not at this address
On Saturday I finally caught the new exhibition at Bury Art Gallery, Not at this address. It features regional artists 'who share the same ambition; the wish to transcend the local and engage with the global cultural dialogue.' If you go to galleries in Greater Manchester will any regularity then the chances are that you will have come across more than one of these artists previously.
Before I review the exhibition I want to plug the event If not this, which is part of the exhibition, and features sound artists Ben Gwilliam, Helmut Lemke, Lee Patterson & Matt Wand. It takes place at Bury Art Gallery on Friday 4 September between 19:00-22:00. If you've been to the Salford Concerts Series this year then you will have seen Ben, Lee and Matt perform. You may have seen Helmut at Islington Mill with Chris Gladwin last year, or during a previous Salford Concerts Series. I thoroughly recommend making the effort to get to this.
I already mentioned that you might be familiar with a few of the artists in Not at this address since they've exhibited regionally as well as further afield. More than half the artists work with The International 3 based in Manchester or have appeared in one of their exhibitions. Although curiously I think I actually saw Pat Flynn's work at an exhibition in Cardiff's Chapter Arts in 2007 rather than locally. The artists involved are Jesse Ash, Brass Art, Maurice Carlin, Alison Erika Forde, Pat Flynn (whose large pieces I'd seen previously), Rachel Goodyear (whose work I've seen at Cornerhouse I think, and at International 3), Andrew McDonald, Amy Pennington, Magnus Quaife (whose work I don't know, but my friend Gary was in the same exhibition as him in Bristol last year), Rachael Elwell (who I've probably met to be honest, although I don't remember), Sarah Sanders, and Anne Charnock (whose work I've seen at Cornerhouse and the Text Festival).
As with the Text Festival exhibition I found that my favourite pieces were generally the smaller: Jesse Ash's newspaper collages which don't look like collages at all but just folded pages from newspapers until you look closely and see where the image has been manipulated; Amy Pennington's short film of what I took to be a tealight on the arm of a chair or setee, with a soundtrack of ambient sound; Rachael Elwell's crochet drawing. But I'm getting ahead of where I want to be.
When you enter the gallery the two things that immediately strike you are the bright, superficially cutesy images on found objects by Alison Erika Forde along the wall to your left, and the two large pieces by Pat Flynn on the back wall directly opposite where you're standing, one predominantly orange, the other predominantly grey. I found I started to lose interest in Forde's work with so much presented in bulk, and to take more interest in what the pieces were painted on. One of the problems I had with the work is common to a few of the artists in the show, especially Rachel Goodyear. The problem is that once you have a piece of work that's well-executed and delicate, perhaps also cute and faux-naive, but which then has a disturbing element introduced there doesn't seem to be anywhere else for it to go. You can talk about 'fairytale worlds', or 'innocence vs experience', but the work really has to be able to carry that. To me a lot of the work doesn't leave any space for the viewer, but refers only to itself. Even where you might say there are references to folk myth and childhood fears it often feels like they're just left as non-specific presences in quote marks, and haven't actually left a trace on the art at all.
I don't feel especially happy writing that, I enjoyed the exhibition, and I know that most people will say I'm wrong. At the moment though I still don't quite get the appeal of Rachel Goodyear's work. Almost everyone I know loves her work, and since it's usually small, subtle, discreet, sparse, well-executed and doesn't explain itself it should be right up my street. And yet somehow it leaves me cold. It may be that like with some other art in the past there will be a piece that will suddenly reveal the reason why everyone else loves the work so much, but it hasn't happened yet. But again I'm getting ahead of myself.
Alison Erika Forde's pieces take up the right wall of the first gallery space, and as I said, in bulk they don't do much for me. They seem to refer to naive or outsider art, and also to the lost worlds of childhood and the wider past. That some of them appear to be painted on found objects like house numbers would also seem to relate to what I think of as vernacular culture, the way people attempt to personalise their possessions through decoration - sometimes bought, such as house numbers on slices of wood - and sometimes made, like scarecrows or the decoration painted on wheelie bins. But there's a false note somewhere, I'm not sure it's possible to be knowingly naive.
