New Art Criticism_01_December 2008

New Art Criticism is no longer on-line, therefore I thought to copy and paste my contributions to the former website here. It is mostly exhibitions reviews and I hope you will enjoy the reading!

PLAYING GAMES WITH LANGUAGE: KATE STREET SOLO SHOW AT NETTIE HORN

Wandering and rummaging about which show was worth reviewing in this cold winter, I must admit that the only spotting of the Nettie Horn website made me decide to come and see this one: the small, pixel-made images were showing drawings beautifully made, with what I call a superhuman skill to make the pencil strokes disappear in a foggy, perfect sfumato.

It looked like a plant in a drawing you might well see in a Victorian botanical etching, however the orchid spreads from a dissected heart, whilst little bird’s skulls grow within the flower’s place; this can be considered as being very odd. Why are artists so obsessed with death now, I thought. Then, recalling the old still lives, I corrected myself because they’ve actually always been.

However, what sparked my curiosity were the use of the birds. As soon as I entered the gallery space, I was surprised to find another kind of artwork I did not know about: three sculptures, or rather assemblages, in the form of a funeral wreath. Flowers, of course, were neatly arranged in a circle and in the form of a heart shape. Again here and there we have “intruders” such as human hands and stuffed birds peeping, holding objects such as broken spectacles, trinkets and even chocolate cookies, whose icing drips down the hand in perfectly frozen drops.

I just stare, realizing that I have to do with a fairly Queen of the Composition: nothing is left to chance, nothing is random. A painstaking work made of intricately crafted components. In another sculpture, two crows seem to be stuck on a black flower wreath invaded by busy bees, their honey leaking all over like viscous glue. The bees, birds and hands should ring some bell now. It is not only about death and a strange obsession with taxidermy, I can feel there is something else those works are trying to say. But for someone like me, oblivious of typical English language expressions, it is quite difficult to get hold of the hidden meaning without obtaining some clarification.

I learned from Marie Favier, curator of the show with Director Danielle Horn, that a “bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”. Excuse me? Ah, that is it…sexual meaning! We now enter the realm of language and its different expressions, ranging from one culture to another. Of course, the bees, the pollination…sex explained to children. The use of the orchid in the drawings evokes the ancient Greek belief that this plant sprung from the split semen of mating animals. There are then the skulls, Love and Death. Eros et Thanathos, no wonder Kate Street’s series of work is called “Little Death”, originating from the French term for orgasm “petite mort”.

We could go on for ages: Street uses words, proverbs and mythologies as a starting point to create sculptures and drawings tinged with a tongue-in-cheek approach to language. It is always interesting to see a young promising artist using something as simple as her own native language and turning it in something so complicated; imagery. Discomforted ones perhaps, which forces the individual to try and subvert the typical idea of romance into something far more intricate, perhaps beyond the usual classifications. It is familiar, yet extraneous at the same time. Those sculptures could seem an absurd baroque-style charade because sometimes that is what love longing can be. When desire is wasted, all is left is just a deep, aching sense of loss. How sad, simple and essential at the same time, though. If you are a fan of semantics and of the honourable art of cultural imagery, you will love Street’s work. Also, if you would like to see some not-too-cryptic contemporary art, you should definitely hit this show, which runs until the 21^st of December.


End note: this first visit brought a further collaboration with Kate and a video work was proudly presented by me in a public museum, here. 

The Underground Diaries: a Friday morning.

Sometimes Fridays can be like Mondays.
Weariness seems to struck, and you're absolutely not ready for the week-end. Like saying "it is Friday already, and I am not." But thankfully, the ones with more energy are always there.

23 September 2011 - Victoria Line, London

23 September 2011 - Overground, London

23 September 2011 - Spots and Squares. Overground, London.

Se ti girano in senso antiorario è peggio

Sentirsi come una tagliola pronta a scattare, una tagliola piena di dentini di ferro minacciosi e arrugginiti, che devono fare un gran male quando affondano nella carne.

Scocciarsi per un nonnulla e ingoiare, che ancora non hai imparato a proferire eleganti accidenti in un'altra lingua, e comunque sarebbero diretti ad un oggetto inanimato quale il computer.

Pensare che non succede niente d'interessante, non sta succedendo niente d'interessante, non succederà mai niente d'interessante, in particolare a te. E stai gettando una decina di chilometri di momenti morti al vento perché non riesci a pensare a qualcosa d'interessante per sbloccare la situazione.

