 |
Email PageGoldsmiths: MFA 2007 Survey
August 29, 2006- September 16, 2006
Reception: August 30, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Emanuel Almborg, Richard Clements, Erin Growe, Sarah Gilder, Gudni Gunnarsson, Robb Jamieson, Yuko Kamei, Maria-Brigita Karantzi, Sonia Morange, Ryan O'Conner, Christopher Paquet, Raymond Taudin Chabot, Jeanine Woollard
White Box
525 W 26th StMFA 2007 Survey produced by Cottelston Advisors. Curated by Jennifer Thatcher.
____
Goldsmiths: MFA 2007 Survey Performances
In conjunction with the preview of the exhibition Goldsmiths: MFA 2007 Survey, Cottelston Advisors will be presenting the following suite of performances on the evening of August 30, 2006, from 6-8pm.
Shoot the Moon: A musical performance piece commissioned by Robb Jamieson, the song expounds the virtues of Rock n’ Roll over Contemporary Art. The band consists of Daniel Schacter on lead guitar and vocals and on drums Tara Martin. Robb will be stage crashing. Title: Contemporary Art. Duration: 4 minutes.
Dr. Polly Fibre: A graduate of Goldsmiths Postgraduate School of Textiles, Christine Ellison aka Dr. Polly Fibre builds a soundscape of rhythms and texture from the peripheries of tailoring. The sonic seamstress collapses binaries through this exploration of authenticity, progress and craft in an age of post-digital aesthetics. Title: CRAFTWORK VIII: 4/4 time. Duration: 12 minutes.
ORTHO: ORTHO is a performance noise ensemble made up of Clay Lacefield, Kyle Lapidus, Nouri Zander with sound and technical support by Ron Rosenman. Using handmade costumes, props, and electronic instruments they tell tales and espouse scientific theories. ORTHO will change your life! Title: This Island ORTHO. Duration: 13 minutes.
____
Goldsmiths College is the most notorious art school in Britain. Famously the birthplace of the Young British Artists in the late1980s, Goldsmiths invented the very idea of the celebrity art school for a celebrity-obsessed era. Lazy art critics, curators, and collectors were suddenly motivated to venture into deepest south London for Goldsmiths degree shows. Quick: get down there before Charles Saatchi snaps everything up! Quick: Find the art stars of tomorrow – then drop them just as soon as the next year graduates!
Not much has changed. If the ever-growing warren of artist-run spaces and young gallerists in London’s trendy East End has provided another arena in which to see young artists’ work, art colleges are still the most convenient means by which critics and curators can take the temperature of the current contemporary art scene. And Goldsmiths still reigns supreme: its degree shows are bigger, bolder, and more exhausting than any other in Britain. Saatchi still sniffs about.
Yet if the excitement and laboratory atmosphere still prevail at Goldsmiths, the insecurity that until recently accompanied the here-today-gone-tomorrow London art scene is thankfully dissipating. Today’s new crop of Goldsmiths artists can look forward to a postgraduate future where there are endless spaces in which to exhibit, an expanding cluster of art fairs to seduce collectors, and a general public less hostile to contemporary art; a culture that is more interested in nurturing young artists than continually replacing them. Moreover, now that its infrastructure is fully established, the new London art scene can afford to be more international in its outlook, in direct contrast to the insularity of the YBAs. This new openness, maturity, and con. dence are everywhere evident in the work of this year’s best Goldsmiths MFA students, whose nationalities include Greek, Icelandic, American, Japanese, and Germany.
While a do-it-yourself aesthetic has for the past couple of decades been the hallmark of British sculpture, the new sculpture boasts the skills of the expert welder or joiner, the result of days laboring in the foundry. Richard Clements and Ryan O’Connor make heavy robust sculptures that both revel in a seemingly oldfashioned notion of masculinity and question the starkness of the Modernist macho aesthetic. A hybrid of classic 20th-century furniture design and surrealist sculpture, an O’Connor chair, for example, might answer the Modernist quest to balance form and function, did it not appear to be growing branches. Clements works rather in the mid-point between the urban and the rural; he examines our relationship to the natural and what forms these interactions create. His wrought iron sculptures Fountain and its companion piece and its companion piece Decoy, an elegant an elegant Decoy swan-shaped garden ornament, celebrate the non-institutionalized freedom of rural aesthetics.
If Modernism was obsessed with the idea of a sleek technotopia, Sonia Morange prefers the behind-thescenes messiness of our gadget-obsessed society; she paints electrical wires. With her expressionistic style and jewel-colored palette she brings a nostalgic, sometimes even erotic, whimsy to her still lives of tangled bundles of wires and the untidy backs of computer monitors. Christopher Paquet, on the other hand, mixes high Modernism with folkloric allegory in his imposing diptych The Power of the Majesty, in which a stag rises in which a stag rises Majesty proudly from a fairytale woodland scene. Curtained on either side by heavy black brushstrokes, the scene hovers precariously between utopian and dystopian. Maria-Brigita Karantzi’s and and Karantzi’ Guðni Gunnarsson’s installations use the technique of magic realism to lure the viewer into an Alice in Wonderland world of topsyturvy scale and puzzling philosophical conundrums.
