Selected Artists:
Marta Bakst | Boyd & Evans | Tom Butler | George Charman | Eleanor Cleasby | Julie Cockburn | Marisa J. Futernick | Marguerite Horner | Vikram Kushwah | Owen Oppenheimer | Alex Pearl | Art al Quadrat (Gema & Mònice Del Rey Jordà | Joey Ryken | Mark Sansworth
ArtSway Open 2010 brings together national and international artists, displaying the highest quality contemporary visual art in a wide range of media, and covering a broad variety of themes and ideas.
Applications for ArtSway’s annual Open are accepted from artists of all levels, from all stages of their career, working across all disciples. The Open aims to reflect the range of activity artists use today. ArtSway carefully considers the idea of placing no restrictions on content or choice of media, and artists are encouraged to enter examples that best reflects their current practice and direction. This year ArtSway received over 400 entries for the Open, with 17 artists being selected for exhibition. The eventual winner, announced on Saturday 15 January 2011, will receive a prize of a solo exhibition at ArtSway in 2011, with full curatorial, mentoring and marketing support for their exhibition.
The winner of Open ‘09 was London-based painter Dolly Thompsett. Her solo exhibition, New Paintings, ended at ArtSway on 7th November 2010. Dolly was also one of three members on this year’s selection panel, along with ArtSway’s Curator Peter Bonnell and Judy Adam, former Visual Arts Co-ordinator at Salisbury Arts Centre. Previous winners include Laura Green and Benjamin Beker, who have both used the accolade of Open winner to great advantage in the subsequent development of their careers.
ARTSWAY OPEN 2010 EVENTS: ArtSway is hosting a number of events to coincide with this years Open, please see the follow the links in the 'related pages' section for more information on individual events.
ArtSway Open 2010 is sponsored by Lashmars of Lymington | www.lashmars.co.uk
Artist Statements and Biographies
Marta Bakst, Lost in Shadow; Shapeshifters (triptych); Glazed Eyes (diptych), digital prints, 2010
I am interested in interpreting a psychological encounter with space in the modern city through the photographic medium. The subjects and locations that develop my ideas and feature in the works are sourced through a random exploration of different locations. In the specific body of images presented here there is a focus on our relationship with nature.
The work suggests a lived experience fragmented by the memories of other people and places, evoking a sense of transience and longing. The photographs create a narrative from the passing moments of our daily lives that usually go unnoticed and create a subtle strangeness that is suggestive of a dream. An idea of ‘another place’ is reinvented over and over again, yet remains distant.
Digital and traditional photographic processes are used in production of the work. Collaging or grouping of photographs creates associations between the different forms within each image. The photographic style develops an aesthetic that is reminiscent of times gone by, with undertones of something present beneath the surface, which questions what is beyond the fixed photograph. This pulls the viewer between the suggested time of the image and the present.
Marta Bakst Biography
Marta Bakst (b. 1975, Manchester, UK) currently lives and works in East London. She graduated from Chelsea College of Art with a Masters in Fine Art in 2001, previously having studied BA Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art. Recent exhibitions include a solo show at Eleven Spitalfields in East London and PrintNow, shown at Bearspace Gallery in South East London and also at London Art Fair 2010. In 2009 exhibitions included Itchy Scratchy at Permanent Gallery, Brighton and a lightbox installation as part of the Photomonth 2009, East London’s Photography Festival.
Boyd & Evans, Clee Hill: Summer and Clee Hill: Winter, archival prints, 2010
Post art school, making our way in London in 1968, we had not painted for a year and thought, as an experiment, we would try working together to build in extra quality control. It worked well and we have been in this partnership ever since. Our early influences came more from film (Bunuel, Godard, Antonioni) than painting. The first public exhibition we took part in was Narrative Painting in Britain in the 20th Century at the Camden Arts Centre in 1970, and we are still happier responding to the word narrative than realism of any kind.
