Big thanks to everyone who came along to the Preview of Video Days last night! We really enjoyed hosting Nottingham’s skate community for an evening of photos and film screenings – as well as a great talk from Chris Lawton, co-founder of Skate Nottingham. By the end of the evening a mini skate session broke out …inside the gallery…
A huge thank you again to Skate Nottingham, Varial Magazine, SkatePal, Blind Skateboards and everyone else involved for their support!
A selection of photos from the opening of Lace: Unarchived.
A selection of images from the opening of Ruth Angel Edwards: Wheel of the Year ! Effulent Profundal Zone !
In the lead up to Ruth Angel Edwards’ solo exhibition Wheel of the Year, we made a series of blog posts containing material forwarded to us from Ruth, that offered insight into what informs her practice, and more specifically the work she’ll be presenting here at Bonington.
29 November 2017
Our first post below relates to the modern day phenomenon of ‘Ghost Nets’. Please click onto the image or link below to be taken to the article:
‘What are Ghost Nets?’ [online] Available at: http://oliveridleyproject.org/what-are-ghost-nets/
30 November 2017
Second post from Ruth Angel Edwards, referring to the MS Moby Dada cruiseferry. Click the image to sign the petition:
‘Stop the use of Looney Tunes on Military ships’ [online] Available at: https://www.change.org/p/stop-the-use-of-looney-tunes-on-military-ships
12 December 2017
Ruth Angel Edwards [Evening] post 3, click the image or link to read the report.
‘Investigation launched after one of the ‘worst’ cases of fly-tipping’ [online] Available at: http://www.nottinghampost.com/news/local-news/investigation-launched-after-one-worst-284790
3 January 2018
‘Mutoid Sam and The Notting Hill Carnival’ [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Izel6F8d1qg
3 January 2018
‘Profundal Zone’ [online] Available at: https://aquaticbiomebreakdown.weebly.com/profundal-zone.html
10 January 2018
Ruth’s 6th blog post links us to the the essay: Ghosts Among the Ruins: Towards a Haunted Phenomenology by Mark Horvath & Adam Lovasz
10 January 2018
‘The Lorax (Original)’ [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8V06ZOQuo0k
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.
Bonington Gallery curator Tom Godfrey caught up with Sara MacKillop to discuss her ongoing fascination with objects, images, sculpture and printed matter (and the overlap between all of these things), ahead of the opening of Sara’s solo exhibition, One Room Living:
Tom: I’m interested in this relationship between printed matter and the sculptural form that is prevalent in your practice. It’s something that you explore in both your publications and gallery exhibitions, where tropes are exchanged between these art-forms that challenges associated terms of engagement, i.e; a book is for handling and a sculpture is for looking at. Could you expand a little on this?
Sara: I think the starting point of this is that I am very concerned with presentation and display when encountering images and objects. Therefore, when there is a printed image I am immediately interested in what it is printed on, if there is something on the other side etc. This is maybe something to do with a use of found or altered objects or images of various kinds and looking at the wrong aspect of them – or approaching it in a non-straightforward fashion.
When making a publication I am very concerned in finding the correct format for what I am going to present and in some cases, the publication can be almost all format. As a result, my publications can appear like a mess of stuff – this wasn’t a plan, but I quite like it. Sometimes a publication is presented as a sculpture in an exhibition. The sculptures quite often have a temporary feel, but can also be presented in more than one way or adapted each time they are shown.
Tom: This exchange between sculpture & printed matter, with its subsequent challenge on a pre-conceived status of sculpture – making it into something that is adaptable and ephemeral – is really interesting.
I wondered if you could talk a bit further about the connection the exhibition makes to the wider environment of the university. The introduction text references an analysis being made towards how the institution’s function is represented across a multitude of different spaces. Could you expand on this and also describe this process of observation you have made from your visits to the gallery?
