of 400
Generator: Systems Logic and the Analogue Art of Programming
Generator, curated by Saturation Point Projects, on show at Kaleidoscope Gallery presents a selection of artworks that are automatically generated, in that control of the artistic process and/or outcome is transferred from the artist to a system or set of rules. However, the programmatic here is decidedly analogue as opposed to the digital programming associated with “computer art”.
Charley Paters, Configuration #33, 2015, acylic on plywood, 40cm x 50cm x 5cm. My photo
Charley Peters Configuration #33 is unmistakeably a painting, even though there is only trace evidence of facture in terms of brush strokes or painterly gesture. It is a new kind of materiality, one that is informed by the experience of looking at screens or monitors, abstraction in HD perhaps. A gridded pattern of repeated triangles in blue green and pink, the subtle changes are to colour and tone but not to structure, leading to my reading it as a tilted spatial plane over which light falls. Yet I am finding no representational object, other than what might appear to be a wall, or more accurately simply this painting, a representation of itself in three dimensions, slanting backwards from the right hand edge. I am tempted to suggest that there is information here but that it is information about information.
Andy Parkinson, Six Hexagons, 2015, acrylic on six canvases, 77cm x 79cm
My own painting here is a sequence of six identical hexagonal canvases. Each one is divided into two triangles and two parallelograms described by opposing sets of coloured stripes, more or less tonally matched. The stripes are themselves arranged sequentially, a light blue stripe, for example always meeting a yellow ochre one, dark blue always meeting black etc. and ordered according to the pattern ABACADAEBCBDBECDCEDEABCDE.
Christina France, Equilibrium 1, pigment, archival digital print on German etching paper, 80 x 60cm. Image by courtesy of the artist
Christina France’s Equilibrium is an ongoing series of screen prints and etchings, and here pigment rich,digital prints, developed from initial works on paper, made in response to notions of balance and counterbalance within a quadrilateral form. In the artists words: “Determined by size and colour, the 50:50 ratio of the square is altered and reconstructed within the initial format and without, employing chance operations to assign colours and placement within the square”.
Hanz Hancock, Untitled, 2015, mixed media, 51cm x 51cm. My photo
In Hanz Hancock’s Untitled, rows of till-rolls in blue white and black are pressed into a square frame, and organised according to a specific procedural system, or analogue programme, in which certain rolls are pushed upwards in the framework in a particular order. I think that the puzzling out of the structure is an essential experience in relation to this piece, as indeed with the other works on show here. It might even be the case that this is a mode of viewing unique to the systems aesthetic. Other artistic traditions have contained elements of puzzle, think for example of a history painting, a biblical narrative or a mythical allegory. Identifying the actors and figuring out what’s being enacted is part of the enjoyment. Counting twelve people, for example, might cue recognition of the twelve disciples, or three female figures might indicate the three graces. However, in such instances interpretation, and number even, is about content, whereas here it is entirely at the level of process. Just as in mathematics, twelve, or three, are of interest in their own right, the language being abstract, tautological, rather than representational. There’s also something happening here to do with foundness and materiality, the till-roles being ready made and having more physicality than paint. The work is abstract in the sense of the word that is opposite to its usual meaning: it is concrete. But the system is abstract in the more usual sense of “removed from reality”. However, though abstract in the second sense used here, a system or procedure also has something of a ready-made quality.
Patrick Morrissey, Goodbye Ploy 2, 2015, video. My photo
Patrick Morrissey’s video Goodbye Ploy is an animation of a painting, the materially existent becomes material for video. Here we have a process of abstraction in a number of self reflexive moves: the abstract analogue programme is realised in a physical painting, which is then transformed into information, into animated image, not quite immaterial, but certainly more abstract than the painted object. James Irwin’s video based work Silicon Binary Progression (ii) seems to explore similar terrain, alternating between abstract code and perceptual image, and all contained within work station hardware. In Mary Yacoob’s intricate ink and graphite drawing, resembling an architectural plan, Modular Hakka House, abstract map, lacking any referent, has become abstract territory.
