Nottingham Trent University is delighted to invite Ruth Angel Edwards to speak as part of the 2017 Fine Art Live Lecture Series.
Edwards is a multimedia artist whose work explores the communication of ideology through popular culture. Drawing from mainstream and subcultural youth movements from the past and present, Edwards looks at the way audio and visual content is used to manipulate an audience and disseminate information.
Working between video, audio, sculpture, performance and print, Edwards explores subcultures, tracing their paths and examining the wider socio-economic environments that give rise to them, exposing their failures and flaws and uncovering lost spiritualities and hidden positive potential.
This live lecture coincides with Edwards’ solo exhibition Wheel of the Year – ! Effluent Profundel Zone ! which is showing in Bonington Gallery until Friday 16 February 2018. A new commission for Bonington Gallery, this immersive installation considers the inescapable cycles of waste and decay, a by-product of all our consumption, personal or material.
The exhibition explores how these ecologies overlap at different scales – from the futile pursuit of personal purification and ‘clean living’, to the increasingly rapid turnover of cultural ‘content’ in the media and popular consciousness, to the wider perspective of the waste which is polluting our oceans, and threatening our very existence.
Ruth Angel Edwards is a Nottingham born multimedia artist based in London. Her recent exhibitions include: Enema Salvatore! Almanac, Turin, 2017; Light Deception / The Great Imitator, Auto Italia South East, London, 2017; solo exhibition at Arcadia Missa, London, 2016; Info Pura, The Residence Gallery, London 2016; Derivatives and Futures, Human Resources, Los Angeles, 2016; A British Art Show, MEYOHAS, New York, 2015.
A selection of images from the opening of Ruth Angel Edwards: Wheel of the Year ! Effulent Profundal Zone !
Founded in 1946, the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London is a membership organisation that seeks to promote an understanding of radical arts and culture. The ICA bulletin has always been instrumental in communicating a multi-disciplinary programme that encompasses music, film, talks, poetry, visual arts and performance to its audience.
The earliest 1950s bulletins function as a simple notice to inform its readership of the ICA’s activities. The uniform visual identity of these early bulletins is partly shaped by the ICA’s conception of itself as an ‘institute’, an organisation whose ethos was equally beholden to the ideas of the laboratory, the university and the professional society, as it was to the modern art gallery or museum.
In the 1960s the bulletin adopted a magazine format, where the listings were supplemented by articles exploring contemporary poetry, music and visual art, alongside critical writings, reviews and polemic. In bringing together these different disciplines, the bulletin evoked in print the interdisciplinary aims of the ICA, and the diverse programming that took place within the gallery space itself. Casting off its 1950s consistency, the bulletin adopts what CHK Design Director, Christian Küsters described as a ‘non-identity’ that characterised the ICA’s representation of self: simultaneously indebted to the self-publishing endeavours of artists, the poetry chapbook and the zine.
Subsequent decades saw the collage-indebted style of the 1960s give way to a muted colour palette and a rationalised identity. These changes culminated in the creation of a new logotype in the 1980s and the subsequent adoption of a new typeface and branding by acclaimed designer Tony Arefin (1962-2000) in the 1990s.
Following a series of re-designs the ICA bulletin has more recently become an online platform. Bringing together event listings with articles and projects conceived by ICA staff, collaborators, students and artists it has retained the characteristic sense of mutability that has typified the bulletin since its inception.
Curated by Daniel Heather.
Here is a selection of news articles from our exhibition Its’ Our Playground: Artificial Sensibility, and a selection of posts from our instagram page on the installation from the show.
It’s Our Playground Artificial Sensibility featured on KubaParis, October 2017.
Lila Matsumoto’s ‘ekphrastic response’ to It’s Our Playground Artificial Sensibility featured on MAP, October 2017.
It’s Our Playground Artificial Sensibility featured on thisistomorrow, October 2017.
In the past nine years, Sara MacKillop has published and self-published over 30 book-works. Printed matter has always been at the core of MacKillop’s artistic practice, working directly with the physical form of books and employing reprographic techniques to create her expanded installation works.
MacKillop is a strong supporter of wider independent publishing, demonstrated by her founding of the Artist Self Publishers’ Fair in 2015 at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in London with fellow artist Dan Mitchell, which has continued as an annual event at ICA.