Pat Flynn's works on the end wall are pictures of anonymous contemporary urban locations. They look photographic until you come closer and see that they probably aren't, but they're certainly not painted. I've read that they are created on computer pixel by pixel, but whether this is reproducing already existing images (which seems likely), or inventing plausible scenes I don't know. Although all human presence has been erased from them in terms of what the image shows and in terms of the artist's 'hand' being visible I like these pieces. The affectless representation, and the banality of the images and what's represented brings the emptiness right back to a kind of beauty. Or at least admiration.
On the right hand wall of the first gallery the largest piece is a set of related photographs by Maurice Carlin, some too high for you actually look at properly, of the remnants of posters dating from the miners' strike on a wall in Salford. There are people, individuals and groups, in the photos, either just standing in front of the wall or interacting with the posters by photographing them or looking at them. If there's a narrative or message it's not immediately apparent. The posters linger on defiantly, but reduced to a small remnant, much like the mines themselves. Perhaps the temporal and cultural distance between now and then is being emphasised. In an exhibition where the human presence has been almost totally erased this piece is an anomoly, crowded with people and with references to a real cultural moment.
Hanging close to the wall is Sarah Sanders' piece (I think, I didn't take notes on the day) Fast Slow. This is a large sheet of heavy looking paper on which the words 'fast' and 'slow' have been written, the words running into each other, from about halfway down the page. I'm still not sure whether I like this or not. I like the idea, but I'm not wholly convinced by the execution. I can't remember if Rachel Goodyear's work is next on this wall, heading back toward the entrance, or in the other room. I think it's here, but in any case I've dealt with my misgivings in some detail already.
The final work in this room is a small screen, to the right of the entrance as you come in, playing a short film by Amy Pennington. Already mentioned, this shows what I take to be a tealight on the arm of a piece of furniture. The soundtrack appears to be ambient noise, and I would have liked it to be cranked up a little. Text that appears to be a message from a daughter to her mother appears in subtitle at the bottom of the screen. The text gave me a problem. It could be the 'reason' for the piece, but I wasn't sure about it. I wasn't sure whether it was meant to be deliberately inexpressive, or if it was simply a flat piece of writing from someone aiming at poignant. The repetition of it on a loop would suggest that any meaning is intended to be flattened out of it by over-emphasis, but it might equally be a sincere attempt at a mantra. On the whole though I enjkoyed the piece, and was willing to leave the status of the text unresolved.
In the smaller second room there are a similar number of pieces, two of which are on a large scale. On one end wall, to your left as you enter, is a large presentation of watercolour images. These are from a sequence I think called 1968, which I believe is by Marcus Quaife. The images are taken from photographs, or in one case a cartoon, but use a hightened contrast to reduce the amount of detail reproduced. Some images are familiar, the majority aren't. The cartoon referring to politicians (Nixon aside) that you don't recognise, the degraded images, and the fact that they are presented decontextualised, like botanical or ornithological specimens acts to distance you from them, and to make the year seem distant beyond even the reach of nostalgia. Once again I'm not sure what I actually think of the work.
On the opposite wall are a couple of large pieces, either watercolour or ink, which I believe are by Brass Art. They resemble illustrations from collections of folktales, a theme already present in Alison Erika Forde and Rachel Goodyear. As with both of those others I couldn't really say that I actually felt any sense of the threat or darkness that the artists seem to have attempted to encode. Like Forde's work, but not Goodyear's, the work also seemed a bit whimsical and even perhaps superficial. But it is very well executed.
Leaping about this space, Andrew McDonald has small screens next to each entrance of the space on which different animations are playing. These are computer animations based apparently on handdrawn images. Whether those handdrawn images are based on other sources isn't mentioned, but the movements of the human figure in each look suspiciously like they originate in either film or more likely motion-capture technology. They represent 'adventures' of a headless, shirtless person who I think is called John. In the first he climbs gingerly around a stony landscape. In the second he descends ladders into a room containing a machine, which activates while he is there, but which doesn't seem to serve any purpose. Although I have no real lasting impression from either piece they are fascinating achievements and compulsively watchable even while frustratingly uneventful.
