Exhibtion/Gallery Reviews

The Side Gallery.

Street Life Instantaneous: Photographs of Newcastle in the 1890’s.

The Side Gallery is a lovely quaint exhibiting space down by the Quayside; since its opening in 1977 it has been showcasing the local photography scene in the North East of England and the inspiring historical and contemporary work from around the world. ‘Street Life Instantaneous: Photographs of Newcastle in the 1890’s’ was a delightful exhibition of Glass plate negatives recently discovered by the photographer Aaron Guy. They document street life in Newcastle in the late 19^th Century with hand held cameras; the photographs depict an endearing honestly into city life focusing on areas such as down by the Milk market, Sandgate and Quayside. The photographs are most likely the work Newcastle Photographer Edgar Lee, whose work had been previously showcased in the Side gallery in the 1890’s. Lee was a respected and successful Photographer in the Newcastle area and even had a professional studio in Eldon Square. Despite the relative infancy of photography as a medium, Lee was making his own Hand held cameras and fast drying exposure plates. These innovative techniques allowed lee to ‘capture a moment’ with pioneering immediacy. This was my first visit to the Side gallery, but I will defiantly be going again after seeing this exhibition. It is a lovely Gallery space and the careful curation of images made the exhibition interesting an engaging. It is free Admission, and has a wonderful collection of Prints, postcards, Amber films and books all concerned with photography and often linked with the North East, well worth a visit!

The Vane Gallery.

Narbi Price: Shan’t Quit

I think the Vane Gallery is one of the city’s best exhibiting spaces, and is often largely missed! The Vane was founded in 1997 and was designed to be a cutting edge contemporary art space right in the centre of Newcastle, it has exhibitions of a variety of contemporary artists from across the world as well as showcasing the regional talent. Currently being exhibited at the Vane is An exhibition by the Local artists Narbi Price called ‘Shan’t Quit’. This is a great exhibition of paintings and prints by Price who tends to use acrylics and a variety of Glazes to create a charming realism in his work whilst retaining a painterly honesty. The ‘mundane and overlooked’ are a frequent subject matter in his work, which is also the case for this exhibition with scenes of loading bays, car parks and such like. This series of works by Price actually depicts the location of the 1888 Jack the Ripper Whitechapel Murders, with the initial of the victim subtly added to the title of selected works. Through this series Price is exploring the relationship between the history of any given site and the mundanity of experiencing it, a contrast also reflected in his painting technique. From a distance the locations appear to be painted almost photorealistic, but when you get close to the surface you can see the painterly gestures and thick dabs of paint. This exhibition certainly didn’t disappoint, it is on till 26^th October, don’t miss out!!

Baltic: Thomas Scheibitz. ‘ONE-Time Pad’ 26 July- 3 Novemeber 2013.

Thomas Scheibitz is a German artist, born in 1968 and he studied at the Art Academy in Dresden where he developed his signature visual language. Scheibitz creates work across a variety of media but most are concerned with the formality of geometric shapes, vivid colour and a continual play between figuration and abstraction. Scheibitz tends to seek his inspiration from assorted found objects, which feature in the exhibition; he has deliberately painted some of them yellow so that the colour of the object less easily distracts from its formal quality’s. Thomas Scheibitz’s work also references themes in the everyday and he draws from a wide range of motifs; from film, literature and design to the great renaissance masters. This exhibition is a showcase of over two hundred works by the artist over the last five years, and is spread across two floors in the Baltic. The lower level, is mainly large scale paintings but also an archive of found objects taken directly from the artists studio in Berlin. Whilst the upper level contains a more eclectic mix of pieces and covered more of the artists process behind the works with a room full of preparatory drawings. I really enjoyed the exhibition and found it quite engaging, especially Scheibitz sculptures out of cardboard which were highly glossed and gave the illusion of wood and dense materiality. I was less impressed with the paintings, however this could be to do with my irrational prejudice towards all things ‘Neon’ in artwork. Nevertheless Scheibitz large scale works do have a striking quality about them, he paints a very shallow pictorial space with interlocking geometric forms that almost echo some kind of impossible jigsaw. Formally the paintings are quite interesting as Scheibitz uses a combination of traditional paints such as oils alongside household ‘B&Q purchases’ with even greater juxtaposition between rapid painterly marks and a carefully rendered almost graphic approach. Furthermore this flirtation between the figurative and the abstract in his work is interesting, and wholly subjective so defiantly take a trip so see what you make of it yourself!!

Personal Project Development.

Initially i wanted to create work that responded to my current setting as an artist in Newcastle; I thought this would predominately take shape (exploring new subject territory) as landscape and seascape studies of Northumberland and Tynemouth. Having being warned to avoid typical 'postcard' subject matters such as Tyne bridge, i began thinking about making this 'postcard' element explicit and perhaps painting these scenes to appear formally as paintings of  postcards. However over my brief trip back to London over the Easter break, i salvaged a large collection of old family Postcards, letters, albums etc which fascinated me. It is hard to say what it was that captured my interest in these images, but they became the subject of my subsequent work (and perhaps the foreseeable future). The postcards dated from around 1907 and many had correspondence written on the reverse; all belonged to my grandfathers's Aunts Postcard collection.