This vitrine exhibition compliments Sara MacKillop’s solo exhibition One Room Living in the Gallery from Friday 3 November – Friday 8 December, whereby she will present a series of works, objects and interactions that make reference to areas within the University that cater for social and recreational activity.
This exhibition is supported by the Elephant Trust.
We are pleased to present Sara MacKillop’s first UK institutional solo exhibition since 2010.
One Room Living takes as its starting point the spaces within Nottingham Trent University that cater for leisure and recreational activity. By appropriating the motifs of art supplies, vending machines and spatial furnishing, MacKillop presents a series of works and interactions that reference the wide variety of spatial uses that directly surround Bonington Gallery – analysing not only the gallery’s site and situation, but also how the wider institution’s function is represented across a multitude of spaces.
Accompanying the exhibition is a display of MacKillop’s wide array of published and self-published printed matter, produced across a nine-year period, housed within the vitrine cases in the gallery foyer.
This exhibition is supported by the Elephant Trust.
Sara MacKillop is an artist living and working in London. She studied at the Royal College of Art, London, from 1999 to 2001. Recent solo exhibitions include Window Display, Haus der Kunst Munich, 2016; Temporary Bond, Clages, Cologne, 2016; Sculpture Room, Trondheim Kunstmuseum, Trondheim, 2014; Post, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, 2013.
We are delighted to begin our 2017/18 exhibition season with a solo exhibition of new work by Paris-based artist duo It’s Our Playground (IOP), comprised of Camille Le Houezec and Jocelyn Villemont.
Artificial Sensibility continues the duo’s ongoing reflection on artificial intelligence – when technology mimics human cognitive behaviour. Artificial Sensibility reveals a hybrid learning process of automated principles of recognition and basic human methods of education.
Presented via a series of intuitively formed constructs of blended colours, warped shapes and images of natural elements, misunderstanding and ambiguity gives rise to free-form poetic response.
As their core practice, IOP have curated many exhibitions of artists’ work. Artificial Sensibility will be an opportunity to widen their scope of production by collaborating closely with other types of makers, including technical and artisan practitioners with specific savoir-faire.
Artificial Sensibility is part funded by Fluxus Art Projects, a not for profit Franco-British organisation encouraging cross-channel exchanges in visual arts.
1. CHERRY_cherry_PEACH_peach, 2017
UV print on dibond, aluminium casts, glass paint, aluminium box section, polyester.
Courtesy of the artists & galerie Valentin, Paris.
2. VIOLET_violet_CORAL_coral, 2017
UV print on dibond, aluminium casts, glass paint, aluminium box section, polyester.
Courtesy of the artists & galerie Valentin, Paris.
3. ORANGE_orange, 2017
UV print on dibond, aluminium casts, glass paint, aluminium box section, polyester.
Courtesy of the artists & galerie Valentin, Paris.
4. OLIVE_olive_LAVENDER_lavender, 2017
UV print on dibond, aluminium casts, glass paint, aluminium box section, polyester.
Courtesy of the artists & galerie Valentin, Paris.
5. ROSE_rose, 2017
UV print on dibond, aluminium casts, glass paint, aluminium box section, polyester.
Courtesy of the artists & galerie Valentin, Paris.
6. SALMON_salmon_EGGSHELL_eggshell, 2017
UV print on dibond, aluminium casts, glass paint, aluminium box section, polyester.
Courtesy of the artists & galerie Valentin, Paris.
It’s Our Playground is an artistic collaboration between Camille Le Houezec and Jocelyn Villemont. Their solo exhibition Artificial Sensibility follows Reconstructive Memory Galerie Valentin, Paris, 2016; Mental Matter, Les Bains-Douches, Alençon, 2016; Deep Screen, Parc Saint-Léger, Pougues-les-Eaux, 2015; and Screen Play, SWG3 Gallery, Glasgow, 2014. It is part of an ongoing exploration into methods of producing, installing, apprehending and distributing an exhibition in physical spaces, online, and in the hard drive of our brains.
Casting and foundry: Benoît Villemont
Graphic design (typography): Camille Garnier and Alex Paraboschi
Sound piece: Thibaut Villemont
Exhibition Photography: Julian Lister
A collection of design memorabilia and reflections, from the 1980s archive of Juliana Sissons.
We have been delving into the archive of fashion designer and Nottingham Trent University (NTU) lecturer Juliana Sissons. Housed within the Gallery Vitrines, London’s Calling reveals an eclectic collection of Juliana’s personal memorabilia and influences, iconic magazine features, design objects, and video footage from the 1980s.