Guardare torva il cielo grigio, che senz'altro non aiuta. La temperatura che a tuo giudizio è glaciale in modo quasi offensivo per essere Settembre, certamente non aiuta.

In conclusione, il pensare che, di fondo, il motivo in particolare per cui ti girano così tanto, qual'è?
Il non trovare una risposta a questa domanda, o forse il trovarla e fare finta di niente per non cadere nei luoghi comuni dello schiavismo femminile da ormone, ti fa capire che stanno girando in senso antiorario, ovvero controcorrente.

Ed è decisamente peggio.

24 June 2011: She Devil 5, Rome > Kate Street

In a young Curator's career (or "career"), there are certain occasions for celebrations. You know, little small satisfactions, like when you select a talented video artist whose work is then included in a group show, and the screening happens to happen - hear ye! - in your hometown's Public Museum: the MACRO - Museum of Contemporary Art Rome.
Your name, together with those of other 12 remarkable colleagues, shines in small white letters on a black panel, and your little critical text is printed on paper handouts, and passed from hands to bags.

I saw Kate Street's work for the first time at Nettie Horn and always wanted to realise a project with her. Some fortunate circumstances made this possible in grand style, and for it I am grateful to the artist and to Italian gallerist Stefania Miscetti. But let's skip the chatting and go straight to the copy-and-paste of what the event was all about, plus some pics of the evening.

This is the Press Release:

SHE DEVIL was devised in 2006 by Stefania Miscetti for Italian and international female artists and curators, from the youngest to the most successful. Different works and critical perspectives coexist in a multivocal discourse which reveals the many facets of the female world and vision. This broad spectrum of activities and aims can be seen in the exhibitions that have been organised over the past years, which have included 40 video works and involved 24 curators, as well as a special international edition held in Bucharest in 2009.

As part of its summer 2011 exhibition cycle, MACRO is hosting a new edition of the project, now in its fifth year, an event that is perfectly in line with the galaxy of cultural and artistic proposals that have defined the identity of the Museum over the past few years. On the opening night the videos in this new edition will be presented in the conference room of the Museum's new wing, the nerve centre of the New MACRO exhibition area. The wing, too, was designed by a woman, the architect Odile Decq, thus it is the perfect setting for the presentation of the video works.

The Fifth Edition is curated by: Antonia Alampi, sybin - susanna bianchini, Benedetta Carpi de Resmini, Dobrila Denegri, Maria Garzia, Laura Giorgini, Maria Cristina Giusti, Caterina Iaquinta, Manuela Pacella, Cristiana Perrella, Lydia Pribisova, Elena Giulia Rossi, Chiara Vigliotti.

Thirteen videos by International female artists were presented, among which Kate Street's Flowering, 2010 (duration 1'29''). It was the only video animation on display.

In Kate's work, nature is always scary or uncanny. In Flowering’s case, the artist used childhood memories, in particular the belief according to which, if you swallow a plant’s seed, this grows up in our stomach. We see the plant filling the frame and engulfing the figure; its expansion creates an intermittent, not linear time suggested by the images that converge one inside the other in an uncertain, non-fluid way. The animated sequence makes one think of a complex association of thoughts, which is a characteristic of femalès nature; sometimes, our same guesswork overpowers us and it is hard to swallow it back inside, to dominate it. At the same time the ending, though not encouraging, suggests an exorcism of these fears, which is favoured just by going through such violent experience. As it happens also in her precedent works, Kate Street’s guideline is the different and possible meanings that some images’ associations generate in the viewer.

Kate Street, Flowering, 2010, video still. Courtesy: The Artist

She Devil 5 is on until 8 January 2012 at MACRO, precisely in the V-Tunnel.

I went back home for the opening, and the Museum was packed with people visiting also the other shows that are currently still on. It was nice to see familiar and unfamiliar faces around.

Show me the Shoes you wear and I will tell you what kind of Curator you are: Curator's Stuff 

The Bay Window Project: Russell Chater

THE BAY WINDOW PROJECT, 2011

Artists in a Frame

curated by sybin

RUSSELL CHATER > SPECTATRE

From: Monday 19 September 2011

SybinQ Art Projects

The Window on Cleveland Street, London, W1T 6DP. MAP HERE.

t. 07913717999

e. curatingcontemporary@gmail.com

The Bay Window Project: Patrick Mimran once said that art is where you least expect to find it. A window that becomes a container for contemporary art pushes the boundaries of public and private, transforming an ordinary space into a place for public art. Unaware passers-by will stumble upon it, becoming unintentional witnesses of the evolution of site-specific art in a non-institutional environment.