The remaining pieces are relatively discreet, and all are among my favourites. Two of them, Jesse Ash's newspaper collages and Rachael Elwell's crochet drawing, have already been mentioned. Anne Charnock's text image is discreet more because it is high up on the wall than from any lack of size. It is one of her pieces which features a corrected text, in this case amended to say precisely the opposite of what it originally said, as you might see it on screen if you had document markup activated. Albeit in different colours. Ash and Elwell's pieces are on the opposite wall. I've already described briefly. In Ash's photographs from newspapers are collaged by elements from the photo being cut from another copy of the paper and added to the image. As well as being precisely executed, the changes to the images don't appear to make much difference to the original. There may be a point being made here about the media and the manipulation of image. Elwell's picture is small and low on the wall, and appears to be a drawing of a loose fragment of crochet. All these pieces, being so inexplicable, apparently only partially complete draw you in and require effort. They are probably my favourite works, along with Pat Flynn's larger pieces, Amy Pennington's film, and Maurice Carlin's photographs.
Overall I enjoyed the show a lot and once again as with the Text Festival I like the way it's hung, allowing the work space to breathe, and drawing out connections between the work. Viewing the exhibition becomes an active process, not just a passive trudge round in sequence. Once you've been through the works you return to sample things in a different order, to see if you read things right, to check apparent echoes or contrasts between pieces. I also enjoy the relationship of tiny, discreet works to larger pieces.
Thematically I wasn't wholly convinced that the works do necessarily transcend the local, engage with the global cutlural dialogue (whatever that is), or whether that's necessarily a desireable thing. I'm certainly not convinced that works which don't transcend the local are excluded from any wider cultural dialogue. In the case of a lot of the work, both pieces I like and those I'm not so fond of, the supposed transcending of the local seems to take the form of a kind of hermeticism. Other than Maurice Carlin's photos it's true there are no specifically Mancunian or Northwest elements in any of the work, and some of the work does depict, utilise, or refer to products of a global culture - Pat Flynn's retail park, the objects painted on by Alice Erika Forde, and the magazines or newspapers used by Magnus Quaife and Jesse Ash for instance. What many of the works do appear to have in common is a flatness of affect, a distance and coldness. In some cases this works.
But make up your own mind. Get down to Bury before 7 November and have a look for yourself. Then let me know just how much you disagree with what I've written.
Before I review the exhibition I want to plug the event If not this, which is part of the exhibition, and features sound artists Ben Gwilliam, Helmut Lemke, Lee Patterson & Matt Wand. It takes place at Bury Art Gallery on Friday 4 September between 19:00-22:00. If you've been to the Salford Concerts Series this year then you will have seen Ben, Lee and Matt perform. You may have seen Helmut at Islington Mill with Chris Gladwin last year, or during a previous Salford Concerts Series. I thoroughly recommend making the effort to get to this.
I already mentioned that you might be familiar with a few of the artists in Not at this address since they've exhibited regionally as well as further afield. More than half the artists work with The International 3 based in Manchester or have appeared in one of their exhibitions. Although curiously I think I actually saw Pat Flynn's work at an exhibition in Cardiff's Chapter Arts in 2007 rather than locally. The artists involved are Jesse Ash, Brass Art, Maurice Carlin, Alison Erika Forde, Pat Flynn (whose large pieces I'd seen previously), Rachel Goodyear (whose work I've seen at Cornerhouse I think, and at International 3), Andrew McDonald, Amy Pennington, Magnus Quaife (whose work I don't know, but my friend Gary was in the same exhibition as him in Bristol last year), Rachael Elwell (who I've probably met to be honest, although I don't remember), Sarah Sanders, and Anne Charnock (whose work I've seen at Cornerhouse and the Text Festival).
As with the Text Festival exhibition I found that my favourite pieces were generally the smaller: Jesse Ash's newspaper collages which don't look like collages at all but just folded pages from newspapers until you look closely and see where the image has been manipulated; Amy Pennington's short film of what I took to be a tealight on the arm of a chair or setee, with a soundtrack of ambient sound; Rachael Elwell's crochet drawing. But I'm getting ahead of where I want to be.
When you enter the gallery the two things that immediately strike you are the bright, superficially cutesy images on found objects by Alison Erika Forde along the wall to your left, and the two large pieces by Pat Flynn on the back wall directly opposite where you're standing, one predominantly orange, the other predominantly grey. I found I started to lose interest in Forde's work with so much presented in bulk, and to take more interest in what the pieces were painted on. One of the problems I had with the work is common to a few of the artists in the show, especially Rachel Goodyear. The problem is that once you have a piece of work that's well-executed and delicate, perhaps also cute and faux-naive, but which then has a disturbing element introduced there doesn't seem to be anywhere else for it to go. You can talk about 'fairytale worlds', or 'innocence vs experience', but the work really has to be able to carry that. To me a lot of the work doesn't leave any space for the viewer, but refers only to itself. Even where you might say there are references to folk myth and childhood fears it often feels like they're just left as non-specific presences in quote marks, and haven't actually left a trace on the art at all.