We started using photographs to collect images that might be useful in our paintings. As photographs became more important we exhibited them from time to time. The most exciting work we saw during a year spent in America, 1977-78, was by the new colour photographers such as Stephen Shore and William Egglestone. The year in the US left an indelible attraction to the landscape and life forms of the South Western desert states, where, since 1998 we have spent many moths gathering images. We will be going again in the spring of 2011. We have been concentrating more on photography since 2004 although we are painting at the moment.
If our painting is involved with human narratives the photographs concentrate more on a sense of place. The paintings are inextricably involved with photography but it is also the case that our photographs are not always what they seem. The development of digital imaging has allowed us to make very complex seamless montages and to mix colour and black and white within the same image. The works here are not straight photographs. They are each stitched from multiple pictures, taken within seconds of each other. Each is in effect a photographic reconstruction of the scene. Would we have painted had Photoshop been available in the 70s? We hope so because painting is very important to us. We visit friends near Clee Hill regularly and like to stop there whenever we’re passing. For a beauty spot it’s not that beautiful but is all the more interesting for that, exposing you as it does to light, weather and the seasons.
Boyd & Evans Biography
Fionnuala Boyd (b. 1944) and Les Evans (b. 1945) met during a foundation course at St Albans School of Art, and went on to Leeds University and Leeds College of Art respectively. They started working together in 1968 and have been showing regularly with Flowers Galleries in London, Los Angeles and New York since 1970. They have exhibited widely in public and commercial galleries. They have work in numerous public and private collections including the Tate Gallery, Arts Council, British Council and the Metropolitan Museum in New York. They spent a year in the United States as Bi-Centennial Fellows 1977-78, were artists-in-residence to Milton Keynes 1982-84 and were artists-in-residence to the Royal Geographical Society’s Brunei Rainforest Expedition 1991. They recently won the Visitors’ Choice Prize at the Threadneedle Prize competition and are planning a retrospective at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham for 2012.
Tom Butler, Two Sitting Boys; The Broken Pitcher and Hairy Vanitas, gouache on postcards, 2010
Tom Butler uses second-hand postcards as miniature environments in which to create sinister and fantastical scenarios. The images selected for ArtSway are concerned with hiding behind ones hair in order to go unnoticed, and the Grotesque – an artistic movement concerned with both the decorative and the abject designed to invoke a feeling of uncomfortable bizarreness.
Tom appropriates found material such as postcards (and more recently Victorian ‘Cartes de Visite’) as a ‘psychological clothes horse’ enabling him to project thoughts, fears and anxieties in an immediate and direct way.
Tom Butler Biography
Tom Butler (b.1979) studied History of Art at Winchester School of Art before deciding to practice studio art. He has since graduated from Chelsea College of Art and The Slade School of Art with a BA and MFA respectively. Recent solo exhibitions include, Co_respondence at Madame Lillies, London (2009) and “I don’t know when I’ll be home” at Exeter Phoenix (2010). Recent group exhibitions include The Deptford X Core Gallery Open; I am Solitary I am an Army, with Beers Lambert, at Surface Gallery, Nottingham and a series of ‘Postcard Interventions’ with Paris Correspondence School, curated by Charlie Levine, soon to be shown at Minnie Weiss, London. He lives and works in Maine, USA.
George Charman, A Drowned Man, drawing cut-out on graph paper with acrylic ink, 2010
This work explores the notion of the ‘ruin’ as an image/object of change, as organic as it is manmade. I see the ‘ruin’ as a structure existing somewhere between a past reality built on failed dreams and, what the writer J.G. Ballard called, ‘a symbol of the near future’, a desire to push forward into the blind light of tomorrow whist still cloaked by the cast shadows of the unresolved immediate past. The built structure becomes hideously unrelenting, decaying and evolving simultaneously to form a vision of diseased beauty; a quasi lattice blueprint of uncertain conflicting futures.