Different aspects of each postcard interested me, for some it was the physical object and others the image or handwriting and i suppose literary context. The above painting was created from a postcard that particularly interested me, due to its circular shape and also how is was curiously off centre. I painted this as if it were on a gallery postcard, and kept a limited palate and the subject matter slightly hazy. I was also interested in the use of Text, and a phrase on the back of the postcard which stated "this space may now be used for communication" which i letter transferred on to the right hand side.

I continued to work with the postcards, adding paint and text (inspired by Ed Ruscha). I also created a collage of enlarged sections of the photographs and painting which i then painted into, again with a liited palate and blurring the image to reflect this loss of information.

I had various other studies alongside this exploring different qualities concerned with the postcards. I have decided that i would like to create professional postcards of all my 'finished works' and build up a postcard portfolio. When considering my work i realised that this notion of reproduction was an underlying conceptual interest of mine; questioning what my final 'outcome' could be considered to be. Is it the painting? or is the postcard reproduction of the painting sufficient enough, does a viewer get any more or indeed any less out of seeing the actual piece of work?

The Final Outcome

This project, with its unconnected strands of individualism and creativity, has been connected together to take the form of a dice. The 'Dice' not only acts as a facilitator for our purposeful play: the viewer is invited into a game of chance,whereupon throwing the object they find drawings through the peepholes, which were of a once unconnected past. Furthermore, the 'Dice' becomes a museum. Our works of art, once visual threads of thought, are bound together as six faces contained within an indestructable whole.

An insight into our social activity

 As well as 'blogging', social networking became a key aspect in the development of our project. Allowing fast, long-distant, intertwined group messaging which enabled us to schedule meetings, inpromptu-rehersals and ultimately, it fed directly into the 'usefulness' of this project.

Ideas and practicalities of the 'Performative Presentation'

Edited version of our first film. Connecting the unconnected.

Film focusing on body language, gestures, voices and the film in full.

Weaving hangings

Weaving text from video and mark making drawings to connect the unconnected

UN COUP DE DÉS JAMAIS N'ABOLIRA LE HASARD - MUSIQUE, Michalis Pichler, 2009

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkG_qAk7zxQ

'All thoughts emit a throw of the dice'. Mallarmé

A Throw of a Dice

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Page from Un Coup de Dés jamais n'abolira le Hasard (1897) by Stéphane Mallarmé
Edition of l’Imprimerie Nationale from 1990

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Stéphane Mallarmé worked on his long poem Un coup de dés (A Throw of the Dice), which consists of ten printed pages, for thirty years. The first printed version that approximately conformed to his wishes was begun in 1897, shortly before his death, and thus can be considered definitive only in a limited sense. The status and esthetic intention of the work go far beyond classic pattern poetry: the main phrase—Jamais un coup de dés n’abolira le hasard (A throw of the dice will never abolish chance)—is strewn across the entire text in the largest typeface. The spaces in between have subordinate clauses using nine other typefaces and types of highlighting. The intention was to enable a reading on several levels, similar to that of a score. Large blanks spaces and entirely blank pages allow the reader to experience his or her own shipwreck (naufrage). Particularly easy to understand in French, the phonetic equivalence of, for example, maître (master) and mètre (meter) or coup de dés (throw of the dice) and coup d’idées (spontaneous insight) permit many associations. The parallels to Claude Debussy’s esthetic of surfaces are obvious: the principle of the construction of La mer (The Sea; 1905) is not goal-oriented progression but rather the simultaneity or sequence of many small, brief movements. Mallarmé’s work has inspired many, mostly unsatisfying attempts at translation, film versions, and musical settings. In 1998, it was projected onto the four walls of a room at the Musée d’Orsayin Paris and could thus be experienced spatially like a constellation of stars.

This is a piece of documentation demonstrating how we came about the cube idea. We combined all six of our markmaking pieces to create a cube. Pinholes allow viewers to look inside to see the drawings. The idea came about as we wanted something which from the outside looked like a unified and complete object but on the inside demonstrated our individuality and something that was fun and interactional, encompassing our ideas of 'purposeful play'. 

 More Purposeful play.

Notes made from video on ideas of individuals and how they connect as a collective

Documenting the weaving process used to connect the unconnected

As Development from Mark making, we intend to make a white box sculptural installation. The cube will have our mark making drawings on the inside which you view through 'Dice' Holes. We felt it linked nicely to common ideas, such as having an element of chance, light and shadow and also the initial Archiving game we played at the start the project.

Primitive Mark Making