I don't feel especially happy writing that, I enjoyed the exhibition, and I know that most people will say I'm wrong. At the moment though I still don't quite get the appeal of Rachel Goodyear's work. Almost everyone I know loves her work, and since it's usually small, subtle, discreet, sparse, well-executed and doesn't explain itself it should be right up my street. And yet somehow it leaves me cold. It may be that like with some other art in the past there will be a piece that will suddenly reveal the reason why everyone else loves the work so much, but it hasn't happened yet. But again I'm getting ahead of myself.
Alison Erika Forde's pieces take up the right wall of the first gallery space, and as I said, in bulk they don't do much for me. They seem to refer to naive or outsider art, and also to the lost worlds of childhood and the wider past. That some of them appear to be painted on found objects like house numbers would also seem to relate to what I think of as vernacular culture, the way people attempt to personalise their possessions through decoration - sometimes bought, such as house numbers on slices of wood - and sometimes made, like scarecrows or the decoration painted on wheelie bins. But there's a false note somewhere, I'm not sure it's possible to be knowingly naive.
Pat Flynn's works on the end wall are pictures of anonymous contemporary urban locations. They look photographic until you come closer and see that they probably aren't, but they're certainly not painted. I've read that they are created on computer pixel by pixel, but whether this is reproducing already existing images (which seems likely), or inventing plausible scenes I don't know. Although all human presence has been erased from them in terms of what the image shows and in terms of the artist's 'hand' being visible I like these pieces. The affectless representation, and the banality of the images and what's represented brings the emptiness right back to a kind of beauty. Or at least admiration.
On the right hand wall of the first gallery the largest piece is a set of related photographs by Maurice Carlin, some too high for you actually look at properly, of the remnants of posters dating from the miners' strike on a wall in Salford. There are people, individuals and groups, in the photos, either just standing in front of the wall or interacting with the posters by photographing them or looking at them. If there's a narrative or message it's not immediately apparent. The posters linger on defiantly, but reduced to a small remnant, much like the mines themselves. Perhaps the temporal and cultural distance between now and then is being emphasised. In an exhibition where the human presence has been almost totally erased this piece is an anomoly, crowded with people and with references to a real cultural moment.
Hanging close to the wall is Sarah Sanders' piece (I think, I didn't take notes on the day) Fast Slow. This is a large sheet of heavy looking paper on which the words 'fast' and 'slow' have been written, the words running into each other, from about halfway down the page. I'm still not sure whether I like this or not. I like the idea, but I'm not wholly convinced by the execution. I can't remember if Rachel Goodyear's work is next on this wall, heading back toward the entrance, or in the other room. I think it's here, but in any case I've dealt with my misgivings in some detail already.
The final work in this room is a small screen, to the right of the entrance as you come in, playing a short film by Amy Pennington. Already mentioned, this shows what I take to be a tealight on the arm of a piece of furniture. The soundtrack appears to be ambient noise, and I would have liked it to be cranked up a little. Text that appears to be a message from a daughter to her mother appears in subtitle at the bottom of the screen. The text gave me a problem. It could be the 'reason' for the piece, but I wasn't sure about it. I wasn't sure whether it was meant to be deliberately inexpressive, or if it was simply a flat piece of writing from someone aiming at poignant. The repetition of it on a loop would suggest that any meaning is intended to be flattened out of it by over-emphasis, but it might equally be a sincere attempt at a mantra. On the whole though I enjkoyed the piece, and was willing to leave the status of the text unresolved.
In the smaller second room there are a similar number of pieces, two of which are on a large scale. On one end wall, to your left as you enter, is a large presentation of watercolour images. These are from a sequence I think called 1968, which I believe is by Marcus Quaife. The images are taken from photographs, or in one case a cartoon, but use a hightened contrast to reduce the amount of detail reproduced. Some images are familiar, the majority aren't. The cartoon referring to politicians (Nixon aside) that you don't recognise, the degraded images, and the fact that they are presented decontextualised, like botanical or ornithological specimens acts to distance you from them, and to make the year seem distant beyond even the reach of nostalgia. Once again I'm not sure what I actually think of the work.