The 1980s was a decade when civil unrest threatened to undermine the country’s social order. Meanwhile, London’s fashion was at its most novel and diverse. At a time when Vogue was covering trend directions in pastel shade twinsets and pearls, the Face, i-D, and Blitz magazines were embracing the raw creativity in the unique style of London’s youth culture.
Young people were making innovative statements about contemporary life through their dress. Not driven by fashion labels of the time, but preferring to create their own ‘signature’ through eclectic mixes of jumble sale finds, vintage pieces, old theatre costumes, and home sewn garments – pushing ideas outside of their traditional influences.
Young fashion designers emerged in an ad hoc way during the early 80s and were echoed in the anarchic environment of the music industry, and in the nightclubs that sprang up spontaneously across the capital. Creative self-expression was the focus that formed the ethos of London’s clubs in the early 1980s and the hedonistic mix of people who were drawn to this scene encouraged creativity and risk taking in design.
This unique display gives a snapshot of Juliana’s life as a fashion designer in London through the 1980s, working with the likes of Lee Alexander McQueen, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Top of the Pops, Divine, Scarlett Cannon, Leigh Bowery, Isabella Blow, and Judy Blame – capturing the excitement of this unique time of self-expression.
In Conversation with Scarlett Cannon and Juliana Sissons
Wednesday 18 October 2017, 2.15 pm – 4 pm
Join us on Wednesday 18 October as Juliana and Scarlett share their experiences of what it was like to be part of the vibrant, transitional youth culture and clubbing scene in London during the 1980s. London was experiencing a social, cultural and political revolution, paving the way for self-expression and rebellion. The club scene in London was explosive and challenged boundaries; and the fashion that came with it was flamboyant, hedonistic and designed to shock.
To reserve your free place, visit the event booking page on the NTU website. This event is open to students, staff, alumni, and the general public.
Ahead of their forthcoming solo exhibition Artificial Sensibility, curator Tom Godfrey caught up with Camille Le Houezec and Jocelyn Villemont from It’s Our Playground to ask them a few questions about their practice and what to expect from their exhibition…
Tom: I’m interested in this term ‘hybrid learning process’ that is referred to in the exhibition text. How are you considering Bonington Gallery’s own context of being a gallery situated at the heart of an existing learning environment?
It’s Our Playground: The show is titled Artificial Sensibility in reference to artificial intelligence. It echoes the way we seek to find a sensibility in everyday interactions with our technological devices, and the way they are more and more precisely trained to mimic human behaviour.
The starting point of the exhibition is ‘image recognition’, a process used to identify an object or a feature in a digital image. A toddler will only need to see the image of an apple a few time before naming it, whereas a machine will have to inspect hundreds of apples in order to identify it. Both the human brain and the computer rely on the shape, the color, the pattern of a thing to recognise it. We find it interesting that humans create machine learning processes based on brain function. The show focuses on how the flaws of these automated techniques can lead to misunderstanding, create confusion or even poetry.
The prints hanging from the corrugated sheets of plastic within the exhibition have been made using stock images bought on the internet. These pictures of natural elements have been superimposed in order to produce big collages which might actually trick recognition systems.
As artists, there is another way of learning that we like to use : collaboration! This exhibition is built around the idea of a collaborative process as a way to generate complex artworks.
Given the location of Bonington Gallery, an exhibition space situated on a university campus, we thought it would be a suitable context for the show.
Tom: The generative result of ‘misunderstanding’ and ‘confusion’ feels an appropriate theme to explore within an art-school where these positions are cited as being advantageous in the early development of work.
Could you talk in more detail about the comparison between how a machine and a human might perceive and (mis)recognise an object? And how this could be a potential analogy for how we view artworks?
IOP: Like artificial intelligence, we have to train our senses from the early stage of our lives to perceive and recognise objects and people precisely and to name them. The way we feel emotions, the way events orientate our actions have a direct impact on our behaviours.
We strongly believe sensibility, education, taste, intuition influence the way we perceive events, trends and we can stretch it to artworks. Emotion, intuition, sensibility is exactly what still separate us from machines. In an art school context, misunderstanding, confusions, or even mistakes are considered positive experiments, these can make you take ways you would not have taken, make choices you would not have made.