Katrina Blannin, blackgreyblackgreyblackwhiteblackwhiteblackwhite-orange 50, 2015, acrylic on linen, 70cm x 70cm. My photo
I love the literal matter of fact-ness of Katrina Blannin’s title blackgreyblackgreyblackwhiteblackwhiteblackwhite-orange 50. We would be right to say that the painting does exactly what the title says it does, at least in terms of the programmatic order of rotated tone/colours within a set of tessellating mostly triangular forms on a lozenge shaped canvas. And we would also be wrong, because in viewing the painting, fact seems to give way to nuance, flat tiles become shifting spatial relationships. Perception is never simple, however reductive a work may be . Hence my attempt to describe it in a precise sentence fails. “The map is not the territory and the thing is not the thing named”. I think it is this slippage between map and territory, information and material, idea and object, procedure and outcome, generator and generated, that I am enjoying in Blannin and others’ work on show here.
Generator: Systems Logic and the Analogue Art of Programming, including work by Katrina Blannin, Christina France, Hanz Hancock, James Irwin, Patrick Morrissey, Andy Parkinson, Charley Peters and Mary Yacoob is on show at Kaleidoscope Gallery until 11 July .
A limited edition print by MuirMcNeill with an essay by Laura Davidson accompanies the exhibition.
From Centre at The Loud & Western Building
From Centre, an exhibition of reductive abstract works, curated by Saturation Point and Slate Projects was on view at The Loud & Western Building, from 11 April to 26 April 2015 showing the following artists:
William Angus-Hughes, Rana Begum, Martin Church, Nathan Cohen, Rhys Coren, Natalie Dower, Judith Duquemin, Julia Farrer, Ben Gooding, Lothar Götz, Hanz Hancock, Tess Jaray, Silvia Lerin, Peter Lowe, Patrick Morrissey, Laurence Noga, Charley Peters, Richard Plank, Giulia Ricci, Carol Robertson, Robin Seir, Steve Sproates and Trevor Sutton.
Installation shot, from left to right works by Laurence Noga, Patrick Morrissey and Martin Church. Image by courtesy of Slate Projects.
It’s an impressive line up, spanning several generations of artists, born in every decade from the 1930s to the 1980s, and making a convincing case for the growing relevance of abstract art in the UK.
Installation shot, works from left to right by Natalie Dower, Martin Church, Julia Farrer, Rhys Coren, Laurence Noga. Image by courtesy of Slate Projects
Thinking about abstraction’s continued relevance may require me to at least mention Zombie Formalism, (“Formalism because this art involves a straightforward, reductive, essentialist method of making a painting and Zombie because it brings back to life the discarded aesthetics of Clement Greenberg”), if only to suggest that the term, coined by artist -critic Walter Robinson, quoted in brackets above, seems to refer more to the market than to the art and may appear more pertinent in the USA than in the UK where alternative modernisms have sometimes held more sway than the version associated with Greenberg and Fried. It is Constructivism I have in mind, its UK variant Constructionism and the Systems Group, which for the artists at From Centre are more central than Abstract Expressionism etc.
The reductive (but not necessarily essentialist or straightforward) works on view at From Centre seem to me to be a genuine attempt at continued participation in a living, though contested, tradition.
Installation shot, works from left to right by Julia Farrer, Robin Seir, and Tess Jaray. Image by courtesy of Slate Projects
In Dower’s 2013 Painting Polymorph, a subtle pink rectangle is halved down the middle, from which the central point of a pale yellow circle is found, and within that circle a white rectangle beneath an irregular black triangle are positioned. Or maybe there is no “above” or “beneath”, a rectangle within a circle is divided into three different shaped triangles, two white and one black. Alternatively, we simply have a rectangle divided into nine other shapes. The figures and their relationships are not random but calculated mathematically, the parts being strictly determined by the whole, to my mind the most elegant definition of a system. The painting has subtlety, serenity, beauty and a little excitement too, with its alternating views and the slight after-imaging taking place.
Natalie Dower, Polymorph, 2013, oil on canvas, 61 x 86.5 cm. Image by courtesy of the artist.
