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)Whitechapel Gallery
The Bloomberg Commission
Josiah McElheny
'The Past Was A Mirage I'd Left Far Behind'
Link to exhibition page
Gallery text regarding exhibition:
"Reflection, light and transparency are defining themes of Modernism. They provide a leitmotif for a new work by sculptor Josiah McElheny, creator of the 2011 Bloomberg commission.
McElheny's installation is sited in the former Whitechapel library, built in 1892 as 'a lantern for learning' and now part of the Whitechapel Gallery. Taking up illumination as an aesthetic and social project that resonated across the 20th century, McElheny's work proposes a new history of abstraction as a fragmented, sensory experience.
For his commission, McElheny has constructed seven sculptural screens made from mirrored glass, wood, and projection cloth. The sculptures double, triple, and refract any image, creating an illusion of depth, extending the viewer's gaze, and expanding the image itself.
For this year-long exhibition, the artist has asked four collaborators to each suggest a 1-hour showreel of purely abstract films, selecting their own personal history of abstraction in the moving image. These films are projected onto the sculptures in a manner similar to the inverting effect of the mirrors: the sequence is shown not only in reverse chronology, but also from the end to the beginning of each film. In a further unfolding, the images are projected upside-down and flipped along their axis.
Fragmented, reflected and disorienting, the sculptures' images constantly change in relation to the viewer's position, offering an opportunity to piece together these aesthetic fragments into a new history."
Text from my own sketchbook:
"These sculptures are desperately strange, words or shapes flash at you from your peripheral vision, birds fly backwards, shapes are constantly rearringing. Occasionally I become part of the sculptures, when I catch myself reflected in a mirror.
The geometric forms [of the sculptures] complement the space, the gallery itself is full of diamonds on pillars which reflect the diamond structures and reflections. I watch people disappear behind mirrors, thinking that people behind me are in front.
The backs of the screens are perhaps more interesting. the shadows of projections are visible and milky, subdued compared to the quite frantic images that are projected.
Language is particularly interesting, being distorted in such a way creates imagined alphabets."
Abstract films
Government Art Collection: Selected by Cornelia Parker
'Richard of York gave Battle in Vain'
Text from my sketchbook:
"Like Sophie Calle's 'Chromatic Diet', Parker has selected pieces for a collection based on colour. I like this way of link-making: In our 16 drawings project, I would have loved to have seen someone make decisions based on colour, even though the drawings were in pencil. Maybe I'll have to do it, it would make me laugh.
A dandelion, a banana... What else is yellow? The sun. Actually, I'm finding it quite difficult to think of things that only come in one colour. I'm wearing a yellow dress, but in a pencil drawing it could be white, or green, or orange. Red Royal Mail rubber bands are always red. And dusty."
Tate Modern
Gerhard Richter
Text from my sketchbook:
"These [photopaintings] are really strange - how does he achieve the in/out of focus? Some (like Stool in Profile) are more painterly, but others more closely resemble the photographs they have been based on (Two Couples).
What an interesting subversion, the style is photographic yet the method are painterly: brush strokes are clearly visible, sometimes even the thick paint protrudes from the canvas, drawing our attention to the painting process.
I like the non-black in the black and white pieces (sic.), blues and greys are inky to make the darkness [just like Mrs Egan-Fowler said!].
Sometimes the exposed canvas at the edges of the painting is what subverts the 'photographic' illusion: canvas has letters and numbers on the side, clearly visible to the audience...
Will thinks Two Couples looks like a film still - he's right, these paintings really imply narrative, especially those with accompanying text.
This is interesting: Uncle Rudi is a photogrpah of a pianting based on a photograph, returned, changed, to it's original state. THis implies that it is the process which is important, like when I scan in my cutting drawings they become a new thing, a changed outcome which can add another dimension to the work.
Double Pane of Glass is amazing, the glass has retained some of it's reflective qualities so that as people walk past their colours are absorbed into the grey landscape. The depth of colour is even more interesting here than in Seascape because subtle colours are constantly moving and changing in the piece. Grey is tactile, a relief, in comparison with some of the very smooth, flat work. Me and Will discussed that want to touch raised paint surfaces; is it a human compulsion, I wonder, or just that of art students? When physical depth is created in paint, other kinds of subtleties are created. Here, Richter moves away from delicately mixing colour to create tone, and allows the medium of paint itself to create it's own light and shadow.
128 Details from a Picture (Halifax) is so astonishing. Each photograph is like a painting, like miniature created landscapes. THe focus of the camera moves, meaning that sometimes depth is distorted, and the notion of 'landscape' is obscured.
Drawings are like musical scores, drawn with graphite and a rubber. They have an alphabet as a means of description.
11 Panes makes viewer into an abstract form, it changes us into an ethereal being - traces of our movement stay with us, like a photo of me has been taken every second and layered. This is brilliant, and reminds me of my layered 4 hour drawing but this is so much better because it is in constant flux: it makes us transparent, ghostly. We don't exist in this piece as we do in real life. 6 Panes is just as strange. We do not, we cannot exist in the space where the sculpture is and yet there we are, inside it, as ghosts of ourselves.
3 November 2011
Ashington Colliery Museum
The Ashington Group (The Pitman Painters)
I love the flattening of space in some of these, like Harry Young's The Hermit where everything is in the foreground and Harry Wilson's Fish Sale where the fish are seen as if from above, flat on the surface of the painting.
The brushstrokes are so naive: the paint follows the curve of noses, buildings, legs. Unprimed canvas shines through Andrew Rankin's In The Canteen, and there is a funny transparency in the paint in Ammas by Oliver Kilbourn; you can see through the dog to the pavement.
There is first person perspective in Len Robinson's Joiner's Shop - the hands are at the front of the frame.
All of these paintings are technically interesting - although actually incompetent, they explore some interesting ideas - we aren't used to seeing paintings like this in a gallery, so we forget how paintings look when they are made by amateurs. The translucency and the flattening of perspective, the drawing attention to lives that are so unsuitable for oil paints. Oils, used to depict gods and kings, being used to show men at work, children outside the chippy. Looking at these makes me want to start painting again - to play with paint in a material way: I have been really drawn to the brush strokes made by different sized brushes and unprimed canvas in these pieces, so perhaps I need to work through these things in my own work, like Damien Hirst teaching himself painting in the garden shed.