George Charman Biography
George David Charman (b.1983 London, UK) completed his BA at University of Creative Arts, Farnham (2002-05), and his MA at the Royal College of Art, London (2006-08). He has won prizes for his practice including the Tim Mara print prize, the Helen Chadwick travel prize, and most recently, 2nd prize at the Jerwood Drawing Prize. In 2010 he was selected for the ACME Fire Station five-year live/work studio residency. Selected group exhibitions include: New works, West Dean College, Sussex: 2010, And Then Again, Lisbon City Museum, Portugal: 2010, Jerwood Drawing Prize, London and UK tour: 2009-10, Contested Ground, 176 Gallery, London: 2009, Architectura, William Angel Gallery, London: 2009, City X, England & Co, London: 2009, Abandoned by the third dimension, Centre For Recent Drawing, London: 2008, Here and Beyond, (solo exhibition) The Old Sweetshop Gallery, London: 2009. In 2008 he won a commission from the London based architectural firm MAKE to produce artwork relating to St Paul’s Cathedral Information Center. George has work in private collections including the Terrance Conran Collection, British Airways Collection, Make Architects Collection and the Royal College of Art Print Collection. He currently lives and works in London.
Eleanor Cleasby, Still Life, C-type print on Hahnemuhle photorag, 2010
Still Life is part of an ongoing series that explores the modes of communication and language adopted by museums, galleries and, in this case, London Zoo. You are invited to enter an imaginary world where fact and fiction are entwined – to contemplate the boundary where nature ends and artificial environment begins. The displays are part-painting, part-installation. The painted background forms the ‘proper’ context for each specimen enabling us, the viewer, to visualise it in its natural habitat. We are then forced to draw upon our imagination and are encouraged to take extra-visual leaps.
These illustrative and diagrammatic displays present themselves coherently in order to be grasped ‘at a glance’. However, we have become fluent in this language of ‘display’ and can read its signs and deflect its imaginary power. By documenting these enclosures I aim to make you question the concepts of display and visual representation, truth and concealment, fact and fiction. Display might on occasion be the best method of concealment offering transient and illusory satisfactions. An excess of display has the effect of concealing the truth resulting in the viewer seeing everything yet understanding nothing.
The title Still Life highlights the similarities to traditional still life painting. It addresses similar issues, albeit not necessarily intentionally, such as life, death, nature and science. Even the composition and lighting draws its similarities: all the objects are placed in the most conspicuous point of light, to be seen to advantage, without being handled. The way I take photographs reflects the way I experience the world through such cultural institutions like London Zoo. My work is not a mockery of such institutions but a sincere attempt to question the truth behind an image and display.
Eleanor Cleasby Biography
Eleanor Cleasby is a practicing artist living and working in London. Having completed an MA in Documentary Photography from the London College of Communication and receiving a Distinction, her work has since been exhibited at numerous art galleries including The Photographers’ Gallery, London. In addition to her own practice she has spent the past six years teaching Art and Photography in schools and colleges across London.
Julie Cockburn, Shellshocked 1, altered found oil painting, 2010 and Belle, found image, embroidery, ink, 2010
Julie Cockburn’s altered found images address ideas of authorship and ownership, as well as the individuality of perception. Each portrait, chosen for its benignity – a painting of a stalwart gentleman or 1950s yearbook beauty queen – is given an alter-ego, the imagination of the artist acting as psychoanalyst. The canvas and torn page are seen as 3d objects, the static image just scratching the surface of the sitter’s character, and Cockburn pierces and stitches through the superficial facade, both physically and metaphorically, in ritual excavation.
Belle is the beauty queen, a photographic image of perceived perfection, frozen in time. Cockburn’s needle and fingerprints decorate and decimate, the doodled, stitched and smudged intervention liberating the sitter’s alter ego to expose her perceived hidden dreams, nightmares and fantasies. She is simultaneously beautiful and hideous, chaste and sullied. She is ambivalent. Shellshocked 1 is an altered found canvas, a fractured face both present and absent, holding the viewer in optical illusion, as the geometric parts seem to fill more space than the space available. The title of the work summons up a disintegrated hero, hiding behind a mask of his own making. He is ashamed. There is a sense of visual storytelling in Cockburn’s work – each character is re-invigorated with the artist’s subversions and interventions. Like Mary Shelley, Cockburn can conjure up a monster; with a nod to Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, she has a stab at “Where Are They Now”. There is pathos here too, as the artist explores the empathic nature of being in relationship and the ambivalence of being human.
