Zoe Mendelson at Chisenhale Art Place

March 9, 2010
2 – 3:30pm
Zoe Mendelson PhD Chelsea student
www.zoemendelson.co.uk www.chisenhale.co.uk

1:45 - 2pm Arrival (access to building only at this time)
2:15pm Performance & 2 - 3:30pm Studio visit/seminar

Chisenhale Art Place, Chisenhale Road, E3
Tube: Mile End Bus: 277 get off at Roman Rd or Victoria Park, Dress Warm!

(James Faure Walker & K Lovelock facilitate)

Documentation of this seminar by Marsha Bradfield. Originally posted on the CriticalPractice Wiki

Zoe Mendelson: March 9, 2010 - Chisenhale Art Space
Keywords: collage, articulations of (architectural) space, neo-baroque, old technologies - nostalgia, art that looks like art

• Zoe was concerned our discussion would focus on questions of installation - and how the artworks were working in the studio qua gallery
• There's lots to see
• Being in the studio complicates this critique - and the studio has been "curated" for the critique (?) The studio is in an constant state of curation.
• Cardboard desk - playing at school - numbers and codes
• Emphasis on assembly - collage - putting things together - creates new things - juxtapositions of objects with drawings
• Jo's interesting comment: It's easy to image/picture the stuff through a phone camera - very easy to frame
• Engaging with various articulations of architectural spaces
• Scale - shifts between macro and micro
• Old technologies - overhead projector, X-rays, assortment of projectors
• Scopic regimes - technologies of vision - internalizing and externalizing
• Different kinds of space - gendered space - gynecological box
• Do the artworks work on their own or do they need one another for support?
• Collage is very much about reprocessing materials - putting things together creates new things
• Subjects - and how we become subjects - what technologies make us subjects
• Various notions of work - various kinds of labour - undecidability of the status of work - is it finished; isn't it finished
• For me: It wasn't so much about Zoe trying to figure things out as her offering a space for psychic play - projection - somewhere to inhabit - prompts for imagining
• Choice of what's included in the collages - feels very controlled
• Sense this work is quite "knowing work" (a little self-conscious) - invites a particular kind of gaze
• Obsession - James' comment: It's all weird, it's all surreal, Chicago-style work (?) - both overly familiar and alienating - (cliche?) James used the metaphor of Grandmother's hanker-chief?
• Process - much of what we see is about something that had a life before - reborn
• When do you know when something is finished? In the case of the wall drawings, they're finished when they're erased
• Think it invites misreading - untranslated knowledge - may present other types of knowledge - how it was made - how the things were put together - practices of practices and various kinds of architecture and attention
• More interested in "how" things come together than "why" they come together.
• Questions around all the stuff seeming to come from the same era - think this relates to sense of nostalgia that pervades the artworks
• Zoe is interested in making things in a Luddite way - but also excited about other practices, other ways of working - including digital ways of working
• Homage, difference and hierarchy - bringing things together to create another system
• Neo-baroque - discombobulating - one space opening into another space - opening into another space - Gerard likened it to "roadkill" - Zoe spoke about desktop icons and how they open into whole new spaces - lots more information
• The work looks very much like art...Strikes me there's a tension between the artworks as objects (material) and them as propositions...(conceptual)
• Seduction by aestheticized technologies?

Azadeh Fatehrad

Azadeh Fatehrad Chelsea MA Student
February 9 Chelsea 3 – 4:30pm

Azadeh Fatehrad presents:
Pine Tree, 2010, installation, dimensions variable



This work began as a response to my country’s current situation.

Recently, I watched an interview of an Iranian actress who said, “The Middle East is beautiful, but looks black now - dangerous now.”

My recent installation shows the happiness that has been forgotten in my country.

The pine tree has been wrapped-up like a dead body, turned, like a dead pine tree - from its vertical natural state to a horizontal position, and attached to the wall.

The tree is accompanied by five prints each are 16th Century historical paintings depicting Iranian celebration parties. In the background of these images are pine trees and, in my county, the pine tree symbolises creativity, life, longevity and immortality. These happy and celebratory images reflect the sublime, artistic ideals and ethical ideas of the people from central Asia and the Middle East.



The prints are covered with handprints of black paint. It is an Iranian tradition that when someone dies we make handprints in red, but here, I chose to use black.

To the left of the prints are five paintings wrapped in black glossy paper which present the 20th and 21st Century. It is true, Iran looks black today.



On the floor of the installation are written words in black paint. Before I made the installation, I sent a video link of Iran http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmVvKRm9JdU to my classmates and asked them to come up with five words to describe what they had seen. From their responses, there were no words like “black.” Instead, everything they gave were words like, “beautiful” and “happy.” I then wrote the words they gave to me on the floor of the installation.

One can walk through the installation and as one does, they can’t help but walk on top of words like “beautiful,” “green” and “clear” and thereby further defacing and making invalid the painted words on the ground.

