Crit#20, @John Jones Project Space, 17 June 2011
Presenting artists:
Graduate BA Art Practice Goldsmiths
Luis Ignacio Rodriguez graduated from Goldsmiths Art Practice degree in 2010 and usually explains his art at parties as performance meets video meets installation. This ensures conversations swiftly move away to his interlocutor’s idea of art.
Graduate MA Creative Practice for Narrative Environments, Central Saint Martins
Result of a research for MA project exploring fetishization of virtuality, A Set For Online Romantic Dinner consists of a: half plate, corner plate, jewelry headphones, bow tie headphones, keycloth (so you don’t spill your wine on the keyboard) and a set of rules or etiquette on how to behave during an online romantic dinner. Inspired by Berthol Brecht’s distancing objects and a 2009. Skype wedding that happened on the airports in Dubai and London, it is treated as an utilitarian set of objects, but at the same time critical design which comments on the current situation of digital media developing mostly into virtuality forgetting the body as an important element in interaction with the technology. Lina Kovacevic is Croatian designer currently based in London
MA Fine Art, Goldsmiths
What are we looking for when we look at images? Andrew is interested in the complicated relationship between looking and longing, particularly in relation to nature and ‘origins’.
PG Cert Photography, Central Saint Martins
Shape shifting, elusive presences, traces of movement and light combine to create images that are never quite what they seem. Robin Gardiner has been exploring these ideas in a number of buildings with which she has a personal connection. She works in sequences probing the liminal space between what is seen and what is sensed.
Graduate, BA Fine Art, Middlesex
With this my latest series of painting I have changed my way of working. I wanted to have more freedom with the way I work. When I planned a painting I had in mind how it should look and I kept strictly to that plan. I needed to experiment with these new paintings by adding elements I did not consider using within my previous work. I wanted to change my way of working by using trippy psychedelic patterns and images, the use of collage and hyper-surrealism, to keep my paintings as free flowing as possible. Previously my paintings where ghostly figuration and haunting portraits. There are messages within my paintings it could be personal, political, historical or all at once. I cover my paintings with layers and smokescreens to lure the viewer into the work to find messages and hidden depths within the paintings but I don’t know how the work will finish aesthetically.
Final Year, BA Fine Art, Chelsea College of Art
The motifs in my film and artworks evolve around technology’s impact on our consciousness, by exploring varieties of contemporary alienation, the internet’s once utopian potential, and the individual’s quest for self-betterment via play in identity and desire to develop intellectually. I feel that technology, rather than playing the role of mindless task performer, has had a transformative impact on our lives, including the way we interact with others, and how we perceive the world. I enjoy the paradoxical juxtaposition of the rational, mechanical machine to the potential for its role in the re-enchantment of the world through the rise of magic, mythicism and the spiritual. For I see technology as playing a vital role in our spiritual lives: the internet, for example, while a physical body of wires, chips and phone lines, creates a non-physical realm of experience, in which we autonomously post, commune and wander, usually in private, gathering once out of reach information, and meeting the once unreachable. For me, the Internet is a way of satisfying our emotional and spiritual needs, as opposed to our physical, providing an opportunity for reflection on our being, and possibly the reaching of higher states of consciousness.