Sara: On my first visit to the Bonington Gallery I was very conscious of the different uses of space I encountered on the way to the gallery – the cafe, art shop etc. When you arrive at the gallery itself you walk downwards into the space, and there is a series of doors leading to different spaces with different uses from the gallery. In a way it made sense to me for the exhibition to appear as a repository for motifs of these spaces and I am interested to see what happens when they overlap. I had been working with some of these motifs (images of art supplies from promotional material) prior to the exhibition, but the work is mainly developed after initial site visits.
Tom: I’ve followed your work for nearly 15 years and have witnessed what feels like a sustained enquiry into a certain type of source material that could perhaps be described as ‘every-day’. Whereas some artists fetishise certain systems, objects or brands into their work as an attempt to command ownership over them, you manage to preserve an open and democratic feel to your varied output that becomes more reflective of the idiosyncratic attachments we form with certain objects and images we all encounter on a daily basis.
Could you talk more about this ongoing commitment and interest in the materials and source material that informs in your work?
Sara: My interest in an object or image can be initiated by a recognition that it presents something in a way that is better than I could achieve myself. This is often an unintended consequence of its design or presentation; again a result of looking at something in the wrong way or purposely misunderstanding it. It’s not really about identification where I feel it speaks to me – I usually become concerned with how an object or image functions where I’ve seen it, and how it was displayed. I then make changes to the framing / presentation, sometimes working within and/or disrupting the parameters of the format itself, and finally move on to something else. Pen Fence is a good example of this, although I am continuing to use different versions of this.
Tom: Accompanying the exhibition in the main gallery is a presentation of all your published & self-published materials from the past 9+ years. Could you talk about your history within self-publishing?
Sara: The first publication I made was 50 Envelope Windows in 2008. I had all these images of envelope security patterns scanned through the windows of the envelopes, and I hadn’t found a fitting way of presenting them until I tried them as a book. The slight differences and sequences fitted to the turning of the pages of the book perfectly. After that I started having ideas that the end format was a publication and that has continued until now. There are now around 35 publications in total. The publication itself is the artwork. I was working at Donlon Books at the time and they stocked a lot of artist books. It was a good way into learning about the rich history of artist publications.
Also, X Marks the Bökship provided a great place to meet people who make publications and see what was being made. I am attracted to the kind of publication which can have many forms; the way that for quite modest means you can make something, distribute it easily to pre-existing communities and then move on to the next project. I organise the Artist Self Publishers (ASP) Fair with artist, Dan Mitchell. We make a fair that offers free tables and focuses on the publication as artwork. We’ve done it for three years now and hope to continue. I’ve valued the experience of artist self-publishing and the groups of people I have met through it, and so wanted to share this.
Tom: We held a discussion in the gallery in 2015 (to accompany Foxall Studios’ Publishing Rooms exhibition) that looked at the ‘changing importance of printed matter and whether it still holds up as a relevant and vital contemporary media format’. Do you have any views on this?
Sara: Yes – I think printed material is still a very vital material. The availability and affordability of print on demand makes it accessible, which makes it vital. The new context of printed matter as one of many formats to produce and distribute to me actually makes it more interesting.
One Room Living will open with a preview on Thursday 2 November 5 – 7 pm. The exhibition will remain open until Friday 8 December, visit the webpage for more details.
All images courtesy Sara MacKillop.
Juliana Sissons spoke to BBC Radio Nottingham’s Alan Clifford about her ‘London’s Calling’ Vitrines exhibition and wider creative practice. It’s available to be listened to on the iPlayer for 28 days from today, here.
Bonington Gallery Curator Tom Godfrey spent 5 days in August visiting documenta 14 in Kassel and Skulptur Projekte Münster. Below are some highlights (and digressions) taken from our instagram feed during the trip.
Here are a few images from the openings of It’s Our Playground: Artificial Sensibility, and our Vitrines show London’s Calling. Thank you to everybody who came down! Both exhibitions will be open til 27th October 2017.
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.