The Victoria Miro Gallery, London

'The Vanity of Small Differences' exhibition, Grayson Perry, 07 June- 11 August 2012

A few days ago i visited the Victoria Miro gallery in London, which was a gallery i hadnt been to before as its a little out of the centre of London and not so widely publicised as some others. The Vanity Of Small Differences by the artist Grayson Perry consisted of six tapestries of scenarios 'exploring his fascination with taste and the visual story it tells of our interior lives.' Looking at the work, it is clear there is a central focus on political themes, morals and class and what is right and what is wrong. I enjoyed the exhibition very much as the traditional medium of tapestry used was very unusual in contrast with the content of the work. The bright colours and composition of the pictures were very distorted so each vision seemed like a dream or a personal memory of the artist. There was so much happening in each picture and unbelievable attention to detail that coming away from a piece and then going back to looking at it again, there were new things to take in each time.



Here is the official description from the Victoria Miro Gallery about the exhibition:

'In The Vanity of Small Differences Grayson Perry explores his fascination with taste and the visual story it tells of our interior lives in a series of six tapestries at Victoria Miro and three programmes, All in the Best Possible Taste with Grayson Perry, for Channel 4. The artist goes on a safari amongst the taste tribes of Britain, to gather inspiration for his artworks, literally weaving the characters he meets into a narrative partly inspired by Hogarth's A Rake's Progress.

Grayson Perry comments: "The tapestries tell the story of class mobility, for I think nothing has as strong an influence on our aesthetic taste as the social class in which we grow up. I am interested in the politics of consumerism and the history of popular design but for this project I focus on the emotional investment we make in the things we choose to live with, wear, eat, read or drive. Class and taste run deep in our character - we care. This emotional charge is what draws me to a subject".

Perry has always worked with traditional media; ceramics, cast iron, bronze, printmaking and tapestry. He is interested in how each historic category of object accrues over time intellectual and emotional baggage. Tapestry is the art form of grand houses: depicting classical myths, historical and religious scenes and epic battles. In this series of works Perry plays with idea of using this ancient allegorical art to elevate the commonplace dramas of modern British life.

The artist's primary inspiration was A Rake's Progress (1732 -33) by William Hogarth, which in eight paintings tells the story of Tom Rakewell, a young man who inherits a fortune from his miserly father, spends it all on fashionable pursuits and gambling, marries for money, gambles away a second fortune, goes to debtors' prison and dies in a madhouse.

The Vanity of Small Differences tells the story of the rise and demise of Tim Rakewell and is composed of characters, incidents and objects Perry encountered on journeys through Sunderland, Tunbridge Wells and The Cotswolds. Hogarth has long been an influence on Perry's works, his Englishness, his robust humour and his depiction of, in his own words, 'modern moral subjects'. The secondary influence comes from Perry's favourite form of art, early Renaissance painting.

Each of the six images, to a greater or lesser extent, pays homage to a religious work. Including Masaccio's Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, Matthias Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece, Rogier Van de Weyden's Lamentation and three different paintings of The Annunciation by Carlo Crivelli, Grünewald and Robert Campin. The images also reference the pictorial display of wealth and status in The Arnolfini Portrait by Jan Van Eyck and Mr & Mrs Andrews by Thomas Gainsborough. Woven into each tapestry are snatches of text, each one in the voice of a participant in the scene illustrated. Each image also features a small dog, reminiscent of Hogarth's beloved pug, Trump.'

Below are the six tapestries that make up this exhibition:


The Agony in the Carpark, 2012


Expulsion from Number 8 Eden Close, 2012



The Adoration of the Cage Fighters, 2012



The Upper Class at Bay, 2012



The Annunciation of the Virgin Deal, 2012



Lamentation, 2012


'Press Release' exhibition, Sarah Sze, 20 June- 11 August 2012

Another exhibition which i loved was Press Release by the site-specific installation artist Sarah Sze who uses everyday objects and materials such as wool, string, match sticks, lamp lights, pegs, twigs, fruit, water bottles, paint tins etc to make different situations in a floor space which are composed in an intrigueing way, almost like seeing through the eyes of an inventor or being let into the exciting world of an inventor's work shop. They were so detailed and elaborate and cleverely imagined, you could definately tell they were created over a substantial amount of time.