Julie Cockburn Biography
Julie Cockburn (b. 1966 London, UK) studied sculpture at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London (1993-1996). Her solo shows include Filling the Cracks with Ceiling Wax, Flowers East, London (2010); Bridging the Generation Gap, Forster Gallery, London (2008); What the Eye Doesn’t See, Seven Seven Contemporary, London (2008). Group shows include Double Trouble, Blyth Gallery, London (2010); Sarcophagus of the Kingdom, I-MYU Projects, London (2010); Keep Me Posted, Posted Projects, London (2010); In Miss Rowe’s Footsteps, The Eagle Gallery, London (2010); The Russell Herron Collection, Sartorial Contemporary Art, London (2009); Space Now!, The Triangle, curated by Caroline Douglas, London (2008); The Golden Record - Sounds of Earth, Collective Gallery, Edinburgh and touring (2008); ArtSway Open 07, ArtSway, Hampshire (2007); Art and Psyche: The Freudian Legacy, CDS Gallery, New York (2007); Jerwood Drawing Prize, Jerwood Space, London and touring (2007, 2010). In 2010, she won the Matt Roberts Arts Salon Art Prize. Her work is held in private collections worldwide and in the collections of British Land, Goss-Michael Foundation, The Wellcome Collection and Yale Center for British Art. She lives and works in London.
Marisa J. Futernick, Swimming Pool Catalogue, watercolour and ink on paper 2009 and Some Southern California Matchbooks, watercolour and ink on paper, 2010
I use my fascination with popular culture and nostalgia for bygone pop eras as the basis for producing work, turning in recent years to the myth of Southern California. There is a profound sadness and darkness at the core of Los Angeles. My recent work reflects on the lost optimism of the California dream; the faded glamour; the abandonment of Utopian modernity.
LA represents both the dream and the death of the 1960s. The city is the embodiment of popular culture and America at its most extreme, both wondrous and frightening. It is the geographic ‘end’ of the country; uninhabitable, artificial and unnatural; and yet a symbol of paradise and the ultimate in ‘cool’. Based almost entirely on mediated imagery and myth, my romanticised idea of Los Angeles is that much more intense when viewed from my life in London, a place far removed from LA in so many ways. I have progressed from merely looking to a faraway time to also looking at a faraway place. There is something profoundly melancholic about longing for that which no longer exists; not least because that which is being yearned for is unlikely to ever have existed outside of mediated culture.
Marisa J. Futernick Biography
Marisa J. Futernick was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1980 and graduated cum laude with a BA in Fine Art from Yale University, with a term spent as a visiting student at Goldsmiths College. Recent group exhibitions include Salon Art Prize, selected by Kate MacGarry, Richard Birkett (ICA) and Peter Bonnell (ArtSway), Matt Roberts Arts, London; Resort, The Residence Gallery, London; and PixelPops, BolteLange Gallery, Zurich. She currently lives and works in London.
Marguerite Horner, Division, oil on canvas, 2010 and The Counsellor, oil on canvas, 2010
Painting has the ability to induce a contemplative state in the viewer and this contrasts with the distracting effects of the moving image.
The painting invites the spectator to contemplation, before it the spectator can abandon himself to his associations. Before the movie frame he cannot do so. No sooner has his eye grasped a scene than it is already changed. It cannot be arrested…thoughts have been replaced by moving images, the spectator’s process of association in view of these images is indeed interrupted by their constant, sudden change….the masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator……distraction and contemplation form polar opposites. Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935)
I find that it is through the visceral material of paint that ideas about the internal struggle of the spirit are given form. Jung asserts that the experience of the Sacred and Holy is a fundamental requirement of the self. To deny it brings spiritual decay; to embrace it illuminates the soul with meaning. My main focus is to make markings that serve not so much to represent views of the world around us, as to activate what lies behind them, a quality not to be named, only touched on. By using an inter-play of divergent pigments, my subjects become flowing calligraphic performances on primed canvas or charcoal on paper.
