Feeling over function

Michael Samuels Tragedy of the Commons (2012)

I can't help feeling that Spacex's current show - This Was Tomorrow -  actually belongs 45 miles west in Plymouth. That city's status as the greatest built example of post-war planning and architecture seems a more fitting backdrop for these works by Michael Samuels, which look back playfully to the ideals of Modernism.

Housed in Spacex's converted 19th century warehouse at the more boho end of Exeter, the work seems instead to reference the local vintage and junk stores. Precisely constructed from fragments of modern furniture (lots of G-plan), along with speaker cabinets, anglepoise lamps, G-clamps and ratchet straps, the materials for this work could easily have been sourced from nearby shops.

While I try to keep my focus on the work's formal qualities, I'm actually feeling nostalgia. I'm seeing bits of my grandma's Formica-topped table and the dark-wood wall cabinets favoured by my ageing parents-in-law. Not to beat about the bush: these are sculptures made from dead people's furniture. It gives them a poignancy that is compelling, but possibly unhelpful in relation to the artist's clever investigation of formal, material and spatial qualities. Nonetheless, it's a wonderful show.

The largest gallery space, windows closed off to create a claustrophobic cave, is home to Tragedy of the Commons, a monster construction of modular furniture, which - exceeding domestic scale - becomes architectural in its impact. Its title refers to an ecological/economic theory which suggests individuals will inevitably destroy a shared resource. The UK's post-war legacy of run-down tower blocks, echoed here, seems to underline its truth.

Michael Samuels: This Was Tomorrow  28 July - 15 September 2012
Spacex, 45 Preston Street, Exeter EX1 1DF
www.spacex.org.uk

Digital dates

Just announced. The results of the Exeter Phoenix Digital Art Commission, which gave 30 artists the opportunity to work with the Centre for Additive Layer Manufacturing (CALM) at Exeter University, will be on show between 16th November 2012 and 19th January 2013. Now all I have to do is get my object made...
http://www.exeterphoenixdigital.org.uk/2012DAC.php

Culture crash

Oliver Flexman's Operations in the Contact Zone, which opened last week at Exeter Phoenix, offers a knowing take on the often absurd mismatch that can occur when translating from culture to culture. As human beings, we have more in common than we often think, but the subtleties of branding and labelling also highlight the differences.

The whole show is as slick, glossy and assured as the branding it reflects. My favourite piece is two huge, faded shop fascias from the Gulf. Though they once sat on two sides of a corner site advertising the same restaurant, the images are now placed back to back over a light box. On one side it reads Prince’s Restaurant the other Princesses Restaurant. The installation is brilliant: the object looks as if it's crashed onto the gallery floor from on high and propped itself on a piece of municipal street furniture.

Operations in the Contact Zone, 20 July - 30 August 2012
Exeter Phoenix Galleries, Gandy Street, Exeter

http://www.oliverflexman.com

www.exeterphoenix.org.uk/art

Putting the open in open studios

Proof that South West open studios are finally acknowledging the importance of non-saleable work:  Somerset Art Weeks (15th-30th September 2012) supports a number of recognisably contemporary entries. There's a gallery in a phone box curated by Peter Messa, a pop-up museum by Hacker Farm and curated detritus from OSR Projects. I'm hoping these artists didn't have to pay the same entry fee as artists who stand to generate income from the event.
www.somersetartworks.org.uk

Trying to stay out of the picture

I'm delighted to have been offered a small show at Exeter Phoenix in October.  [in]visible will feature a selection of my drawings and photographs that track movement and time, and which reveal the subjective nature of apparently objective observations.  All work will be for sale.

Gabrielle Hoad: [in]visible - 9 October - 5 November 2012, Exeter Phoenix Cafe Bar, Gandy Street, Exeter EX4 3LS

www.exeterphoenix.org.uk/art

Conversations with Zola #2

More progress on my commission for The Library of Lost Books which will become part of an exhibition for the new Library of Birmingham. I'm working with a German translation of a French novel La Terre by Emile Zola (Mutter Erde in German). I want to address the idea of earth referred to in the book's title and themes: the soil from which everything grows and into which everything decays.

So, I'm thinking I'd like to plant some seeds in that earth. These are dill seeds (Anethum graveolens), known as Gurkenkraut in German (translates as cucumber herb, thanks to its frequent use with cucumber in German cookery) and Fenouil Bâtard in French (bastard fennel).

http://gabriellehoad.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/conversations-with-zola-1.html

A little piece of Exeter

Here is my little piece of Volkhardt Muller's supersize woodcut Any High Street, commissioned while he was cutting the plate in an empty shop in Exeter back in November 2011.  It depicts a piece of litter on the pavement.