Here is the description about the exhibition composed by the gallery:

'Victoria Miro is delighted to announce an exhibition of new work by Sarah Sze, her second solo show with the gallery. Characteristic of Sze's expansive practice, the exhibition will comprise
several interrelated installations - conceptual constellations of everyday objects.

Over both floors, Sze's latest body of work re-imagines the gallery as a kind of laboratory where processes of observation, examination, and exploration are in progress. In the lower gallery, a series of discrete works serve as accumulated evidence of a project - each sculpture it's own portable, temporary site, a complex system marking a location with an individual, precisely choreographed gesture. In the upper gallery, from across a darkened expanse a single, illuminated large-scale installation becomes an archaeology of its own: an elaborate concave assemblage seemingly captured in a moment of either construction or ruin.

Preoccupied with conceptions of how we continually locate ourselves within space, Sze's works unfold as investigations of the psychological, and even emotional, understandings of our environment. We are always finding ourselves in space, oscillating between orientation and disorientation, and with each location we experience accompanies an evolving history.

In the works, references to instruments of measure and mapping are drawn, as are the worlds they strive to ascertain. The act of looking prompted by Sze's intricately constructed sculptures and the detail of her materials is underscored here as a unique, yet shared, encounter with place: a moment of discovery, a remnant of an experience.

Biographical information: Sarah Sze will represent the United States of America at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. Sze has exhibited internationally, with solo presentations at MUDAM, Luxembourg (2012); Asia Society, New York (2011-2012); Musée d'Art Moderne et d'Art Contemporain, Nice, France (2011); Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Newcastle, UK (2009); Maison Hermès Forum, Tokyo (2008); Malmö Konsthall, Sweden, (2006); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, (2003); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2002); Fondation Cartier in Paris (1999); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1999); and ICA London (1998). Recent permanent installations include Still Life with Landscape (Model for a Habitat), The High Line, New York and The Distances Where Magnets Pull, University of California, San Francisco, both (2011). Sarah Sze was born in Boston in 1969 and currently lives and works in New York.'


Narcissus Garden, By Yayoi Kusama, 2008

This installational work was something apart from the exhibitions by another artist called Yayoi Kusama consisting of giant metal spherical shapes floating on the pond water like massive ball bearings. The way they gathered together reminded me of multiplying bacteria or some kind of alien growth, though they were also very beautiful in the natural light and reflecting from the water beneath. There was a dazzling contrast between something that was very beautiful but something that felt dangerous and overwhelming at the same time.

Work Experience at The Cambridge Contemporary Art Gallery

This week i have been completing some work experience in Cambridge in the Cambridge Contemporary Art Gallery. Its been a busy week so i thought i'd tell you a little about what i've been getting up to and the job roles i've undertaken throughout this time.
Cambridge Contemporary Art Gallery is based down Trinity Street, in the heart of Cambridge, within a row of other various galleries opposite Trinity College. The gallery holds different exhibitions every month, in which work can be viewed and bought as customers please. This week starting Monday 18th June to Friday 22nd June has been a changeover week which is where we swap over between an old exhibition and the new upcoming Summer Exhibition, dedicated to British Art and Craft. The summer months will be dedicated to a variety of artists in all mediums including printmaking, sculpture, crafts and all things British.
During my week my job roles have included receiving work from artists for the exhibition, which needed to be unpacked, compared and checked off on a corrisponding delivery note, labelled with information on the artist, the name of the work, the price and edition number etc and then displayed in a professional way in the gallery space.
I created some window displays for the gallery, which had to be eyecatching and draw people into the gallery from the street, using sculpture, pottery and canvas paintings. I displayed a number of different artists work including Denise Brown, Virginia Dowe, Margaret Gardiner, Virginia Graham, Sarah Hillman, Carrie Paxton, Will Shakspeare, Mychael Barratt, Glynn Thomas, Clare Caulfield, Scott Irvine, Charlotte Cornish, Paul Harvey and Kevan Hopson, which are all British contemporary artists, many working in sculpture and glass.
I learnt a lot about the gallery's main principles and the steps taken in the progression from having art work delivered to actually selling the pieces. I sold work to a number of customers, and found out more about how customers can pay for work over a set number of months using the 'Own Art' loan scheme http://www.ownart.org.uk/.
Other jobs included painted the walls white ready for the new exhibition, replenishing stock once other work has been sold and taken away, framing work, packing up work that has been sold ready for collection, and dealing with customer enquiries. I also spent some time in the sister gallery situated in Benet Street called Cambridge Contemporary Crafts, so i worked with many different people in the two seperate galleries. I will be having another week of work experience with them in August an i look forward to working with them again. I have really enjoyed my week and would recommend anyone to visit. You can visit their websites for more information on the exhibitions or for any of the artists i have mentioned:
http://www.cambridgegallery.co.uk/
http://www.cambridgecrafts.co.uk/