Other artists here who employ mathematical or numerical systems include Peter Lowe, a former member of the 1970s Systems Group founded by Malcolm Hughes and Jeffrey Steele. He defines systems in his work as “a way of communicating an intelligible idea in terms of shapes colours and forms, or an organisation principle that I predetermine and allow to run to see what the outcomes will be…” In his painting here, Triangles within a Dodecagon, he takes the regular twelve sided shape as its starting place and bases an equilateral triangle between two of the vertices, or along one of the sides. A second triangle is found by taking the base across three vertices, a third across four and a fourth across five. The fourth triangle being the last one that can be produced by following this process, is exactly central, each of its sides spanning four sides of the dodecagon. In the painting here the resultant figures are positioned on a square canvas, losing the surrounding dodecagon altogether. The colours, black, white and red create four planes: a white ‘background’, in front of which is a plane including the largest and smallest triangles in black, in front of which is the red triangle, in front of which is the white triangle. Of course they shift creating varying perceptual gestalts.
Installation shot, from left to right, works by Peter Lowe, Rana Begum and Nathan Cohen. Image by courtesy of Slate Projects
There are shifting gestalts in Rana Begum’s painted relief, No. 317, the actual three-dimensionality of the piece, combined with the movement of the viewer results in multiple variations of form, whereas in Charley Peters’ fascinating painting Plexus we are presented with the illusion of flatness within an illusory three dimensional space.
In Giulia Ricci’s Order Disruption Painting there’s something strange going on spatially, the patterned repetition of a triangular motif creating something akin to a systemic field which breaks down in places as the pattern is interrupted, resulting in the appearance of wormholes or spatial anomalies that can also be interpreted as twisting forms caught in the net of the surface whilst at the same time forming that surface. For me, her work explicitly links system to visual pattern.
Giulia Ricci, Order/Disruption Painting no.2, 2012, Laser engraved laminated board and acrylic paint, hand painted, 61 x 101 x1.8cm, Edition of 3. Image by courtesy of the artist
All the artists in this show, perhaps to varying degrees, share an interest in system and/or series. The two tend to go together when a numerical system is being explored. However Julia Farrer’s Knot in Time, seems more to be the product of an entirely empirical enquiry. In both approaches I think there is a search going on, not for the one definitive statement but rather for knowledge. The traditional notion of the masterpiece is challenged, just as it seems totally out of step with our post-digital experience. With Farrer perhaps we have series but not necessarily system, with Laurence Noga I think we have both, but the system is more operational than mathematical.
Yet, each work in this exhibition does command attention as its own thing, perhaps the title of Carol Robertson’s painting Aura is suggestive of this. Whilst in the work different coloured bands surrounding a circle might be likened to an aura, I wonder if that famous Walter Benjamin opposition between mechanical reproduction and the aura of the single artwork is also being referenced. Paradoxically, the serial methodology both challenges and upholds the singularity of each individual piece: singular within series, one but not all.
There may exist differences in emphasis between the generations represented in this exhibition. Perhaps the older artists show more interest in structure in comparison to the younger ones who may appear as interested in the breakdown of order as in its establishment. Contrasting, say, the Trevor Sutton painting Christow with Giulia Ricci’s Order Disruption Painting, could reinforce this view, as might opposing the serene geometry of the Natalie Dower to the visual excitation of Patrick Morrissey’s work, or the stability of Sutton with the kinetic, off- balance effect of Morrissey (see image below), and I know I am going too far in contrasting the contained circularity of Farrer’s Knot in Time or Robertson’s Aura with the eccentricity of Martin Church’s Definitions (Study No. 3), because mostly what I am finding here is continuity.
Installation shot, from left to right works by Trevor Sutton and Patrick Morrissey. Image by courtesy of Slate Projects
Without succumbing to the much too linear (non-systemic) notion of progress, I do want to suggest that these generationally diverse artists, in their shared commitment to an economy of means and a formal language, rooted in the tradition of constructivism and systems art, continue to develop this rich field of artistic activity.
Watch this space!
(There is an illustrated catalogue accompanying the exhibition, with excellent essays by Nathan Cohen and Laura Davidson and an introduction by Alex Meurice.)