The third artist invited to exhibit in The Bay Window is RUSSELL CHATER

A recurring interest in contained and transitional spaces pervades much of Chater’s practice. Works question the boundaries between inside and outside and the familiar and the unfamiliar - seeking to explore spaces and states that are ‘between’ or ‘beyond’. Familiar scenes are often denied their context or purpose, resulting in the viewers’ focus shifting from the immediate to the subliminal.

For The Bay Window Project, Russell presents the work SPECTATRE (Various elements, dimensions variable. Courtesy: The Artist and SybinQ Art Projects)

Inspired by the conditions presented by the private/public space of a common bay window, SPECTATRE (a word suspended between spectator and spectre) draws on the language of a shop window display. The site-specific installation is both kitsch and eerie as a spot-lit mannequin is revealed to passers-by from its theatrical stage. The piece is also surreal – presenting as it does a commercial shop-window arrangement in a domestic apartment window.  Indeed, the work draws on its surroundings, with a nod to the artistic displays of the gallery directly below as well as the numerous shop windows of central London. Ultimately, however, the work can be read as a (self) portrait – raising questions about what we hide and what we reveal, the private and the public. Fundamental relationships of figure/space, light/dark, surface/depth are framed, and wider readings around reflection and in particular the gaze are evoked. The work also acts as a kind of companion piece to a large-scale painting that the artist will be showing at London’s City Hall later in the year.

The display runs daily: 19 September - 6 October 2011

FINISSAGE PARTY on Wednesday 5 October 2011

Please join the artist and us at the Jet Lag Bar, 125 Cleveland Street, London W1. From 6:30 pm.

Russell Chater is a graduate of the MA Fine Art course at Central Saint Martins and has exhibited extensively in both the UK and abroad. Galleries include: Galerie Zurcher (Paris/New York); Grey Area Gallery (Brighton); Unit 2 Gallery/Whitechapel Art Gallery (London); Galeria Espacio (Valencia); Museum of Science and Industry (Manchester). Russell has also co-curated a number of exhibitions and was previously a Co-Director of Dalston Underground Studios. The artist lives and works in London. Upcoming exhibitions include shows at London’s City Hall and Schwartz Gallery, London.  

For further information please see: http://www.re-title.com/artists/russell-chater.asp

The Underground Diaries: A Lifetime Together.

You saw it happening between your grandparents.

Even your parents are going along that way. Not to mention you in-laws.

After, say, 30-45 years of marriage, it can happen that you can't really stand each other anymore. 

The ailments. That unnerving bad habit of his that you didn't manage to change. The growing apart.

That is why, when I see something like this on the tube or anywhere else, I can't help but smile blissfully. 

14 September 2011- Circle Line, London. 

I took a similar picture in Rome, and published it here.

The Underground Diaries: Fashion Spotting

Like lot of other "igers" (detestable hashtag neologism), I am now completely addicted to Instagram.

Either for the nostalgia for a past era that, through our parents fading pictures, seems more real than ours, or for the frenzy of experimentation, this simple app seems to awake the potentially good photographer in you. The result is, you are always taking pictures, and one or two do turn out to be fairly good (even though you have no idea of what you're doing and only rely on your natural sense of colour and composition). Well, filters help to make something helplessly ordinary looking coooool.

Therefore, I am now starting a new section of the blog: The Underground Diaries.
I have recently stumbled upon TubeCrush.net, a website where people upload pictures of blokes they fancy, spotted by chance on the tube. The idea is that the photographed subject should recognise himself on this website, read the message attached to it and contact the person who took the picture, perhaps to live happily ever after.
How. About. That. slash Good. Luck. To. You.

Anyway, far from criticising or endorsing any dating method - we all need some love and romance, don't we? - the pictures I will post are, too, taken on the Underground. I have always been fascinated by the suspended dimension of the Tube and the varied chunks of humanity on it, coming and going from point A to point B, crossing by point C and reaching point D backwards, basically ignoring one another. I am not going to bang on the concepts of alienation, city life, etcetera, I just like to spot beauty into the ordinary.
The man I married once told me that, whenever he travelled on the tube, his main occupation was observing people and try to understand if they were happy.

So, this is the first shot of an ongoing series___

18 August 2011 - Hammersmith & City Line, London

___Do you think they are happy?