Ceramics by Virginia Graham



'Royal Albert Hall', Hand-painted screenprint by Clare Caulfield



'Nougat Bowl', Glassware by Will Shakspeare



'Black Tern', Black Marble sclupture by Paul Harvey


'Trinity Great Court', Etching by Glynn Thomas

 

Ceramics by Margaret Gardiner

The Whitechapel Gallery

I actually visited The Whitechapel Gallery quite a few months ago but the subject has escaped the clutches of my blogging since then so i thought i would tell you a little bit about what i saw there. There has been a continuous exhibition running in the gallery from the 5th April 2009 until the 31st December 2012, called 'Social Sculpture', a collection of work from a multitide of sculpture based artists, my favourite being a piece of work by Tobias Rehberger, called 'Adaption 13' which was made in 2008 combining acrylic with electrical appliances to create multi-coloured columns of light which provide a 'source of beauty an illumination'. Below is the description of the work featured in the gallery:

'Frankfurt-based artist, Tobias Rehberger creates environments, sculptures, furniture and ceiling installations that are inspired by modernist art history and design classics from the 1960s and 1970s. Playful and interactive, his installations and objects are often dependent on the active participation of his audience. 'Adaption 13' is a series of lamps, which reverse the standard process of works being built from model forms. Rehberger has taken a large-scale model as the basis for his small-scale lamps. The model is the cafeteria at Suddeutsche Zeitung Verlag, Munich, for which Rehberger designed a large centrally-located block, made of different coloured acrylic panels and illuminated from behind. The brightness of the acrylic wall changes according to the information stream that runs through the building's Electronic Data Processing system, and it is this design feature which the artist has distilled for his lamp series.'

I took some photos od the work which are shown below, in some of the photos i took away the focus from the photograph so as just to portray the 'auras' of coloured light and the contrasting colours which appear beautifully in each lamp.

Weaving

I've updated this page if you care to take a look, pictures from my latest experimentations are included.

Work Experience

I will soon be finishing my first year of academic study at university, with a whole four months before i begin my second year at the end of September. During this time, i have acquired some work experience at The Cambridge Contemporary Art Gallery, which is down Trinity Street in Cambridge.

Im really looking forward to getting to know what it would be like to work in a gallery. I am working for two weeks in total, from the 18th June to the 22nd June, and also from the 28th August to the 31st August. These two weeks are 'change-over' weeks, where the work displayed in the gallery is taken down and new work is put up. Some of the tasks i will be expected to do in this time is take down the work, package it safely and carefully, store it, clean the gallery between the change-over and put up the new work making sure the work is displayed correctly and professionally. Other duties include labelling all the work (artist name, date, price) and making sure that is correct, helping to write and organise biographies for the artists exhibiting, and dealing with public enquiries.

I will be assisting in two change-overs. The first will be for a 'Mixed Summer Exhibition' and 'Cambridge Scenes', and the second will be 'Reg Cartwright: New Paintings'. I think it will be interesting for me to see the difference between putting an exhibition together for a group of artists and an exhibition for a solo show.

If you want to find out more information about the gallery, you can visit their website at: www.cambridgegallery.co.uk.

