Laboratory

On 28 August, Sarah and I discussed the work that the 3 artists had presented for the closing party of ‘Laboratory’ – what the artworks meant to us and also how the practices of the artists could develop in the future (the latter wasn’t just driven by our egos by the way… the artists asked us for some feedback too, honest….)

Here is what we thought…

Mia Taylor

Mia’s work in ‘Laboratory’ shows how she has responded to the architecture of Gallery 1 – a busy thoroughfare for visitors with a mixture of walls, glass screens and pillars. Her practice has constantly shifted between painting on canvas and working with the space that surrounds her, always informed by her interest in fragmentation, indeterminacy and multiplicity. Importantly, individual pieces can also be seen as integral parts of a wider series, as Mia has incorporated details of architecture into the paintings and then describing that detail back into the surrounding wall, floor and ceiling areas. The wall-based pieces are arranged in a series of visual jumps: a hazy, indeterminate mountainscape is adjacent to a protruding cone of tissue paper (see below); two gesturally-drawn paintings are separated by a screen that prevents both being easily seen at the same time; a canvas wrapped in semi-opaque plastic with a clear vertical stripe hangs next to another with horizontal fringing collaged across its middle.

The other elements she has created – the ribbons of colour hanging from the ceiling supports, the canvas block that has replaced a brick in the floor, the semi-opaque screens – all show a lightness of touch that, initially, seems like an intervention undertaken in a fairly non-committal way. In aggregate though, these elements have a marked impact on the space – both how it looks and how visitors navigate through it. To us this shows an increasing confidence to work out the links between the architecture of the space and her painting practice and tie that into a coherent installation on which she has stamped her artistic identity. Working with a difficult space appears to suit Mia’s practice well.

The one collaborative piece in Mia’s space is the low-tech science fiction film (see above) produced with Alex Schady, which can be seen on first entering Jerwood Space. Shot in various locations in and around the gallery, the film features a home-made spaceship and orbiting planets set to a soundtrack of audio found on the internet and with dialogue, spoken by Mia, taken from the garbled text that resulted from an interview between her and Pryle that was (as was mentioned earlier in the blog) wildly mistranscribed by some voice recognition software. The film is inventive and amusing, but has a different aesthetic to the other works. Like them, the film takes its cue from the surrounding architecture and includes footage taken in Mia’s gallery space during the show, but the other pieces on display have a number of minutely considered links that weave them strongly together, while the outside references of the film set it apart. Exhibitions of Mia’s work in the future could easily concentrate on her output alone.

Jock Mooney

Jock’s gallery is a mixture of intensely-coloured miniatures and big, gestural drawings. The much-discussed drying rack has been reassembled and sits in a prominent position facing you as you walk into the space. On it are a riotous cast of objects and characters: trees, blobs, flowers, busts (in both senses of the word), a cartoony dog biscuit and a cat simultaneously vomiting and crapping.  Hundreds of hand-drawn wasps (see below) swirl and swarm in a high corner of the space (and even invade the neighbouring toilets) and a link is formed across the gallery to their nest – bundled up pieces of cut-up paper on which the wasps were originally drawn – stuffed in the gap between a wall panel and the slanted ceiling. Apart from a trio of errant wasps, one long wall is animated solely by a small painting on wood – the piece that Jock said felt like a departure from anything he had tried before (see below).

Two huge new drawings, made on paper roughly torn from a large roll, are draped from the central ceiling support (see below). These are direct descendants from the quickly-executed drawings that Jock binned and then resurrected earlier in the show (showing that those earlier drawings proved not to be a dead end). A large pseudo-canvas (made from a piece of jettisoned cardboard) contains a loosely-drawn amalgam of a mountain (or is it a trifle?), a head, a cottage, broken lines and words. This is hung at right angles to a minutely-detailed wreath painstakingly constructed from hand-drawn fingers, entrails, masked figures, a house and a sofa, all seemingly quoted from the 70s horror movies and 60s counterculture comic books that inform Jock’s work.

The dialogue between large and small, minutely-executed and freely-drawn, two-dimensional and three-dimensional, nearness and distance is the most impressive element of his final presentation. Jock definitely needs large spaces to play in. It is interesting too that, although ‘Laboratory’ has been focused on the processes involved in creating art, the final presentations in each gallery evolved into something approaching a ‘finished’ exhibition. With Jock’s work the importance of keeping a sense of process on display seems more important though. The fragile cluster of hand-made leaves that sits in the middle of the space, the sculpture mounted on a four-wheeled trolley and the paint-splattered rack all speak of temporariness (with this in mind, perhaps the floor drips underneath the rack should have been retained too?). A major part of these works is their overt mutability – it is apparent that they can be moulded and changed at any point to produce new and powerful incarnations.

Steven Eastwood

Steven’s space is dominated by a twin-screen projection, provisionally titled The Hiss of the Blow, focusing on Marianne and Angel, two boxers that he met at a nearby boxing gym whilst researching the locality around Jerwood Space. The two protagonists skip, hit punch bags and shadow box in front of the camera, while at one point the pace slows and the atmosphere becomes more melancholic as Angel (who is also a songwriter), sings a cappella lyrics written by her and Steven. In a corner of the gallery is a diminutive monitor sitting casually inside its soft-sided carrying case (see below), which shows a DVD of Steven filming a bout of sparring between Angel and Marianne on a hand-held camera, before he then steps into the ring to spar with (and get well and truly hit by) Marianne.

Boxing is a seductive mix of grace, skill, power, violence and pain. The projections are engaging and visceral invocations of boxing and inevitably suggest comparisons with other filmic depictions – from Raging Bull to Million Dollar Baby – a long and illustrious history that inevitably affects the reading of any new work in the genre. (It’s also worth noting that Rooney’s gym is frequently a filming location for music videos too.) The Hiss of the Blow is divided into 2 minute segments, reflecting that matches are divided into 2 minute rounds for female boxers, and this formal device allows Steven to collage together a range of different techniques, mixing static camera positions with frenetic, staccato footage recorded using a hand-held camera whilst inside the boxing ring during a sparring bout (as seen from a different viewpoint in the video shown on the monitor).

The video piece displayed on the monitor has less polished production values – showing minimally edited footage taken from a fixed camera position – but is in some ways more immediate and more engaging for it. The formal differences between the videos are reinforced by the differing ways that the works are presented: one is projected onto a screen, so will inevitably seem more cinematic, while the other is presented more casually on a monitor still within its carrying case, so will seem more provisional and personal. The monitor work has an evocative contrast between the poised and balletic sparring partners and the slightly awkward movements of the artist ducking in and recoiling back from the action. The artist putting himself in the ring seems like a statement that he is being more involved, less aloof and dictatorial than an archetypal movie director. The artist becomes even more fragile when the sparring between Marianne and himself starts (see below); he is at the mercy of his subject rather than the other way around (although not wearing any protective headgear makes him simultaneously seems braver as well).

This work recalls one of Andy Kaufman’s regular routines that involved him fighting with female wrestlers and it has that same dialogue of man vs woman but amateur vs professional as well. There are also hints of the more extreme works of Chris Burden, who was once filmed while being shot in the arm with a rifle. This is the artist letting himself suffer pain – and possibly scarring – for his art.