Kristen Lovelock

January 26 off-site Show Not Tell seminar
2 – 3:30pm
Kristen Lovelock PhD Chelsea student presents her co-curated show:DETOX



DETOX
Concrete Allotment Projects
www.detoxme.org.uk

16 Hoxton Square, London, N1 6NT
Preview: 15th January 6 - 9:00pm
Open: Thursday to Saturday
16th January – 6th February
Hours: Thurs & Fri 12– 6pm Sat 10 – 6pm
Events: please see www.detoxme.org.uk

Artists
Jennifer Allen, Kim Coleman & Jenny Hogarth, Oriana Fox, Rainer Ganahl, Stewart Gough, Darren Jones, Cathy Lomax, Kristen Lovelock, Martin Maloney, Agathe Snow, Charlie Tweed, Jo Wilmot, Mark Wright

Happy New Year everyone and all the best for 2010!

Time to book that colonic irrigation and get rid of all that went wrong in the noughties!

DETOX is a ‘pop-up’ exhibition exploring the phenomena of detoxification.

Detoxification programmes aim to cleanse and purify for maximum wellbeing; DETOX explores this and looks closely at the personal, environmental and ideological issues surrounding detoxing.

Art in the show takes both nihilistic and optimistic approaches to contemporary life and will at times examine concepts of toxicity, excess, dirt, cleansing, purification and the narcissistic search for self improvement.

DETOX opens 16th January 2010 in a disused dojo in Hoxton Square.

About the artists in DETOX:

Jennifer Allen’s highly choreographed video works explore role-play, taboo and transgression through unsettling scenarios drawing on her experience as a strip-tease dancer. She uses a Gonzo porn/fetish aesthetic to question the complexity of human relationships.




Kim Coleman & Jenny Hogarth’s video and performance works play with the choreographed and the non-choreographed. Their installations loop footage to divulge and liberate the charms of liminal processes, objects and subjects.
Hogarth & Colman’s videos focus on how objects and people perform, focussing especially on relationships - between the camera and the subject, light and the camera. Their work in video circumspectly unravels the relationship between the camera, its subject and its maker through various techniques of disclosure.




Oriana Fox’s use of humour challenges women’s relentless and unquestioning following of our cultural norms and rituals. Fox’s ambivalent relationship to the portrayal of women in the media opens up an arena to play and explore women’s roles.

Rainer Ganhal’s life is his practice and his is a rigorous quest to make sense of the world and our everyday decisions and their ethical implications. In his death-defying videoed cycle rides he risks sacrificing himself for art and questions art’s political potential.

Stewart Gough rifles the building supply store to create dramatic formal sculptures. These playfully combine banal materials to create pieces with a commanding sculptural presence. His works reference modernist sculpture, rock iconography and shed-based hobbyists.

Darren Jones’ practice is diverse and moves between media. He uses his art to explore his relationship with the world, laying bare his hopes, frustrations and aspirations.

Cathy Lomax’s paintings look at the mythology of fame - where shared fictions become psychological truths. The ‘Inevitable End of a Love Goddess’ series of paintings look at Jayne Mansfield’s decline. These compelling small-scale paintings have an uneasy quality to them.

Kristen Lovelock’s practice is concerned with how we understand our subjective positions in the world. She uses video, sculpture and writing to experiment with how women are represented. In her work, she plays performatively with truth and fiction, nihilistically adopting and discarding personas.



Martin Maloney - In his new body of work, Maloney has painted a series of female nudes making use of some of the historical conventions of modernism. He was curious to see if he could paint a serious and convincing painting with several eyes, many noses and the head looking in opposite directions. The paintings have displaced anatomy replacing it with abstraction, a brush of colour or a repeated shape to suggest a breast or a nipple.

Agathe Snow’s Total Attitude Work Out Video seems, at first glance, chaotic and out of control. However, upon further inspection one finds an effortless and carefully considered orchestration of incredibly sumptuous parts. The work is a witty parody of celebrity self-help videos and includes advice on what to do if you are transported back in time to meet Jesus and how to survive Nazi Germany. The scantily clad instructors are mostly offbeat, but the work is certainly on pulse.

Charlie Tweed explores control methodologies to create coercive manifesto videos which seem unhinged yet strangely plausible. When watching them you get really sucked in – where can you sign up? We’re in danger here you know!

Jo Wilmot’s expressive, painterly paintings have a tension between the messy execution and the desirable subject. Somehow, her work always looks a bit soiled, whatever the subject matter.

Mark Wright’s paintings are hauntingly beautiful, with his creepy, chilly landscapes. These post apocalyptical places have a poisonous feeling which is startling attractive – like boat oil when it shimmers on the surface of the lake on a summer’s day.

Concrete Allotment Projects is a not-for-profit curatorial collaboration formed by artist-curators, Kristen Lovelock and Jo Wilmot.

