Homeland Exhibition

So much for not neglecting the blog!! 

It seems that since I've been carrying my journal round with me everywhere that I've found a new way of collecting thoughts. Perhaps this can be a positive thing for the blog though. Rather than blathering on at you about where I ate my lunch and that pair of shoes I saw in a shop down chapel street I can get down to the nitty gritty of my art practice on here.

I was recently involved in an the 'Homeland' exhibition at the Woltenholme Creative Space, a derelict building in the centre of Liverpool ideal for an unconventional student exhibition.

The Exhibition at Wolstenholme gave me the opportunity to think more critically about my work and how it could adapt to a space.

I decided to embrace the differences between the unconventional space and what my work was trying to achieve (updating past works).

I decided to create a juxtaposition between the traditional gilt frame and the unconventional rustic gallery wall, giving a jarring sense of contemporary versus historic and questioning traditional methods of display. 

I had been working on a recreation of a gallery space online to investigate digital media (I refer to this later). I wanted to find a way of bringing the idea of technology based art into the gallery, however I dismissed the concept of bringing the Internet into the space on the basis that it is such a free wide source of information that it seemed /contradictory to confine it within a gallery space.

At around the same time I became interested in Hockney’s work. He is predominantly a painter however his work has strong connections to technology and the manipulation of photography. Recently he has developed an obsession for the iPod and iPad using apps to create beautiful digital images, which he continues to refer to as paintings claiming the iPad to be just a new medium of painting.

He also uses this technology TO DISPLAY THEM! Now although unlike Hockney. I couldn’t afford 40 iPads, I still wanted to show how digital media affects our perception of art.

It led me to consider showing my works on digital photo frames. These gave me the opportunity to digitally manipulate the paintings I had already produced to create over 50 new digital paintings.

My little attempt at Mass production

Which Walter Benjamin claimed ‘contributed to human emancipation by promoting new modes of critical perception.’

By editing my own paintings on the digital frames I attempted to create new digital paintings. As Benjamin said, they retain their  ‘underpinnings in the ritual in which …’ they had their ‘…original initial utility value’. So although they have been manipulated they can always be related to their traditional origins. The images are not obviously recognizable, the hues, angles, cropping and scale have changed. In doing this I hope they can be appreciated for their refreshed aesthetic and show the progression of display.

I hope the digital paintings allow the viewer to recontextualize the works.

Separately they give a sense of the original paintings but the initial aura is lost in the medium of digitalization and editing. This presents the power digital media has to change our perception of art works.

By presenting them in a line the viewer has the choice of viewing one unit from close up, and seeing the others in their peripheral viewpoint or standing back and seeing all 9 digitally flickering , creating an area for contemplation of the process and effect of digitalization.

I began to think about how my work could be positioned in a relevant way. I wanted my work to question the values of reproduction in relation to the original by displaying the two in close proximity. 

The theme of the exhibition Homeland was rooted around the idea of territories. This led us to decide to separate the themes of the rooms to home and land.

Home was a warmly lit room, with Lucy Somers’ furniture installation giving an air of comfort and Dave Whiteley’s  ‘Check-mate’ performance piece welcoming you to interact. This is the place where my traditionally inspired paintings would work best, by juxtaposing the gilt frames with the crumbling walls. Old versus new.

And Land. A more clinical experience. This space was occupied mainly by wall based works and technological works. The synthesized music from Matt Weir’s ‘Phantom’ film and the eerie glow of Dave Whiteley’s floor projection gave a sense of the contemporary. This colder digitalized space. was An ideal location for my Digital Photo frames.

By placing the two forms of work in different territories their competition is emphasized. However the two can be viewed as a single entity through the doorway. Their separation between territories experiments with the tensions of their aesthetics, forcing us to appreciate them for their differences, however their visual and distal-unity again encourages the viewer to question the effect of mass production and the alterations that occur during this process.

Finally I began to consider how my work reacted with the work of other artists, mainly Lucy Somers’. 

Both our work embraced the concept of territories having works in both rooms, so we tried to subtly create an interaction between our works. For example the wine bottles in front of the Folies Bergere or the play on light and shadow to emphasize the digital glow of my photo frames against the more homely yet purposefully inharmonious installation. I wanted my frames to show the coldness of the digital works and Lucy wanted her work in Land to appear out of context. By intertwining the two it made our arguments seem more valid.

Also the Young man looking out of his window was placed in a relevant position, the window between the two rooms. The painting is about technology-enforced isolation. Is he connecting the works between home and land by looking through the window or idly gazing into his iPod, separating the digital from the traditional completely?

I extended my work to a further level by testing the concept of a performance piece. I stood by the bar, which was in position to see both the painting of the Folies Bergere and myself reenacting my painting. To critically evaluate the piece it was not so effective in the bustle of the exhibition, and the detachment of the original was difficult to convey. Most of the audience failed to notice the performance.

I made the decision to enter one of my Remakes into the John Moores painting prize. If accepted it will show how a painting directly inspired by another (technically a reproduction) can be considered for its new purpose.