On the opposite wall are a couple of large pieces, either watercolour or ink, which I believe are by Brass Art. They resemble illustrations from collections of folktales, a theme already present in Alison Erika Forde and Rachel Goodyear. As with both of those others I couldn't really say that I actually felt any sense of the threat or darkness that the artists seem to have attempted to encode. Like Forde's work, but not Goodyear's, the work also seemed a bit whimsical and even perhaps superficial. But it is very well executed.
Leaping about this space, Andrew McDonald has small screens next to each entrance of the space on which different animations are playing. These are computer animations based apparently on handdrawn images. Whether those handdrawn images are based on other sources isn't mentioned, but the movements of the human figure in each look suspiciously like they originate in either film or more likely motion-capture technology. They represent 'adventures' of a headless, shirtless person who I think is called John. In the first he climbs gingerly around a stony landscape. In the second he descends ladders into a room containing a machine, which activates while he is there, but which doesn't seem to serve any purpose. Although I have no real lasting impression from either piece they are fascinating achievements and compulsively watchable even while frustratingly uneventful.
The remaining pieces are relatively discreet, and all are among my favourites. Two of them, Jesse Ash's newspaper collages and Rachael Elwell's crochet drawing, have already been mentioned. Anne Charnock's text image is discreet more because it is high up on the wall than from any lack of size. It is one of her pieces which features a corrected text, in this case amended to say precisely the opposite of what it originally said, as you might see it on screen if you had document markup activated. Albeit in different colours. Ash and Elwell's pieces are on the opposite wall. I've already described briefly. In Ash's photographs from newspapers are collaged by elements from the photo being cut from another copy of the paper and added to the image. As well as being precisely executed, the changes to the images don't appear to make much difference to the original. There may be a point being made here about the media and the manipulation of image. Elwell's picture is small and low on the wall, and appears to be a drawing of a loose fragment of crochet. All these pieces, being so inexplicable, apparently only partially complete draw you in and require effort. They are probably my favourite works, along with Pat Flynn's larger pieces, Amy Pennington's film, and Maurice Carlin's photographs.
Overall I enjoyed the show a lot and once again as with the Text Festival I like the way it's hung, allowing the work space to breathe, and drawing out connections between the work. Viewing the exhibition becomes an active process, not just a passive trudge round in sequence. Once you've been through the works you return to sample things in a different order, to see if you read things right, to check apparent echoes or contrasts between pieces. I also enjoy the relationship of tiny, discreet works to larger pieces.
Thematically I wasn't wholly convinced that the works do necessarily transcend the local, engage with the global cutlural dialogue (whatever that is), or whether that's necessarily a desireable thing. I'm certainly not convinced that works which don't transcend the local are excluded from any wider cultural dialogue. In the case of a lot of the work, both pieces I like and those I'm not so fond of, the supposed transcending of the local seems to take the form of a kind of hermeticism. Other than Maurice Carlin's photos it's true there are no specifically Mancunian or Northwest elements in any of the work, and some of the work does depict, utilise, or refer to products of a global culture - Pat Flynn's retail park, the objects painted on by Alice Erika Forde, and the magazines or newspapers used by Magnus Quaife and Jesse Ash for instance. What many of the works do appear to have in common is a flatness of affect, a distance and coldness. In some cases this works.
But make up your own mind. Get down to Bury before 7 November and have a look for yourself. Then let me know just how much you disagree with what I've written.
Comments
Ben (Gwilliam)_ just pointed me to this review, i think it reads really well and i'm glad you like my crochet drawing.
the crochet drawing was made from extending the opposite end of my crochet hook and attaching an oil pastel to it. whilst crocheting, the oil pastel end of the hook makes contact with a paper surface and each and every movement of the process of crocheting a found pattern is documented as a drawing.
i thought you might like to know how it was made, it gives you a bit more context to the piece.
i was sorry not to be able to show a few more of these drawings in the show
best wishes
Rachael :o)
That's really interesting to know, in fact it's made me think about the piece again, I'll take another look at it a bit more closely. It would certainly have been interesting to have seen more pieces using this technique.
Thanks for that, and glad you found the review readable and not too wildly off the mark.
Cheers
Matt