Photos from our initial visit to Upton Hall School

Just some quick photos from the area we are hoping to work in:

Upton Hall School

Im currently working on a group exhibition project with two of my friends, Antonia Clarke, and Kathleen Maginn.

When first planning what kind of an exhibition we wanted to do we decided that we wanted to create some of our own work relating to the project but we also felt it would be interesting to share this project with the community, and give others the chance to help decide the direction of our project, and final outcome.

An idea we had was to get students of different ages involved in creating and displaying there own ideas.

We decided the best way to do this was by running a series of workshops with students from Upton Hall School, and encouraging them to explore different ways of expressing the chosen topic.

Themes:

We wanted to chose a theme that the students we would be working with engage with understand and relate to, but that also has also has enough scope that they can interoperate it in their own, different ways.

We thought about themes relating to ‘place’, we could ask them to think about where they live, their city, or a place they have been too, or even a site specific piece, which would then involve and interact with the place it was displayed. We saw how well this idea can work in a piece by Maria Isabel Gaudinez-Aquilizan and Alfredo Juan Aquilizan called ‘Passage’ which was shown in the Tate during this years Biennial. In the piece they asked people from Liverpool to create boats out of cardboard boxes, which they then displayed though out their gallery space.

We are very interested in creating a piece for Upton Hall School grounds. The grounds surround the school and consist of a long walk-way where the children can get in touch with the outdoors.

It will be interesting to get a different point of view of the subject from the students; we can then collate the pieces and chose what will be appropriate for the exhibition.

During this process it will be important for us to stay in contact with the school, getting information about what they want, and listening to the students ideas, and being involved in workshops with the students would be a good way to do this. 

As well as thinking about how to use paper in art, I have been looking at the idea of globalisation, a subject we are

currently looking at in our lecture series. Im becoming very interested in how changes in technology and travel are

influencing how we live on a basic level, and how places and people seem to be coming closer together in someways and further apart in others. I begain to think about how i could use that idea in my own work.

I started by looking at map books, specifically road atlases and was stuck by how much of an art object they already are.  looking at the thousands of lines stretched across the page wiggling in and out of each other, I tried to picture how these places looked in real life, and  also thought about how big a country - let alone world, we are actually living in. I also spoke to and American couple who had recently moved here, and commented on how difficult and complicated the roads here are in comparison to the wide straight roads they were used to in America.

I started working on cutting our all the small spaces between the roads in my AtoZ to leave a skeleton, web-like effect, especially when the pages where turned over, to just a tangle of white paper, and looking at the effect created when theses pages were layered over each other

PAPER - tear, fold, rip, crease, cut

Noriko Ambe,
A Piece of Flat Globe Vol.4

The work i have been doing recently has been hugely  influenced by a book i was given for Christmas this year, called, 'PAPER - Tear, Fold, Rip, Crease, Cut' which talks about the fact that


"In the West, paper has tended to remain primarily a medium on which to write or illustrate, rather than an object in itself. Recently, however, the potential for the manufacture and manipulation of the material as an integral part of a piece of art or design has increasingly been explored".


The book looks at different artists who have used paper to form the bulk of their work.


Noriko Ambe uses hundreds of layers of cut paper built up to convay the 'nuisances of human emotions'.


The book aso looks at the site-specific, cut paper installations of Mia Pearlman, who cutes paper into flat drawings, and then pins them into huge 3D sculptures.

Touched - Liverpool Biennial (18 Sept - 28 Nov 2010)

"Touched presets art with emotional impact. Art that can not only gain our attention, but that can move us, motivate us, and allow us to find away to change ourselves. Art without emotional force is without intellectual power"

Although I think this statement is by no means true of all the pieces involved in this years biennial,  most of the art i have wrote about in my blog has 'touched' me on some level.

I think the title 'touched' is also relevant to the effect this years biennial had on the city itself. Even without mentioning any of the art pieces you could see something going on all over the city - through the black and red wolves on signs, painted on walls, and outside shops, without having to know anything to do with art visitors to the city must of wondered what was going on.

The biennial also 'touched' and made use of the empty spaces in our city, from literal gaps between buildings, to making abandoned and unused buildings into gallery spaces, like the 'old rapid building' on Renshaw Street.

At the beginning of the 'Biennial Guide Book' Lewis Biggs says,

"to be touched in the heart or the gut is to fell the pull of tragedy in another persons situation; maybe as a result to be moved to horror turning to anger at the desire to do something about it, as in Alfredo Jarr's documentation of the massacres of Rwanda; but to also be moved to by beauty and wonder, as in Danica Dakic's film 'Grand Organ'. As Alfredo Jarr has noted: 'if images loose their power to affect us, we have lost our humanity'"

I would say that sums up alot of the pieces i saw in this years Biennial <3

Ryan Trecartin - Trill-ogy Comp (2009)

Three of Ryan Trecartin's videos were being shown in the basement of the main Biennial site, 52 Renshaw Street, and were one of the first Biennial pieces i saw.

In the 'Biennial Guide Book' Frances Loeffer says,

"Trill-ogy Comp doesn't so much 'touch' you in the gentle sense, as pull you in, shake you up, absorb you, and then set you down, reeling. The works are visually, aurally and emotionally assaulting, leaving our senses disrupted and our thought processes open to new perspectives on the world."

The three pieces 'K-CorealNC.K (section a)', 'Sibling Topics (section a)', and 'P.opular S.ky (section ish)', all feature strange, high-energy, almost genderless characters, who make little sense, repeating the same odd catch-phrases over and over again. 

After moving through the videos, and beginning to become accustom to the choppy cutting, and editing i began to see the similarities to the types of shows been shown on MTV - the same over the top characters and dramas. The same realisation that what i was seeing made no sense, and the same compulsion to keep watching anyway.

These videos definitely influenced me into looking at how these 'reality dramas' could be used in my own work.

 

  U B U W E B - Film & Video: Ryan Trecartin - K-CoreaINC.K (section a) (2009)

- Watch more Videos at Vodpod.

Gardenia

Gardenia - Official Trailer from Andrew J. Rutter on Vimeo.


Trailer for my amazingly talented friend  Andrew John Rutter's new film Gardenia - take a look :)