Crit#7, @Chelsea College of Art, 19 October 2009
Graduate, BA Art Practice,
I will be showing Votive Anchor issues 1-6. Votive anchor is a monthly magazine which consists of one double sided A3 photocopy folded in half. It is used to publish information and images which have not appeared in my work in the month preceding each issue’s publication.
Graduate, BA Hons Painting, Camberwell College of Arts.
My paintings are based on collages I construct using found imagery. In painting these strange and sometimes unsettling scenarios with an increasingly experimental approach to the manipulation of colour, space and composition, I strive to highlight the wondrous ability paint has to describe, suggest and invent whilst establishing an ambiguous narrative that I hope will evoke curiosity in the viewer.
www.abigailbox.com
M.A. Fine Art, Chelsea college of Art and Design
A subject which concerns me is an individual’s ability to control their life. There is a system which governs the global times in which we live. The system is supported by global forces causing the air to become electronic smog, food to become genetically modified and our imagination is based on mass media. However, none of these forces takes the individual into consideration. This system presents a form of contemporary irresistible natural selection. However, I must find my place in this global network. I have to filter the system’s influence out of my life. The essence remains. I operate in this essence; this essence involves the lowest human common denominator. Everything is basic senses, basic relations, and basic food. My art also exists in this essence.
http://marc-aaron.blogspot.com/
My current installation work attempts to understand the dialogical relationship between the object and the event of an artwork. To do this I try to present physical and theoretical models that describe, occupy and/or quote the space that exists between an artist’s conceptual agenda and their product. My work presented here tries to create a system that documents the translation between an idea and an object and an object and its meaning(s). The installation recreates to scale a Roman stepping stone from a site at Pompeii. These stepping stones created elevated crossings in the streets of roman cities through which waste and sewage would run beneath. I recognised the stones as a site of meeting homogeneous to the site of the art object as a meeting point between artist and viewer. As objects the stones act as intermediators between two parallel running pathways; their function is one of flux. My work in the studio presents documentation of this encounter and processing of the stepping stones. I am interested in what is lost in the translation of an encounter or idea into a material situation – the improbability of accuracy – and this is given over to the viewer in my work. Inaccuracy allows the work to function in a disorderly manner – becoming the bad document – the viewer is invited to re-produce the event but through a logic somewhat counter-productive. The photographic element of the work presents the only analogy to the reality of the original object, in its original environment, but the lack of information in the photographs – as it is crudely removed both by over-exposing and by physical cutting – suggests a post-productive vandalism on the works potential to communicate.
I am most engaged by moments when form and content click together beautifully.
I enjoy allowing casual marks to suggest forms, and try to be receptive to where the paint wants to take the work. I am currently exploring a process in which the painting begins as something abstract and ambiguous, and then slowly develops, with forms and meaning gradually emerging. This runs parallel to the process of thought forms emerging out of the unconscious and symbolising themselves in images.
I am also excited about the idea of an itinerant practice that goes around collecting a wealth of imagery, to be later assembled back in the studio. I would compare this to a poet collecting and ordering the day’s events to form a narrative or meaningful expression of some sort.