Marguerite Horner Biography
Marguerite Horner was born and brought up in Lincoln, and is currently based in London. After completing her BA degree in Fine Art she worked as a scenic artist at the BBC for 3 years, leaving to work as a freelance artist. All of her work during this time was commissioned and she painted in collaboration with photographers such as Adrian Flowers and David Bailey, painting backgrounds for publications such as ‘The World of Interiors’ and ‘The Sunday Times’, as well as many award winning advertising campaigns throughout the 80s and 90s.
Marguerite completed her MA in Fine Art in 2004. Her final works were awarded with ‘Kidd Rapinet Prize’ for outstanding work, presented by Sir Peter Blake. She has since been exhibiting widely in Art Fairs and Group Shows, including the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition (2005, 2008 and 2010); ING Discerning Eye Exhibition (2005 and 2010); The Royal Society of Marine Artists (2005); Art in Action (2009); The Threadneedle Prize (2010) and The Lynn Painters Stainer Exhibition (2010). In 2006 Tim Marlow (art critic and director of White Cube) selected Marguerite to feature among the 30 emerging artists to take part in a Guardian/ Saatchi competition. In the same year she had a well received solo show at the Star Gallery in Lewes, East Sussex, for which art historian, Julian Bell wrote the introduction. Also in 2006 Marguerites work was short-listed for the first Celeste Painting Prize. Among the Project Spaces and Galleries that Marguerite has exhibited with are Beverley Knowles Fine Art; Moncrieff-Bray; C4RD; WW Gallery; and ROOM. Marguerite’s work was critic/curator Jane Neal’s ‘Critics Choice’ for Saatchi Online in 2006 and more recently was selected for the Saatchi Online weekly ‘Top Ten’ artists by Paul-Carey-Kent’s, former editor-at-large of Art World magazine.
Mandy Hudson, City Garden, oil on canvas, 2010
City Garden is one of an intermittent series of paintings that have as their subject a combination of the natural and the manmade. The plants are contained within a concrete planter but are becoming overgrown. My paintings are based on details and found arrangements that are part of everyday life. I am always looking out for subjects that I feel will be interesting to paint, taking photos as reference. Sometimes this can result in something that is figurative, like City Garden, or can be abstract. This depends on the character of the subject and the qualities I want to emphasise. I liked the plants because their delicacy felt incongruous in the urban setting but it can be anything, an arrangement of boards leaning against a wall or a certain lighting effect. A lot of what I choose has a sense of impermanence and vulnerability.
Mandy Hudson Biography
Mandy Hudson (b.1966 Luton, UK) studied at Maidstone College of Art, Kent Institute of Art & Design (1986 – 89). Selected Group Shows include; Unnatural Histories, Nunnery Gallery, London (2008); Art Futures, Contemporary Art Society (2007), One Love, The Lowry, Salford (2006), No-Ship, Seven Seven Gallery, London (2006); The Agreement, Kontainer Gallery, Los Angeles (2003) and Closer, Standpoint Gallery (2002). She lives and works in London.
Vikram Kushwah, Ofelea and the Flying Balloons, fine art matt paper with satin lamination, 2010
Ofelea and the Flying Balloons is part of a larger body of work titled OFELEA.
This body of work is a portrait of my imagination and memories, often twisted by the dark underlying layers of the storybooks I read as a child. The series of pictures is a juxtaposition of the Freudian theory of 'The Uncanny', the constantly recurring mysterious environments in the Surrealist art movement and reconstructions of my distant childhood imagination. The feeling of the uncanny, as Sigmund Freud points out, is one of confused fear, one that you feel when confronted with something that was meant to remain hidden, locked away and has now come out into the open. This feeling is certainly not unambiguous. It is this ambiguity itself that makes the mind wander. The wandering mind opens many doors. Behind these closed doors lies what we call the imagination. There are more doors behind the ones that have been opened. They all whisper to each other – about what lies beyond – engaging and gripping the psyche.
