There’s a great exhibition in Angel (closing this week!) that we would highly recommend. It’s a 3-channel film, which focuses its efforts on exploring ideas around perception. Even with the set up of the projectors; 1 projection is dominant storyteller then there are 2 secondary ones that are mostly about creating atmosphere. Suki Chan (who’s exhibition it is) has incorporated an interactive element; if one sits on a stool in the middle of the gallery, there are 3 red lights that are visible from your position. The red lights track your eyes and show the movement on one of the projections, and more of the soundtrack becomes audible when movement is detected. We weren’t too sure about this initially and just thought that it was an unnecessary demonstration of wealth and wasn’t as conceptually as thoughtful as the rest of the show. However, after sitting with it for slightly longer it became less opposed to it and felt that it did actually compliment the show due to it’s ability to create such awareness of something that is so instinctive. The film began with some first hand accounts of people's experiences of the physicality of their eyes. We took this to therefore be about eyes being this vehicle with which we perceive the world, and since a huge component of art is visual, the sense of sight is one which is utilised quite a bit in this context. We are then shown a collection of medical diagrams and drawings of eyes and examples of sight tests and visual experiments with prisms. Something quite disturbing was some footage of the way an eye darts around, consuming all the information in a given space without the user even knowing. A clever touch was a part of the film that exhibited these low-lit rooms that then had other spaces over-layed onto them, through a projection, creating a strange illusion of space; they became one and it was difficult to separate one from the other. This was certainly in keeping with the rest of the film as it was demonstrating the capabilities of the eyes in our own heads, a reason why a projection is much more applicable than a screen in this situation. A beautiful comparison to blind people was made at some point. It was mentioned that when they’re operating within the world and employing their sense of touch, they don't feel their hand, they feel the world and when we do the same, we see world, we don’t see our retinas. A fairly poetic method of explaining that, a journey and destination are subtly different. In conclusion we felt as if this was a film about the way in which we encounter art; as we said previously a huge portion of art is visual and therefore sight plays a huge role in the perception of it. Obviously this is a work which is very open due to the relate-ability of the subject; sight.
We also visited the Jerwood Drawing Prize which was OK as usual. Not really something which we find great pleasure in but occasionally there’s something which surprises! In this case there was an amazing film (that actually won the prize and a clip can be seen >here<) that appeared at first to be an animation but on reading the materials list we discovered that in fact it was white mineral ink being suspended in a cube of gelatin. The simplicity of it was lovely and the shapes it was making brought on thoughts about a future when people have films hanging on the wall as opposed to paintings.
We’ve got quite a lot on our plate at the moment but it’s all pretty exciting! There a new show in Boston in which we’re showing our film ‘Anything I Can do is Not Art Because I'm Not an Artist’ in an exhibition titled ‘A Group Thing’. We’re also involved in an arts festival in Alfreton next week and we’re in the show titled ‘Shop Windows’ and are showing ‘Wash Away the Pain(t)’. something that’s not quite yet materialised but is in the pipe line is a show with scaffold gallery in Manchester that goes by the name ‘Get Rich Quick’ – we’ll keep you updated with this. Then the final show that’s happening is with another group of people from csm in a small gallery in Hoxton where we’re re-staging ‘is here alright?’ with ‘proper’ art crates. Something less exhibition related but still in the realms of our practice is that we’ve been asked to do a talk in Liverpool which is going to be about the idea of the non-expert, something that we’ve got huge amounts of experience in (lol), so we’re getting some ideas ready for that too.
This week has also seen the beginning of our new podcast ‘Artists and Friends’ where we’re going to discuss exhibitions, have interviews and talk over any general ideas or thoughts we might have. Check out our very first edition >>>here<<<. The final thing (told you we’d been busy) is that we’ve put our curatorial project in motion; The SketchUp Residency is going to be a project where we supply artists with a location or a brief for a commission and they take over The SketchUp Residency Instagram. When the residency is over there will be an exhibition or public artwork that exists in the place in which we originally stated in the open call.
