Students from the MA/MFA Fine Art Media program had an exhibition two nights ago titled ‘Autocorrect Ruined My Life’. The show was drawing on the theatrical and the synthetic; this drastic oversatement of an underwhelming narrative, played out via the mediums of performance, sculpture and screen based works. On arrival there was a woman in a suit distributing stickers to people entering the gallery, stickers marked with the word ‘audience’. However, this was not the end of it; once there was a significant amount of people present at the gallery we gathered around the same woman who was now armed with a flip-chart blazoned with the phrase ‘optimise your experience’.
She went on to discuss the idea of an exhibition whilst using business-style language, giving tips and advice on how us, the audience, can ‘perform to the best of our ability’ by ‘achieving our objectives’. After this team-meeting style performance, she stood on a tiny step in the corner of the gallery, one you might see a child using to reach a draw slightly out of reach, and stared, blankly in silence, at the opposing wall. The only variation was when she would occasionally blurt out motivational-esque sayings. The piece was titled ‘No One Ever Drowned in Their Own Sweat’ assumedly after the famous Ann Landers quote. You can see more of Naomi Fitzsimmons’ work >here<.
Another piece of interest was a film work that was situated inside a three-dimensional cartoon thought bubble, which appeared to be being suspended by balloons resting on the ceiling. The subject of the film was a photocopier and the narration was one stuffed with innuendos such as the desire to ‘slide my fresh paper into your deep draw’. Visible on the screen was a sort of slide show of advert-style imagery of photocopiers, with people stroking them and light shining out of every orifice. A few other thoughtful ideas were one woman who was on the roof, out of view, but was singing with the help of a microphone connected to an amp outside the door of the gallery and a film involving a curtain both physically and within the confines of the screen. A couple of works we found highly amusing whilst continuing to be innovative were a birthday cake with ‘EVERYTHING WILL BE FINE’ written on it, where the audience were invited to blow the candles out whilst making a wish and a piece of card on which were written the words ‘photoshop someone pushing Yves Klein into the void’.
It was also the MA at Camberwell last night and there was some good work in all areas. A beautiful piece was where someone has printed a piece of paper in a press, just leaving the outline. Another was a very well positioned print of a cliff edge embracing the entire wall and on the other side of the wall, in a different room, was the sea. Bronze casts of rocks were situated on top of an essay (formatted as one sentence per page) all about landscape and the notion of a backdrop.
We also got some great news today; Katie Tindle, the mind behind The Listening Booth is curating a show at SLAM in Kings Cross titled 'So what is it that you do exactly?', on the 30th, and has asked to include our piece 'Where Are They Now?'. Take a look at her website >here<