These images are constructed using fragments of recollections – often uncanny – from my childhood, stitched up by the secret and powerful tool of ‘day-dreaming’ and also with the careful understanding of Sigmund Freud’s essay, Das Unheimliche. They lie somewhere between reality and fantasy, between the conscious and the sub-conscious. These images are not only a reflection of what I saw behind the ‘closed doors’, but also of what I could have seen.
Researched and shot over a period of nine months, this project has involved long aimless walks in the woods of Kent, meeting strange people, cats, rabbits and horses and finding myself in remote and isolated places as a result of which my dreamscapes and memory gave me rather peculiar visuals. Intricate study of the art and writings of the surrealists and re-visiting my very old storybooks helped me give perspective to the Freudian philosophy of the uncanny. Rather than illustrating the uncanny, the idea here is to give the viewer an experience of the uncanny by extracting fragments of desires and fantasies buried within my sub-conscious.
Vikram Kushwah Biography
Born in New Delhi and brought up in the foot hills of the Himalayas, Vikram has shuffled across many interests including dramatics, fashion and graphic design to eventually chance upon what he didn’t know could be the tool to give expression to his day dreams and desires – photography. He studied photography at postgraduate level at Light & Life Academy, India before moving to London. The decision to move to London was informed by Britain's rich art and cultural heritage and a keen desire on Vikram's part to establish himself as an internationally acclaimed photographer. Here he developed his fine art photography practice via a postgraduate diploma at London College of Communication and a Masters Degree at University for the Creative Arts, Rochester. He has recently been nominated for an international photography award, Emergent-Fundació Sorigué, Lleida, Spain and selected by Photofusion Gallery, London to exhibit at AMPS 10, a biennial exhibition for selected photographers. Vikram now splits his time between his home in the bustling city of London where he works on commissions for fashion houses, designers and magazines, and the enchanted woods of Kent where he travels for his imaginative photographic expeditions.
Owen Oppenheimer, Nowhere Really, video installation, 2010
Owen Oppenheimer’s practice encompasses an eclectic range of image-making processes. Through short films, video installations, drawings, prints and animations, he grapples with the strangeness and absurdity of everyday life in works shot through with an unsettling, mordant sense of humour.
A 70’s saloon car becomes an inside-out cinema depicting a couple on a journey of passion, murder and a limited choice of music. A series of newspapers trace the downward career of a footballer in articles laced with innuendo and crass double-entendres. A card from the postman reads, ‘We Attempted To Deliver You From Evil’.
This is a place where characters are trapped, confined or lost. In imminent yet indefinable danger. But it is also a place rooted in the mundanities of the day-to- day. A place where appliances fail to work properly, and people are constantly frustrated by their own limitations. Radios only come with one station. Bunches of keys assume unwieldy proportions. Cars crash, shoelaces catch fire, drops of rain cause devastating injuries, not least to the ego. It is a place where the commonplace has become awkward and unfamiliar. A world that refuses to function as advertised. Like something glimpsed out of the corner of one’s eye. Or scraped out of it.
Owen Oppenheimer Biography
Owen Oppenheimer was born in San Francisco but was brought up in North London. He did a B.A. in painting at Cheltenham School of Art, before escaping to Northern Europe to study at the Institut des Hautes Etudes En Arts Plastique in Paris. He has undertaken film commissions for VPRO/Kunstkanaal in the Netherlands and the LFVDA/FilmFour in the UK, and residencies at the Cité des Arts, Paris; the Villa Arson, Nice; and the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam. His work has been exhibited and screened in numerous exhibitions and festivals worldwide, and broadcast in the UK on Channel 4. Since 2004 he has combined his art practice with a successful career as an award-winning music video and commercials editor. He lives and works in London.
Alex Pearl, SID, pencil on blackboard paint, 2010
SID is one of a series of drawings of spaceships from 70s and 80s TV sci-fi. They are an attempt to make a drawing that in some way mimics film. As the viewer moves past, the image ranges from the almost invisible to scintillatingly bright.
