Filed under: the wasp room | Tags: 2010, Exhibition, nottingham, the wasp room
Race For The Prize
featuring Paul Lewthwaite, Geoff Diego Litherland & Jonathan Gillie
14th – 24th October 2010, Thursday – Sunday, 12-5pm
Private View: 14th October, 7-9pm
The Wasp Room & Max Warburg Space present the group exhibition Race For The Prize. This collaborative endeavour seeks to expose confluences that have arisen in the artists’ recent work and future direction, which will result in a series of explorative exhibitions.
The artists’ practices are rooted in an ongoing investigation with the processes and formal elements inherent to the media of sculpture, painting and moving image. This understanding of history and technique is not the only overlap in the artists’ work. Recently they have been drawn to the imagery and narratives found within the genres of science fiction. By appropriating these ideologies, which often have pseudo-religious undertones and apocalyptic prophecies, they seek to create an interchange between fantasy and stark reality.
The works aim to exploit the way sculpture and painting can manifest the abstract and intangible into something bordering on reality. Lewthwaite’s sculptures are assembled from laboriously crafted components and ready-made objects. Their stage set qualities and odd forms play with illusions of interpretation, highlighted by the choice of materials and peculiar surface treatments. Litherland’s paintings emerge from dark, geometric backgrounds where painterly abstractions jostle with 3D forms to generate awkward compositions that aspire to enlighten yet offer little resolution.
Together the artworks create an ‘out of the ordinary’ and slightly uncanny atmosphere in the gallery space. Vivid primary and fluorescent colours combine with muted ochres. The detritus of semi-recognisable forms and shapes are laid out ready to be reassembled by the audience.
The exhibition at The Wasp Room is complimented by the digital animations of Jonathan Gillie, whose work references current aesthetics in the visual, as well as the musical avant-garde. His animations are heavily layered compositions in which process and precision play an equal role to instinct and experiment. Attempting to visualize current thinking in science, electronic music and moving image he produces an imagined, exotic environment, as familiar as it is alien and as mechanical as it is organic.
Filed under: the wasp room
16th September – 10th October 2010
Private View: 14th September 2010, 6-8pm.
Download the Press Release
September 14th sees the opening of Max Warburg Space’s inaugural exhibition: Empty Vessels by Alia Pathan, which has been commissioned for the 2010 Tethervision Commissions.
Empty Vessels explores dialogue as an artifice to contradict an image. Using dialogue to create narratives that alter in structure and meaning, the work challenges the viewer to construct an ordered and convincing reality, reconsidering what they believe to be true and false.
Our acceptance of the diegetic – the world within the screen – is continually challenged. In addition to interrogating the conventions of narrative each scene weaves and cascades into the next, destabilising our perception of linear time.
Empty Vessels follows four characters; two detectives, a film editor and a producer, who each attempt to piece together a mystery in order to solve an overarching dilemma. Presenting a chicken-and-egg debate, the links between the two dilemmas become increasingly apparent and evermore entangled.
Pathan’s work embraces digital technological advancements with high production values. The cinematic aesthetic pays homage to storytelling on screen as a way of conveying messages and to the audience for creating meaning themselves.
maxwarburggallery.blogspot.com
Filed under: the wasp room
16th September – 10th October 2010
Private View: 14th September 2010, 6-8pm.
Download Press Release
The Wasp Room presents a solo exhibition of Stuart Croft’s film Drive In: an endless road movie that explores apocrypha, paradise and the monologue form.
Cinema is littered with road movie couples whose destructive fate is sealed from the opening credits. There is often violence, and almost always a myriad of characters encountered on the road, attempting to signpost us towards existential discovery.
In Drive In, none of this happens. Stuart Croft’s movie-couple encounter no violence, meet no fateful ending and find no resolve. Instead, their road journey is ceaseless. They meet no one and arrive nowhere.
Drive In features two characters whose car glides through a nameless, rain-soaked city at night. The passenger, a super-confident American woman in her late twenties, recounts a classic, but barely disguised, male fantasy to a middle-aged man driving the car, who remains unnervingly silent throughout.
A ‘desert island’ shaggy-dog tale, her monologue describes a pathetic guy washed up on a paradise island who stumbles across the woman of his dreams; a joke-story from which Croft has removed the punchline so that, somewhat perversely, it never ends. Both joke and journey recur in the gallery space as a seamlessly conjoined circle. Furthermore, the woman delivers her monologue as a diatribe; a caustic indictment discharged toward her male companion. The fantasy image of utopian paradise, rendered through the desert island joke, collides with the idealised image of the city, rendered via the movie camera.
Shot on celluloid and on the road with the full apparatus of a film crew, Drive In appears to be a convincing slice of a commercial feature film. Yet with endlessness at the core of Croft’s scriptwriting, editing and gallery installation, he infinitely denies linear cinematic assurances.
thewasproom.co.uk
