Eat, Use, Destroy :) / American Bodies

This is an overview of the exhibitions Eat, Use, Destroy :) and American Bodies, both at Islington Mill, Salford in October 2011. Eat, Use, Destroy :) was a group show which I curated as part of Free For Arts Festival. It's focus was described as follows:

An exhibition looking at how we form consumer relationships with objects, images and people. But not always to negative effect. Featuring fine art as well as graphic design and documentary photography by artists from Manchester, London and Dundee.

Micah Purnell, Desire, 2011

Micah Purnell's work is independently motivated propaganda, which often attacks consumerist values. One of his posters both hung in the exhibition space and was pasted to the outside of the building (above), which is the natural habitat for his work.

Jenny Evans, In The Night I, 2011

Jenny Evans' beautiful, painstaking paintings are counterpoised to work such as Purnell's. Indistinct objects are endowed with human connotations, treading a line between respect for a fragile humanity and the objectivity of contempt. In the night 1 presents as a screwed up pair of knickers for example, which could denote any element of human physicality ranging from the fully fulfilled to the awkward or broken.

Clockwise from top left, work by Celina Teague, Robson Cezar and Josh Young.

American Bodies is an exhibition of the work of by David Wojtowycz. Ink drawings portray men posing, their apparently naked lower halves blacked out with gloss black paint. The show is very slickly curated. The usual glass doors of the gallery are replaced with wooden walling, the internal surface of which is painted gloss black. This creates a formal relationship between the whole gallery space and the paper works featuring blacked out squares.

David descibed the show to me as being about the 'death of desire'. This statement alone makes for an interesting relationship between the two shows. The subject matter draws on 70's gay pornography. The crux is that that imagery can no longer be presented in the way he fondly remembers it, due to the historical knowledge relating to the emergence of AIDS.

The show seems to be very personal, and honest about the ambivalencies felt for the imagery alluded to. The 'self-censorship' and context related issues surrounding some of the works seems to relate closely to some of my own work included in Eat, Use, Destroy :) (below). The paintings are actually photographs of genuine adverts, traced over in paint. The personal ambivalence in this case is that both the adverts' subjects are people very close to me.

Josh Young, Acrylic paint on photographs, 2011.

American Bodies is still on throughout October - see Islington Mill website below for visiting details.
Eat, Use, Destroy :) also featured work by Cully, Matthew Randle and David Shamiri.
All images - copyright of the artists.


http://islingtonmill.com/
http://www.freeforartsfestival.co.uk/

Liverpool Biennial

I went to Liverpool for the first day of the Biennial and this is a slightly jazzed up version of what went in my notebook:

John Moore's painting prize

'Protest' - Nicholas Middleton

Looks like a history painting, with a crowd of people carefully arranged in chaos. Although it also bears the style of a painting made from photographs. This contrast is also seen in the detail of a 'crime scene' sticker shown next to an engraving on the 19th century monument. It makes the G9 protest scene look beautiful, which makes me think of freee - 'protest is beautiful'. There's all sorts of people - a grinning couple, business women, lots who look like passers by which have become involved, and lots with cameras.

'Somewhere Between Prayer and Agenda' - Cara Nahaul

Painting presents a mingled body of people, who look like largely undefined Muslims in prayer. The loose, ambiguous style playing with our idea of 'Muslim' as a visual category (cues in painting include hats and beards)?

'Spectrum Jesus' - Keith Coventry

Hard to see the portrait because the whole painting is dark blue. It's also glossy paint, and in a glazed frame. I thought this was the whole point of the work - a literal portrait of Jesus, yet you can't actually see who he is etc. Then I read the wikipedia entry on Coventry and realised that the painting is one of a set, that forms a rainbow. It also relates to fakes and forgeries - it is itself based on a forged painting. I suppose it suggests that religious stories and texts are unreliable on their own.

As a child I was a Roman Catholic. Every Sunday morning at seven o'clock I had to go to church where I had a few minutes to look at the texts that I had to read for the service. The image of Jesus is like a container for all sorts of ideas. Maybe subconsciously I thought of theTurin Shroud as well, how the image is just barely visible - which itself is meant to be a fake. It's not a natural thing, but yet, I'm neutralising it as an image by making monochromes.

(Coventry quote from Wikipedia)

I think the phrase  'Jesus is like a container' Coventry uses is very accurate in describing the multitude of theories, theological and otherwise, that have been applied to Christ. It suggests a blank sheet to which you bring your own ideas, which relates formally to his monochrome paintings, and also presents a popular postmodern(?) idea. You could also see a container as something which holds its various contents together.

Other than that I saw Freee's window installations - commercial style window-sized stickers with their own slogans. Most of them were old pieces, so I thought it looked like a 'greatest hits' selection. I actually bumped into one of freee (Beech) on the train on the way back and apparently he'd said something similar to the organiser - 'you're the first person to give us an album, we've only has singles before'.