Karantzi’s miniature sculpture Impossible features two features two ladders over a dollop of blue paint; leaning against each other, the only route over the paint-mountain is to climb up one impossibly steep ladder, over the top and down the other. Her mischief continues in Shit! in which a tiny in which a tiny . gurine stands next to an over. owing toilet; surrounded by a string of festive fairy lights, hers is a cruel shrine to the unfortunate man’s bowel disorder. Both artists have a magpie’s eye for the discarded and unloved gems – scraps of mirror, shiny bin bags – of our consumer society; Gunnarsson recycled an entire abandoned house in his native Reykjavik.
The fragile male ego is explored in the videos of Emanuel Almborg, Raymond Taudin-Chabot, and Robb Jamieson, and in the paintings of Erin Crowe. Taudin-Chabot creates meticulously choreographed existentialist tableaux of contemporary businessmen. His films study the almost imperceptible maneuvers that men perform to signal or attempt to improve on their position in the of. ce pecking order. Moving as slowly and deliberately as a Bill Viola video, the men anxiously scrutinize their stress-worn re. ections in the of. ce bathroom mirror or studiously avoid each other’s predatory gazes. Erin Crowe paints portraits of those whose egos require constant af. rmation; she preys mainly on businessmen and politicians. If on some occasions Crowe’s adulation of male authority . gures might suggest the psychopathology of a deluded fan, on others she plays the role of the of. cial corporate portraitist. Her winsome charm and perfect timing have even made her a minor celebrity: she was invited to be the CNBC artist in residence when the news station was unable to interview the reclusive Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan on the day of his retirement. For this exhibition, Crowe turns her disarmingly . attering eye on Fidel Castro and the philanthropist Warren Buffet.
Emanuel Almborg and Robb Jamieson look rather to the insecurities of the young Western male. Part docudrama, part animation, Almborg’s film Major takes the vie- takes the vie- wer on a labyrinthine trip through the fantasy world of a teenager, who, with his imaginary alter-ego, attempts to escape the stifing ennui of middle-class family life. As the film shifts perspective, however, we watch his parents battle with their own frustrations at the stubbornness and hostility of their son. Performed by actors, Major was in fact made in collaboration with a real family, who helped write the . ctional script to try and tackle their very real issues.
One of Robb Jamieson’s films asks us to believe that the artist is playing the guitar for the very . rst time. Strutting and strumming away in front of the camera with all the attitude of a seasoned lead guitarist, it takes a while to register that he really is playing badly. Many young male artists make punky films that express their teenage musical af. liations, but, in its earnestness, Jamieson’s film is unexpectedly touching. In predetermining his failure to play well, moreover – the title of the film reveals that this is the . rst and last time he will play time he will play – Jamieson seeks once and for all to kill many an artist’s secret dream of becoming a rock star. Music might be more appealing than contemporary art, Jamieson suggests, but it also takes a lot of hard work to become a musician, so better stick to what you’re good at.
Jeanine Woollard, recently awarded the Beck’s Futures Student Bursary, also tries an impatient hand at an activity that would more usually require several years of dedication to perfect: fencing. In one gallery performance, she enlists her father, whose workingclass background sits at odds with the aristocratic heritage of this sport, into training a group of artists. A Charlie Chaplin-style soundtrack over the documentary footage underlines the slapstick potential of the sport, and the absurdity of its being played inside a white cube gallery with inadequately protective out. ts made by Woollard herself. Another film, Kiss Fencing, aims to capture fencing’s original context, aims to capture fencing’s original context, Fencing the medieval courtly love tradition. Here, Woollard and her fencing partner substitute kisses for swords; trying to score pecks, the . ght looks more like an elaborate bird mating ritual. Woollard is a post-feminist Romantic artist: she’d like a man to pick up her handkerchief after her, but if necessary she’ll get her hands dirty too. If Woollard’s films resurrect an archaic British identity, in contrast to the Britpop cool of the YBAs, Yuko Kamei addresses the dif. culty for a foreigner of establishing a British identity. Kitaika tells the story of a Chinese tells the story of a Chinese girl whose name, Aowen, is unpronounceable not only to her new English compatriots, but also, as an ancient Chinese name meaning the charming ‘. ying in literature’, is equally problematic in her birth country. Finally settling on the name ‘Kitaika’ (Chinese girl), given her by her husband’s Bulgarian grandmother, she graciously resigns herself to remaining a perpetual foreigner.
Finally, Sarah Gilder’s Baywatch satirizes another satirizes another pervasive stereotype: the all-American ideal of the buxom blonde beauty. Her version of the cult soft-porn TV series swaps the golden sands of Santa Monica for the grey environs of an anonymous suburban street. Shivering slightly in her swimsuit on the wet street corner, Gilder’s Baywatch babe readies herself for a rather different babe readies herself for a rather different type of surf-wave, a drenching by a passing car.
-- Jennifer Thatcher
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
|
 | |||||||||||||||||
|
© 2005-2008 chelseaartgalleries.com | Terms of Use | Privacy Policy
| Site Map |