They also display an interest in recreating some sense of the wonder and disappointment inherent in science fiction. I grew up watching shows like Dr Who, Space 1999, UFO, Star Trek and Blake’s 7. Then space travel and its vehicles required a suspension of disbelief and a pleasure in illusion. There is a sweetness in knowing a magician’s tools are merely thread, smoke and mirrors.
Almost every aspect of this film is almost nothing, and yet that is why it is so haunting and so memorable. It feels like an empty dream. (Lynda Morris, excerpt from Drawing Links Catalogue, 2006)
Alex Pearl Biography
Brought up in Cheshire, educated in Birmingham and living in Ipswich Alex Pearl exhibits internationally while trying to avoid travel. In the last two years he has shown in New York, Berlin, Belfast, The Hague, St Gallen, Manchester, Munich, San Francisco, London, Marseille, Stoke on Trent, Lincoln Sydney, Cardiff and Valencia. His commission for this year’s Whitstable Biennale was based on a mistake and he is currently showing a 17-channel installation called Pearlville as part of Unspooling, artists and cinema at the Cornerhouse, Manchester. His upcoming solo show at Tap Gallery, Southend has a title so long it cannot be reproduced here.
Art al Qadrat (Gema & Mònica Del Rey Jordà), At a Distance of 2143km. Return Journey (Videoletter), DVD digital video, 2010
At a Distance of 2143 km. Return Journey is an audiovisual project based on the personal experience of twin sisters Gema and Mònica del Rey Jordà (Art al Quadrat) who have been separated for four months by a distance of 2143 kilometres. During this period Mònica sojourned in Vienna where she gathered information for her PhD thesis on twin artists. Meanwhile Gema remained in Sagunt, their hometown, preparing new exhibitions that would be held upon Mònica’s return to Valencia.
During their separation the sisters corresponded regularly via video letters in which they established a dialogue leading to new audiovisual works that recount their parallel lives. These letters have been the umbilical cord linking the two episodes. Based on personal experience, At a Distance of 2143 km. is a video letter that speaks of the importance of interconnection between two people who must keep up regular correspondence. The video raises contrasting themes such as the familiar and unfamiliar, being at home and being abroad, etc., presenting duality as a metaphor of life. The contrast between the two societies, Austrian and Spanish, is obvious in the different ways in which culture, leisure and everyday life are portrayed.
A MiniDV tape and DVDs with the audiovisual entry and other material accompanying the video letter were sent by post, and shall be displayed together in future as a video installation.
The project is a work in process that has been produced over a four-month period, during which time and according to plan the tape has travelled five times from Vienna to Sagunt and four times from Sagunt to Vienna (spending two weeks in each place for the reply to be produced). The nine journeys correlate with nine audiovisual excerpts that last between three and seven minutes each and which reflect the contrasting summers of Vienna and Sagunt.
Art al Qadrat (Gema & Mònica Del Rey Jordà) Biography
The artistic group Art al Quadrat was formed in 2002 and consists of the twin sisters Mònica and Gema del Rey Jordà (b. 1982, Valencia, Spain). They graduated in Fine Arts in 2005 and also obtained a Master’s in Artistic Production in 2008 from the University Polytechnic of Valencia. Currently, Mònica holds a FPU Spanish research and teaching fellowship awarded by the Spanish government (MEC) from 2008-12 and Gema holds a Fellowship of excellence 2010, awarded by the UPV, both at the Laboratory of Intermedia creations (UPV). Previously, they took part in the Erasmus programme at the Lahti Politechnic (Finland) in 2003 and the Promoe programme at the Universidad de Guadalajara (Mexico) in 2005. They were awarded the 2nd prize in the III Muestra de Fotografía Joven Rodriguez Velo ‘03 and they have participated in art competitions around the world such as Artiade, Olympic of Visual Arts, Athens ‘04 Il corpo solitario, Italy ‘03, Afetos roubados no tempo in Brazil ‘05-‘06 amongst others. Their work is split into two different lines. One covers work of a personal nature and the other social and critical work where they have participated in some Public Art events.