Other Rooms at Basement Arts Project
Basement Arts Project, a non-traditional exhibition space in the cellar of a domestic house just outside Leeds, recently hosted Other Rooms, curated by Saturation Point, (Patrick Morrissey, Clive Hanz Hancock and Charley Peters), a show featuring works by the following artists: Giulia Ricci, Sarah Sparkes, Andy Wicks, Ben Woodeson, John Workman, Clive Hanz Hancock, Patrick Morrissey, Charley Peters, and Walker Hill, each containing its own light source, and each artist responding, whether in film, sculpture or installation, to this darkened alternative space, or other room.
Ben Woodeson, Super Sexy Sculpture.. Oh Yes! 2014, brass, cord, neon, books. My snapshot
I don’t know if I would be entirely correct to describe the works as “site specific”. I could imagine the animated films of Morrissey or Peters and the Ben Woodeson sculpture for example, having independent and portable existences. But I could also argue that appearing here they take on a character that is at least partially determined by the space itself, Woodeson’s Super Sexy Sculpture… Oh Yes reflecting its surroundings not outwards, as one might normally find in a mirror, but rather by way of its concave stainless steel surface, enfolding the external project space into itself, surrounding its own surroundings, as it were.
Patrick Morrissey, Goodbye Ploy 2, 2014, Animated Film, (my photo)
Patrick Morrisey’s film Goodbye Ploy 2, a system of flickering red and orange triangles and rectangles in grid formation, shown against the stone wall, will look like this only here, incorporating the particularities of this uneven surface into the moving image, such that the boundary between system and environment becomes ambiguous. Shown elsewhere, the image would assume some of the specific characteristics of another place. In this work the neutrality of the screen that normally allows film to transcend the limitations of geography is contradicted.
Hanz Hancock, Inside/Outside, mixed media, my photo
Clive Hanz Hancock’s installation constructed of circular pieces of PVC tubing stacked in a narrow vertical wood container alongside a fluorescent strip light is situated in a slim alcove. The light rather than illuminating the rest of the construction, tends to dazzle, distracting the viewer, bringing more attention to itself than to the subject we might have wished it would throw light upon. It is almost as if the light subverts its own purpose. Also, similarly to Goodbye Ploy, whilst the work could conceivably be sited in another place, at another time, making it a stand-alone sculptural piece, it will look the way it looks here only as long as it is positioned in this one space, so could be said to exist only here, affirming the particularity of the here and now whilst also contradicting the mobility of the stand-alone art object, or commodity.
Sarah Sparkes’ Flue is inherently tied to the site it inhabits and enlivens. An LED infinity mirror is located inside a hole in the chimney breast that may once have conveyed exhaust gases from a stove to the outside of the building. Am I to see in it a metaphor for the relationship of an artwork or exhibition venue to the external world? Not so much the world in the artwork, as the artwork in the world, in which it appears as a vapour which soon disperses and is forgotten. It may also be that, appearing to recede infinitely into space without ever representing objects in a ‘real space’ this art object presents us with illusion for its own sake. Rather than holding up a mirror to the world, this work is a mirror that provides access to the immateriality of illusion as illusion. Not a window on the world but a portal, or perhaps even a means of transportation, into infinity. Equally I sense being enticed to look into the flickering light as one might look into a fire and see images, the work, in this interpretation, now relating more to the inner world of the viewers’ imagination.
Sarah Sparkes, Flue, 2014, Mixed Media. (My Photo)
Imaginary worlds, from a distant or mythical past seem to feature in John Workman’s Box of Clouds, a metal light-box salvaged from disused darkroom, containing a painting on glass of a figure in a landscape, the light inside glowing through the painted clouds and trees like the dying light of a Claude Lorrain painting and creating a dreamlike quality.
Andy Wicks’ installation, on the other hand, directs my attention to the world immediately in and around the artwork, to the here and now of the project space itself, rather than to immaterial, infinite or imaginary worlds. Making use of LEDs arranged around an empty plane, like a frame around a blank canvas, it’s as if he transposes the tradition of monochrome painting into another key. I am reminded of David Batchelor’s extensive series of photographs of naturally occurring monochromes, except that in Wick’s installation the monochrome occurs by artifice, constructed, but by different means than paint on canvas.