Now imagine an art-teacher robot, we guess it could generate very relevant questions in a critical review setup and it could also teach you facts : names, dates or historical context. The computer program will describe the shape, colour and possibly identify the object or art piece, but it won’t be able to teach you how to look at a work of art, nor how to interpret it. What interests us in the context of the show is when the computer creates a gap between what it ‘sees’ and the actual object, when the machine’s deduction leads us to consider the object (or artwork) differently. As long as the human will not be able to teach machines how to express feelings, subjective matters, you will need a human brain to interpret its failures as poetry.
Tom: It’s Our Playground is a practice that straddles that of an artist and a curator. The side-effect of this appears to be that you treat materials and artworks in equal measure, and often in quite an irreverent way by positioning other peoples artworks within environments that you create, and not necessarily in ‘optimum’ conditions that a lot of artists might aspire to.
Can you talk about how you ‘treat’ other peoples works, and your attitudes towards this?
IOP: Our attitude towards curation comes from our experience of dealing with images of artworks or documentation of shows on our website the same way artists have appropriated historical facts or artistic practices in art history. From the beginning of our collaboration, we created a setup where we could experiment freely, publicly, and independently.
As artists, we consider the exhibition as a medium and we treat other artists’ artworks as precious materials displayed in what we consider being interesting/relevant conditions for them, environments the artists themselves would not necessarily have thought about. We prefer thinking about our projects as new contexts for the artists and artworks we like and respect, a way to give a new point of view on artworks we do not consider unequivocal. It is important, as an artist to show your work several times in different places but we can be sceptical when it comes to what is considered ‘optimum condition’ which often means an empty, bright, white walled space. These conventional, often commercial spaces are far from being problematic but we believe our role as artist is to challenge these and try a different approach, imagine new things.
Most of the time, we come up with a specific context and present it to the artists, to determine which piece could work in such exhibition.
Very often and when possible we dedicate budget to new productions. To be honest we consider our practice as being often close to collaboration in many ways and at every stage of the working process.
Tom: Can you talk further about the collaborators that you are working with on this exhibition?
IOP: Always looking for new experiments, this time we wanted to involve other practitioners in the exhibition making. Rather than building the display and showing other artists’ work, we were interested in producing artworks with people who do not call themselves artists. We came up with the concept, a title and some ideas for pieces but we started discussing it with collaborators in the early stage of the project so they could properly be involved in the forms we would produce together. For example, Camille Garnier and Alex Paraboschi, both graphic designers made the double sided prints with us. We talked about Artificial Sensibility and what it could mean in the context of a show and decided that we would select natural elements which gave their names to colours and each of us would be responsible for designing the front or the back of the print knowing that these would hang from transparent corrugated sheets of plastic which would affect slightly the way we see one side or the other.
Collaboration is also a way for us to learn new techniques we are not familiar with. Benoît is a designer and founder and we were interested in working with him for a while so we thought this could be the opportunity we were looking for! The prints we produced with Camille and Alex needed hooks to hang from the plastic walls and we designed those together with Benoît. We agreed on these pointing shapes like computer arrows, human hands, crab claws and biface tools. For the show we also wanted to explore a more technological aspect, and invited Thibaut to react to the context. Being a creative technologist, Thibaut is very knowledgeable when it comes to, coding, web designing, new technologies, the Internet, he is also a musician and we thought this show would [provide] the occasion to work together once again (Thibaut has been working with us on websites for the past eight years). After weeks of discussions brainstorming we agreed that Thibaut would be working on a soundtrack, an environment inspired by the ‘noises’ of a thinking computer, an interpretation of the learning process we talked about earlier. Working with members of the family and friends (both Benoit and Thibaut are Jocelyn’s brothers) has been a great experience because it’s very straightforward; we understood each other well along the way and were able to take the project further.
Tom: You appear to work in the virtual and physical realm in equal measure. Could you talk about how you approach working in these contexts, the differences and whether you’d consider these contexts becoming more aligned?
Right after graduating we both moved from France to Glasgow and working online seemed like a great substitute to a physical space at the time. We started doing shows on our website as a way to continue working in a city we didn’t know without having to look (and pay) for a studio/gallery space. It was mostly a very good way to connect with other artists on the other side of the planet!
Then after a couple of years we had the opportunity to run SWG3 Gallery and get our programme funded and our online activity became more of a “subject” rather than a “space”. We started exploring the relationship between the virtual and physical realm with Dovble Trovble at CCA and www.itsourplayground.com in 2012 where we asked the artists involved to produce a work that would exist in both contexts at the same time.