In addition to the exhibition, there will be a full-colour catalogue and a programme of events at 16 Hoxton Square including a Food as Medicine Workshop lead by Shoreditch Spa, a durational performance “No Pain No Gain” by Oriana Fox, a holistic yoga workshop, a family workshop on the exhibition themes and a panel discussion. Full details to be found at: www.detoxme.org.uk

Special thanks to: Phenomena Project – New York,
Oz Garcia www.ozgarcia.com, Jing Tea jingtea.com,
Eat Natural www.eatnatural.co.uk
And a special special thanks to:
Shoreditch Trust www.shoreditchtrust.org.uk Shoreditch Spa www.shoreditchspa.org.uk

For more information:
Joanna at Velvet PR – Joanna [at] velvetpr. biz
concreteallotmentprojects [at] googlemail. com

Kristen Lovelock's work in DETOX:
Kristen Lovelock, Detox, 2008, 3:09

Kristen Lovelock, In Loving Memory, 2008, 6:24

Ana Laura Lopez de la Torre

January 12 off-site Show Not Tell seminar
12:30 – 2pm Film Screening
2 – 3:30pm View exhibition + discussion

Ana Laura López de la Torre PhD Chelsea student
Hosts a visit to the exhibition Do you remember Olive Morris? at Gasworks.
http://www.gasworks.org.uk/exhibitions/detail.php?id=483
http://www.rememberolivemorris.wordpress.com



Installation view. Photograph by Kristel Raesaar.


Installation view. Photograph by Kristel Raesaar.


Documents from the Olive Morris Collection. Courtesy of Lambeth Archives. Photograph by Kristel Raesaar.


Do you remember Olive Morris?
21st November 2009 - 24th January 2010

Do you remember Olive Morris? uncovers the largely untold history of Brixton-based activist Olive Morris (1952-1979). Developed by London-based artist Ana Laura Lopez de la Torre, this exhibition is the culmination of three years of artist and community-led research inspired by this remarkable figure in South London's recent history.

In her short life, Olive Morris co-founded the Brixton Black Women's Group and the Organisation of Women of Asian and African Descent (OWAAD) and was part of the British Black Panther Movement. She campaigned for access to education, decent living conditions for Black communities and fought against state and police repression. Despite her young age, she empowered the people who lived and worked around her.

The exhibition at Gasworks traces the different phases and multiple collaborations within this long-term project, which was triggered by Ana Laura Lopez de la Torre's encounter with a photograph of Olive Morris taken by British Black Panthers' photographer Neil Kenlock. The photo shows Olive Morris standing at a Black Panther Movement demonstration in Coldharbour Lane in 1969, and holding a placard reading: “BLACK SUFFERER FIGHT PIG POLICE BRUTALITY”. Research into this particular moment in history led to a meeting with community activist Liz Obi, a friend and colleague of Olive Morris, who has since become a key collaborator in this project. More recently, the growing interest in Olive Morris led to the formation of the women's group Remembering Olive Collective which are working to restore the memory of Olive Morris and the issues she fought for.

Do you remember Olive Morris? brings together art works, films and historical photographs documenting the movements and campaign groups with which Olive Morris was associated. It also features archival material from the newly-created Olive Morris Collection, held at Lambeth Archives. The exhibition serves as a contextual backdrop for a weekly programme of events including walks, discussions, presentations, workshops and music evenings. These events have been devised by the Remembering Olive Collective around the issues she championed during the 1970s and remain significant today: from squatting and immigration, to self-education. A publication documenting the project as a whole will be launched in January 2010.

For more information about the project, please visit: rememberolivemorris.wordpress.com

CONTRIBUTORS' INFORMATION

Ana Laura López de la Torre (b. 1969, Uruguay) has lived and worked in Brixton since 1995. Using the overlooked and the underrated as a starting point, her work creates visible and unexpected connections between things, people and places. Her practice is collaborative, often acting as a catalyser and involving disparate constituencies with common interests but diverse agendas, Ana Laura's practice is rooted in an engagement with local context, particularly focusing on the life of South London inner city communities. Ana Laura's commissions record includes projects for the ICA, the Whitechapel Gallery, La Casa Encendida (Madrid), Tate Modern and South London Gallery. More recently she has completed the 2008-9 Southwark Studio Residency, with the launch of the artist book Night Time. She is currently undertaking a PhD at Chelsea College of Art and Design and is working on the inaugural commission for Peckham Space in 2010.

The Remembering Olive Collective (ROC) is a group of women composed of over thirty members including artists, activists, academics, archivists, curators, cultural theorists and community workers of varied generations and cultural backgrounds. ROC has undertaken an extensive oral history and cataloguing project leading to the creation of the Olive Morris Collection, which is available to the public from Thursday 22 October 2009 at Lambeth Archives, 52 Knatchbull Road, London SE5 9QY. ROC meets once a month in Brixton, organises regular presentations and runs fundraising activities at cultural and political events, festivals and fairs. For more information, visit: rememberolivemorris.wordpress.com


EVENTS:

The exhibition is accompanied by a series of events and a film programme.
Please click here to view the fullprogramme.