Crit#18, @University of Arts London, 14 March 2011
Presenting artists:
MA Painting, Final Year, Slade School of Art
Rodin’s work is marked by an investigation into the relationship between art and science, which is informed by her background in neurophysiology. A recurring theme in her work is the link between the individual and the crowd,the notion of free will and artistic originality.
Her interest in science not only influences her methodological approach to her artistic practice but also her choice of materials. Rodin’s work essentially seeks to undermine the idea of artistic originality and the attached value system in contemporary art. While Rodin’s work has an emotional engagement with the materiality of painting, she seeks to balance this by adopting an objective pseudo-scientific marked by theoretical ristance.
Graduate, MA Art and Politics, Goldsmiths
We Happy Few is an artwork by Claire Haslam which explores structures and meaning and their relationships to perspective and ideology, power and memory.
It is an attempt to make, in photographic form, a structuralist critique of Western engagement with Iraq. The work comprises two triptychs which engage with signification as a practice through which meaning becomes possible. It explores the idea that an action or an event becomes detached from the ‘real’ by repeated signification and re-signification until the signified is no longer part of the ‘real’ but only another sign. We Happy Few addresses the struggle for knowledge in the face of this loss of ‘the real’.
Graduate, BA Hons Fine Art: Time Based Media, Wimbledon College of Art
Olga Koroleva works with video, photography, sound and writing exploring the subtle margins between fact and fiction, theatrical and mundane, spontaneous and directed. She is inspired by the processes of film and theatre production and their theories. By looking at the nuances by which we as an audience comprehend cinematic and theatrical language she draws attention to the relationship between the process and the finished product.
Graduate, PGCert Photography, Central Saint Martins
In my work I investigate the boundaries between reality and fiction by reconfigure figmentation of memory and imagination. I work mainly in photography. I approach my work with a playful – and sometimes nostalgic – take on the various people and relationships that form my life. I try to reappropriate these relationships and scenarios to become shared social and psychological conditions – with a curiosity that is both critical and sensual.
PhD in Creative Practice: Dance at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance
“Another Chair Dance” incorporates dance, installation, text and video. Three performers move in front of three laptops where several sitting performances are reproduced. Instead of learning the choreographies the dancers resist rehearsal choosing to copy the movement from the videos.
Graduate, BA Fine Art, Central Saint Martins
Lora Hristova censors pornography in an attempt not to prudishly hide explicit imagery but to covertly expose underlying emotional conflicts. Unlike any other medium porn offers us an inexhaustible supply of explicit imagery dealing directly with human sexuality. Much more about power than pleasure, for the artist ‘porn is a manifestation of mass unconscious fears and latent urges.’ Men and women perform clearly defined roles and this feeds her interests in gender relations and feminist theory. By covering up, cropping or colouring in parts of pornographic magazines and videos she removes the performers from their original context and projects onto them insecurities instead of fantasies.