Andy Wicks, Untitled, 2014, installation, (my photo)
I’m struggling to work out what’s happening in collaborative duo Michael Walker and Martyn Hill’s golden, glowing, internally-lit drawing, struggling that is, to work out how it is constructed and from what materials, is it card? It has the appearance of something more hi-tech than that. This engaging piece, featuring serial repetition of geometric units in a grid, likely employs a mathematical system that I am attempting to grasp, and again, not quite getting perhaps because of the back-light fatigue I am experiencing. There is a point at which a regularly repeated sequence starts to dissolve into a unified monochrome expanse and that’s happening for me now, so that what I am most aware of is the golden light emanating from this rectangular box-like object that is not painting, or sculpture or drawing but perhaps a merging of all three. And this not quite getting it is, I think, part of the attraction. I am required to put in an effort with a work that gives up its secrets slowly.
Walker Hill, Prototype, Illuminated pared Drawing# 1 . 2015, (my photo)
I’m now engrossed in Charley Peters’ animations, 99 Drawings and 99 Drawings #2(RGB) ≤ (∆ ̇3) totally fascinated by these line drawings that become a cube that seems to construct and deconstruct in the process of rotation. In a way it’s a study in object formation, or how we construct three dimensions when our eyes actually see only in two. It is equally a demonstration of how we perceive movement when a series of drawings are presented to our eyes one after another in quick succession, that systems quality of emergence when two events are combined and something new and unexpected is generated, resulting here in a piece of work that is endlessly fascinating.
Charley Peters,Still: 99 Drawings #2(RGB)≤(∆ ̇3), 2015, animated pixel drawings. (my photo)
Giulia Ricci’s beautifully slow moving animation entitled Order and Disruption is beguiling, a pattern in blue on white is interrupted as parts become slightly out of sync’ with the rest, and then realign as other sections become slightly out, creating a sense of morphing and bending of space with worm-like figures appearing here and there, but so slowly that it’s difficult to differentiate between my own shifting perception of changing gestalts (that would be there in a still image) and that which is a result of the animation, almost as if that ‘other room’ of my own neuro-logical processing, perhaps not such a ‘black box’ after all, is here coming into awareness.
Giulia Ricci, Order and Disruption, animated film, image by courtesy of the artist and Saturation Point
Thank you Basement Arts Project for your warm welcome, especially as my visit is made out of normal gallery hours. This is a great space for showing and seeing new art, and I am sure I will be back another day.
Other Rooms was on view at Basement Arts Project from 16 Jan to 25 Jan 2015.
New at Saturation Point
Frederik De Wilde, NanoBlck-Sqr #1, 2014, courtesy the artist and Carroll / Fletcher
See Saturation Point, the online editorial and curatorial project for reductive, geometric and systems artists working in the UK, for new interviews with
Carol Robertson, interviewed by Patrick Morrissey
Estelle Thompson, interviewed by Laurence Noga
Julia Farrer, interviewed by Andy Parkinson
also for recent reviews including:
Francesca Simon, Site Lines, by Andy Parkinson
Frederik De Wilde’s NanoBlck-Sqr #1, by Laura Davidson
Jonathan Parsons New Paintings by Judith Duquemin
Carol Robertson, Circular Stories, by Charley Peters
There are many good things going on at Saturation Point…but don’t take my word for it.
New Interview at Saturation Point
Saturation Point is the online editorial and curatorial project for reductive, geometric and systems artists working in the UK. It grew out of the exhibition of the same title held in 2011, curated by Patrick Morrissey and Hanz Hancock. The site includes exhibition information, reviews, interviews and publications. Among other things, you can see a recent review of Vanessa Jackson: Rough Cut and Faceted, by Charley Peters and Fine Line: Concrete, Constructivist and Minimalist Art, by Laurence Noga, as well as new interviews with Natalie Dower, Jane Bustin and a very recent one with me.
Andy Parkinson, Hexagon Colour-Spread (BGRYMC), 2014, acrylic on canvas, 12″ sides
You can also follow a link to purchase the book Natalie Dower: Line of Enquiry, and you can download the Saturation Point 2011 Catalogue. In my admittedly biased view, it’s a really interesting project. Don’t take my word for it, go check it out for yourself.
patternsthatconnect 