top of page
Quick and Dirty
The 'Quick and Dirty' exhibition was an early inward facing pop-up show at WCA, initiated and curated by Helen Dear and Constanza Marques Guedes. For someone like myself who had very limited experience actually participating in group contemporary art shows prior to the MFA, it was an incredibly helpful experience in how it demonstrated the potential for dialogues between diverse work in a space. Not only does the work change the space, and the space change the work, but the dynamics created between the work has a lot to be said for the success of any curation.
I ended up helping out with the installation of the show, which was the beginning of what has since been an interesting learning curve in the installing of various kinds of work in various environments.
Outside of paying more attention to curation, and beginning to take an interest in installation, 'Quick and Dirty' shone a light on the importance of collaboration, compromise, and the management of personalities for group shows. As emerging artists exhibition space - even within our own university - can be at a premium, and I believe that being able to negotiate the given space in creative and collaborative ways goes a long way.
Quick and Dirty
The 'Quick and Dirty' exhibition was an early inward facing pop-up show at WCA, initiated and curated by Helen Dear and Constanza Marques Guedes. For someone like myself who had very limited experience actually participating in group contemporary art shows prior to the MFA, it was an incredibly helpful experience in how it demonstrated the potential for dialogues between diverse work in a space. Not only does the work change the space, and the space change the work, but the dynamics created between the work has a lot to be said for the success of any curation.
I ended up helping out with the installation of the show, which was the beginning of what has since been an interesting learning curve in the installing of various kinds of work in various environments.
Outside of paying more attention to curation, and beginning to take an interest in installation, 'Quick and Dirty' shone a light on the importance of collaboration, compromise, and the management of personalities for group shows. As emerging artists exhibition space - even within our own university - can be at a premium, and I believe that being able to negotiate the given space in creative and collaborative ways goes a long way.
Arc
Arc
Arc
Coming into the MFA program I found myself very conflicted, and frankly frustrated, as to the direction I was taking with my work. My practice felt divided between a deep-seated - though largely unexplored - attachment to the process itself of drawing, and the socio-politically active side of my life that had yet to find much expression in my work.
In an attempt to resolve this divide I worked on a Hypermasculinity Series. In these works the aim was to communicate the point at which some men reach what seems like an apex in performed, clichéd masculinity that ends up becoming either 'toxic' or violently self-destructive. The glitch effect used in many of these drawings was included with the metaphor of 'heat death' in mind, whereby something evolves to a state of no thermodynamic free energy and can no longer sustain processes that increase entropy. While these works at the very least helped me to begin to re-think my practice, the results felt very limited in a consideration of the process of their making and in the feeling that the attachment to illustration was preceding the concept.
Following on from the first attempts, I began to reflect more on the process and labor of these concentrated drawing studies. Through tutorials I was given a vocabulary to verbalize and therefore focus on the notion of value in relation to labor of different kinds, and the value of the chosen subjects themselves. In many cases I gravitated towards conventionally 'low value' subjects, and treated them with an attention to detail and concentration normally reserved for more 'high value' subjects. Further, this was generally done with exclusively carbon-based, 'primitive' mediums.
Coupled with a growing fascination with Hito Steyerl's The Wretched of the Screen (more information to this point can be found in the 'Context' section), the next two works tried to logically follow on from the previous conversation about masculinity while also bringing the notion of value to the forefront. One, a charcoal rendering of an image of young Mike Tyson screenshot from a poor quality YouTube video, tried to incorporate a reading of Hito Steyerl's thoughts on the hierarchy of image quality in the digital world. The piece was done at a much larger scale (60 x 48 in) which satisfied a personal need for physicality in the process of drawing - a need which has since found some clarity in researching Matthew Barney's Drawing Restraint series. Simultaneously I was building a few rudimentary tattoo machines, using only elements that might be available to incarcerated prisoners, as an object-driven expression of economies of value. Further, these two pieces were an important step in opening myself up to an ethos of the 'concept driving the medium' as opposed to the reverse, something I have been guilty of for much of my artistic career.
Sparks final poster
Exhibited work
Sparks
Sparks final poster
1/5
Sparks poster design: Joanna Passos
Sparks
The exhibition involved a group of fifteen first year MFA students, and took place at Legge Studios - a small metal workshop in Lewisham run by three Camberwell alumni. Collaboration was key in first envisioning the exhibition - from the regular group meetings and delegating amongst the participating artists in the planning process, to the goal of community engagement with the local schools and residents of the Lewisham area, and to the fact of Legge Studios being a Camberwell alumni endeavor.
In retrospect we could have benefited from having a more experienced idea of what a conducive gallery space entails. While non-'white cube' and unorthodox spaces remain appealing, both for their potential cost-effectiveness and how these spaces change and are changed by the work itself, I do not believe that we adequately researched Legge Studios prior to taking on the project as a group. For example, paying better attention to the quality of the building infrastructure and walls, accounting for bad weather, and planning the public transport access for visitors and the participants themselves could have greatly streamlined the process.
Crucially, dealings in the future with exhibition spaces or outsourced labor need to be protected through written contracts that allow for the partial payment of any fees throughout the exhibition process, as opposed to a lump sum paid prior to any work being done. This was naivety on our parts in assuming that Legge Studios longstanding friendship with one of our participating artists would be enough to guarantee the agreed terms of the collaboration between our group and Legge Studios. Unfortunately this backfired somewhat in that our group did not have any effective recourse to prevent some of the unprofessionalism from Legge Studios throughout the process.
By unprofessionalism I am referring in part to consistent communication issues on the part of Legge Studios, something that we will hopefully be more attuned to in the planning of any future projects. These issues included: a disregard of emails, phone calls, and messages sent from our group to Legge Studios in the days leading up to, during, and after the exhibition. This extended as far as Legge Studios not notifying us whatsoever when, due to an apparent change of transport company the night before, the van had to arrive at WCA more than two hours late. The same issue arose when the day before the private view, one of the three main gallery spaces of Legge Studios sprung significant leaks from its walls, and ended up threatening one of the artists' works.
From a personal point of view, I was responsible for installing the exhibition along with three of the Legge Studios owners. This had been agreed upon weeks before the exhibition but, when it came time to install the work, only one of the Legge Studios owners was around to help. While ultimately this put me in a position to adapt many new skills when it comes to installation, something that has been a consistent and welcome journey since being on the MFA, the workload in this case was unavoidably overwhelming.
bottom of page