Development of the woodcut continues this summer at Exeter's Royal Albert Memorial Museum, where you can buy your own section from as little as £2.50. The project seems to be as much about public interaction as printmaking, and you can talk to the artist while he works. His print installations Cell and Pastoral, originally created in decommissioned prison cells at Rougemont Castle, are also on show.

RAMM, Queen Street, Exeter EX4 3RX
30 June - 22 September 2012
http://www.rammuseum.org.uk/

Gone but not forgotten

Paul Thek - The Tomb

Loving The Gallery of Lost Art at Tate, an online gallery that tells the stories of works of art that have been destroyed, stolen, mislaid - or were otherwise ephemeral. With textual and visual documentation and archival materials offered as evidence of the existence of the missing works, it has a spooky, improvised atmosphere that we strove for with HEIST, but never quite achieved. A real 'aha' moment for me.  http://galleryoflostart.com

Gardens unwrapped

I spent Saturday in Oxford touring the city's Botanic Garden. I was there to meet metron curators Diane Jones-Parry and Annabel Ralphs about the latest in their series of artist-led projects centred on books.

I'm one of a group of artists working with them on the Oxford Botanic Garden's archive of annual Gardening Chronicles. Senior Curator at the Garden, Alison Foster, drew articles from the Chronicles, which date back to 1851, and randomly allocated them to the participating artists as source material.

My articles are on the crocus and on budding and my task is to make work that can be sited in the gardens, glasshouses or other areas of the site. The exhibition is due to take place in 2014 so there's plenty of time to dig deep into the research and to ponder the very horticultural direction my new work seems to be taking.

http://unwrappingbooks.info/#/oxford-botanic-gardens/4560059824

Mystery upon mystery

I was intrigued by artist Louise K Wilson’s additions to the 1975 movie Picnic at Hanging Rock. Her new work Missing Scenes: An Evening at Hanging Rock was commissioned by Spacex as part of Topophobia and presented at Exeter Phoenix as a one-off event on 5th July. 

Louise K Wilson showed Peter Weir’s (shorter) director’s cut in its entirety, along with various audio and visual interventions, the most prominent of which were snippets of recorded interviews with Devon locals Val Bogan, Joe Loxton and Michael Calver. They talked informally about their impressions of the book by Joan Lindsay, on which the film is based. Wilson also gave a tantalising hint of the contents of the final (missing) chapter, which offers a solution to the mystery at the heart of the story.

I enjoyed seeing this excellent film again, and hearing different views of the novel as we went along (though, as my companion pointed out, it was bit like watching TV when someone else has control of the remote and keeps hitting pause). However, I confess to feeling slightly puzzled about what Louise K Wilson intended by taking on this iconic film for a rework. The event felt like an exploration of mystery and uncertainty, the activities of speculation and explanation, the inevitable blurring of fact and fiction and the multi-layered meanings of texts...

Perhaps it's only right that I really can't be sure.

Topophobia is at Spacex  for one more day only. It closes 7th July.  

Nothing Ever Happens

"Nothing much ever happened at West Coker" in Somerset, according to the village annals. "No relic of saint nor monument of art nor scene of natural beauty ever attracted visitors to it."  So it's hardly the sort of place you'd expect to find a contemporary art gallery.  But the Old School Room, run by Simon Lee Dicker and Chantelle Henocq looks set to challenge that. 

Curated by Nia Metcalfe, their latest show Nothing Ever Happens looks at our attraction to and dislocation from the natural world. This tension is typified by Michael Day's contemplative video pieces, in which picturesque landscapes are interrupted or overlaid with the technological and the mundane.

Dafydd Fortt has constructed a compelling two-dimensional work at one end of the space. Mind the Shake Holes, Tyle Haidd to Cwar Yr Ystrad is derived from photographs taken during several walks between two quarries in the artist's Welsh homeland. Cut-out images - divorced from context - are systematically repeated to create a kind of psychedelic wallpaper.

The dream-like atmosphere is completed by Ellie Doney's sculptural forms which seem poised between  liquid and solid, beautiful and grotesque. Consisting of poured glass matched with clouds of foam filler, they seem at home in their own materiality and yet convey an uncanny sense of instability.

Nothing Ever Happens, featuring the work of Michael Day, Dafydd Fortt and Ellie Doney, runs Thursdays to Sundays, 15 June 2012 - 8 July 2012 at OSR Projects, Old School Room, Church Street, West Coker, Somerset BA22 9BD