Joey Ryken, Suicide Attempt Thwarted by Spontaneous Human Combustion, photograph Diasec mounted print, 2008-2010 and Necromantic Ritual 2: Portrait of Residual Artefacts, photograph, Diasec mounted print, 2009
The images that have been selected for ArtSway are a stopping point in a series of negotiations between installational bricolage, performance, and documentation. Necromantic Ritual 2: Portrait of Residual Artifacts is a photograph of the aftermath of a performance. A paint-filled piñata was smashed in a semi-choreographed ritual with invited performers. Suicide Attempt Thwarted by Spontaneous Human Combustion evolved from a theatrical studio installation; the image documents a one-man tableau vivant, animating the set’s function.
My work connects personal anecdote, occult ritual/symbology, and references to popular culture, sub-cultures and art history. These preoccupations are dismantled through shambolic mimicry and translated into a functional lexicon of objects, photographs, drawings, video, and installation. I am interested in the liminal space around and between the parameters ascribed to media, and the improvisational potentialities within the interplay of objects, display, documentation, and installational context. These contextual experiments circumnavigate investigations into the visceral subjectivities of performance.
Joey Ryken Biography
Joey Ryken (b. 1976, Anchorage, US) has a BA in Fine Art from Central St Martins, and is currently studying on an MA in Aural & Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College. He lives and works in London. Recent group shows include: Live Mash-Ups, DYI Sculpture, Screenings and Experimental Biological Modelings, programmed by Chloe Vaitsou at Guest Projects, London, and Awopbobaloobop at Transition Gallery, London. Ryken has performed in/ as various noise-rock, psychedelic, and improvisational acts in California from 1996 - 2006.
Mark Samsworth, I Fell Upon You and You Fell Upon Me, Canyon Project, oil gesso, card and finger joint cut wood, 2010
I make imagery based on what is around me. This is the immediate local, the inside and outside, the environs that are on hand and those of wider social contexts. The near and the close, a magazine text and images, a collection of roadside accumulations or a mediated dispersal of information can all have a pervading influence. By riffing on these corps components, links emerge and also dissipate, creating a space in which to investigate the architecture of non-time, ergonomic expediency and the act of looking.
In many ways the process of my work is an ongoing experiment to see how I can engage with the larger fields of experience and information. As an artist, I am absorbed in the world of visual language and mediated imagery of artists’ work as represented in art magazines, books and other published matter; these are souvenirs from the artworld. Much of this I use as source material to make drawings and collages based upon comparison and potential. These works run alongside and feed into installations made of sculptural and painted elements where a consideration of craft will be combined with a found and altered object. The visual links of line, tone, colour and form are allowed to propose possible narratives; I think of these acts in a simple mantra of: designed, built, coloured, shaped. The absorption in the act of making these works is a place of the non-measured temporal where the evocation of mood becomes time. I Fell Upon You and You Fell Upon Me, Canyon Project, offers a view of the sublime in combination with a stray object to discuss a comparison of language, structural inter-dependence and a response to architectural.
Mark Samsworth Biography
Mark Samsworth is an artist and lecturer who was born in Whitstable, Kent in 1963. He studied at Canterbury College of Art (1981-82) and Newcastle upon Tyne Polytechnic, BA (Hons) Fine Art (1982-85), and the University of the West of England, where he completed an M.A. in Fine Art in 2008. He has had work exhibited nationally and internationally and is currently based at Spike Island Studios, Bristol. He has curated exhibitions and received prizes in open exhibition and awards from Northern Arts and South West Arts. Recent exhibitions include LundMerceLong at the Spike Island Open 2010, Salisbury Open Drawing at Salisbury Arts Centre and Kino Open, Bristol in 2009. Flies Over Alps; Hurt As He Lands, TF Test Space, Bristol 2008 and This Will Not Happen Without You at The John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, 2006/2007.