It’s hard to disconnect our project from their online presence, and it is a reality for a great number of artists. Mostly because any project will find its way online and we like to think this step is a decisive one. For us, it is a starting point when we use actual exhibition views and artwork documentation from other artists as raw material to create new works and sometimes including the online potential of the exhibition in its concept (Screen Play at SWG3 Gallery, 2014; Visual Matter in Piacé, 2016; Reconstructive Memory at Galerie Valentin, 2016). Our recent web projects could even be seen as algorithm-based publications (cf Infinite Memories, Exhibition Gradient)
We do not see much difference between working online or offline, releasing a new website is as exciting as opening a show!
Tom: I’m interested in the idea of ‘strategy’, particularly in terms of what you say about the online projects being a way of connecting with artists you want to work with, building a community and avoiding isolation.
There is a clear lineage between your early web projects and the more physically ambitious projects you are doing now, and there appears to be a number of relationships you have with artists that have galvanised over time, via repeat projects.
Maybe a fitting way to conclude this interview is to expand on the idea of strategy, in terms of pro-active ways that anybody can employ that can help expand context for what you do.
IOP: We both felt quite early on (while in art school) that unity was force! So we started working together feeling we could be more ambitious, do things faster. Obviously we both had very different practices, but we also had complementary knowledge and skills.
We probably started organising shows with other artists for the exact same reasons. We like the idea of learning from someone else’s practice, gathering talented people and have interesting (often challenging) conversations, building long lasting and strong relationships over work. Most of these relationships with artists emanated from exhibition projects rather than already established acquaintance as the Internet has always allowed us to reach artists we never met before but whom we liked the work of.
After a while, this “strategy” became the core of our practice. We rarely do things on our own; inviting artists, makers, writers, designers is now totally embedded in our work. And while our practice became more hybrid (being successively curators, producers, scenographers…) it can now interfere with different contexts and allow us to be more free.
Artificial Sensibility will open with a preview on Thursday 21 September 5 – 7 pm. The exhibition will remain open until Friday 27 October, visit the webpage for more details.
All images courtesy It’s Our Playground.
A selection from our blog of posts relating to Jason Evan’s exhibition, You’re Gonna Need A Bigger Boat.
21 April 2017
Mark Patterson reviews Jason Evans’ exhibition, You’re Gonna Need a Bigger Boat for the Nottingham Post.
11th April 2017
The installation for Jason Evans’ You’re Gonna Need a Bigger Boat is currently underway. Check out some sneak peeks from inside the Gallery below.
As promised by Jason in the Q&A, you can expect to see some narrowboat painting in the Gallery. All painted by hand in traditional style by the talented Robert Naghi. Join us at the preview to see the finished painting, Thursday 13 April, 5 pm – 7 pm.
A large part of the show involves prints from the Clark Brothers extensive catalogue of promotional materials. As well as the simple one or two-colour ‘Sale” prints, there are also some interesting details to look out for…
29 March 2017
Volunteers wanted to participate in a t-shirt project as part of Jason Evans’ ‘You’re Gonna Need A Bigger Boat’ exhibition which opens here at the Gallery on Wednesday 19 April. Read the brief from Jason below:
I am looking for volunteers to wear specially produced t-shirts; made to extend the reach of my exhibition ‘You’re Gonna Need a Bigger Boat’ at Bonington Gallery, Wednesday 19 April – Friday 19 May 2017. More information about the exhibition can be found here on the exhibition page.
I am looking for willing individuals who work in public facing roles to wear the shirt that features a wood-engraving by artist Philip Hagreen (see below). While I am in Nottingham I will attempt to make a portrait of as many of the participants as possible, in their place of work, and would encourage ongoing sharing of images of the shirts online/in social media, with the accompanying hashtag #youregonnaneedabiggerboat and/or #philiphagreen. The intention is to build up an inventory of images of people wearing this t-shirt during the exhibition dates and beyond.
In recognition of your contribution to the project all participants can keep their (limited edition) t-shirt.
T-shirts are available in standard sizes ranging from small to x-large. In your email, please indicate the size you would like.
Jason Evans
www.jasonevans.info
Image: Wood engraving by Philip Hagreen, courtesy of Ditchling Museum of Arts + Craft