C8H8 Exhibition

Ive just published a page for the recent C8H8 exhibition i created with Eleanor Osmond and Nicola Reeve. Have a look and hopefully it all makes sense and you get a good view of what the exhibition was about and the amazing amount of feedback we got from the people who came!

The Hamburger Bahnhof, 24th February

The Hamburger Bahnhof was another big gallery we viewed in Berlin, about a 10 minute walk from our hotel right outside the Hauptbahnhof train station. All the work was from contemporary artists, with some exhibitions and other rooms full of art to buy.

As my personal art practice relates to the process of ordering objects, materials, data etc. an exhibition which really interested me was a room filled with oblong stone structures, a reminder for me of almost body/mummy/coffin- like structures with circular markings at ends to look like holes where faces would be, placed in what looked to be random separation on the floor, so you were able to walk throught the room, weaving in between these arrangements. The stone was of a sandy texture and colour, with unco-ordinating numbers drawn in chalk/ white paint of the ends of them, although not every structure was catalogued in this way. Planks of wood had been added underneath the stone structures as support and there was a contraption for moving the stones, with a handle, almost like a lever. The work was created by german artist Joseph Beuys, whose work mainly revolved around subjects of the World War and Auschwitz, maybe these relate to bodies/ soldiers/ victims of some of these horrors worldly known or experienced personally by Beuys himself.

When experiencing the work, there was a great sense that it was a temporary piece of work, that it could be moved at any time or was in the porcess of being moved around, that the art work was not quite finished or to the artist's satsfaction yet. Walking in between the structures, reminded me of walking through a graveyard, not only becasue of the body- like shape of them but the unnaturally shaped stone was a reminder of head stones on a grave.

For my own personal work, i took photos of the numbers written on some of the stones, as shown below. The process of numbering the stones shows some sense of ordering and handling of data, but the fact the stones shown in the exhibition had no correspondence to each other but just as random numbers, there is also a lack of organisation.

Another memorable exhibtion from the Hamburger Bahnhof was called 'DB' by japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda, whose seperated but still linked installations at opposite ends of the gallery experimented with pitch in continuous sound, and continuous numbers/ fuzzy white noise/ dark and light/ white and black etc. Here is the desciption of the exhibition on the wall outside the exhibition:

'Japanese composer and visual artist Ryoji Ikeda has conceived an exhibition for the Hamburger Bahnhof that, for the first time, compositionally unites the two symmetrical halls on the upper level of the museum's east and west wings. The exhibition's title 'DB', derived from the word decibel, refers to this symmetry whilst simultaneously indicating the complementary relationship between the two exhibition spaces. Ikeda has designed the white room and the black room as counterparts. The project is a composition in which time and space and shaped through the most minimal use of sound, light and visual elements.'

Experiencing this exhibition was very surreal, and visiting both rooms were on completely other ends of the spectrum and had a totally different effect on me. I visited the white room first, which was so white we had to wear plastic shoe protecters to keep the floor perfectly white. The room had a massive speaker at one end, which is the same for both the white and black room, eminating from it was an extremely high pitched note, something which caused me to leave the room after a short visit; the noise was something that would definately send you mad after prolongingly hearing it. Here are some photos of the white room below.

In the black room, the layout was pretty much the same, the differences being the pitched note being eminated from the speaker was a lot lower, obviously the room was pitch black. But the variations were the bright white light sourec throwing a beam o light onto the opposite wall, creating a pathway through the centre. At symmetrical points at the sides of the room, there were numerous projections showing a continuous flow of numbers being formed/ processed that looked almost fuzzy, and then the numbers suddenely freezing for a moment. The numbers in this room made me feel like everything was rushing past me really quickly and i was stuck in the present.

Another thing worth mentioning which i almost forgot was that on entering the rooms, walls outside showed lines of 'D' versus 'B' words, which corresponded to each other. Photos below give you the idea of what this was about, but reading the words down the wall gave you a sense of the opposites shown in the whole exhibition (white/ black, dark/ light, good/ bad, heaven/ hell, tranquility/ disturbance).