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Simon Le Ruez, A familiar place for the very first time, 2009 Wood, steel, concrete, texture, oil and household paint, 116(h) x 36(w) x 105(d)cm Copyright Simon Le Ruez courtesy the artist and Vane Contemporary Art
24th June — 25th September 2009 Opening times: Monday - Friday, 9.30-17.30.
Rotate is a temporary exhibition programme at the Contemporary Art Society, showcasing the work of artists, artist-run spaces and galleries attracting critical acclaim nationally and internationally.
For Rotate, Vane directors Paul Stone and Christopher Yeats have curated an exhibition of seventeen artists from the UK, Europe and USA whose work is concerned with the construction of new and/or personal narratives. Their sources range from found objects or images, the everyday, the playful and the subconscious — whether drawn from popular culture/mass media, souvenirs, everyday ephemera, art history, mythology, politics, the environment (both built and natural) or science.
Artists exhibiting in Rotate with Vane are Héctor Arce-Espasas, Paul Becker, Claire Davies, Graham Dolphin, Kerstin Drechsel, Jorn Ebner, Nadia Hebson, Simon Le Ruez, Dodda Maggy, Jock Mooney, Stephen Palmer, Josué Pellot, Morten Schelde, Matthew Smith, Alison Unsworth, Barbara Walker and Flora Whiteley. Héctor Arce-Espasas Héctor Arce-Espasas's works in pencil and watercolour on paper draw on his childhood memories of Puerto Rico. Without erasures or corrections, delicately rendered images of human structures and artefacts emerge alongside vibrantly colourful organic forms: nature and society co-existing with each other. Paul Becker Paul Becker makes paintings and drawings exploring the extremities of basic human feelings. The scenarios he creates flit between the conscious and unconscious, a feeling that is emphasised by his stubborn and involved painting process of daubing, scraping and repeated re-working of images. His images are hard to define. What makes them so initially difficult is their apparent lack of continuity. Their themes are as multiform as the progression of a daydream and can follow the same smoky thought pattern. The erotic, the puerile, the gentle and the arcane co-exist as uncomfortably here as they would within the heart of a reverie. Claire Davies Claire Davies uses scientific exploratory processes to make visible and audible the enigmatic elements of organic and manmade materials taken from their microscopic environments to a macroscopic context in her video presentations and prints. Recent work has used a scanning atomic force microscope (AFM), which produces information by tracking electrons that are emitted towards the objects that it seeks to describe, producing precisely detailed images, showing specimens at many thousands of times their actual size. She takes - and manipulates - colour, time and sound to reflect on the abstract nature of the raw data presented by the AFM, whether from scanning the surface of a piece of glass or the petal from a flower. Graham Dolphin Graham Dolphin's work acknowledges a quiet obsession with the world of mass culture and the effect it has on our society through its advertisements, icons and other objects. Disdainful and attracted in equal measure, Dolphin reconfigures its products. Kerstin Drechsel Kerstin Drechsel usually paints scenes that are the capturing of intimate personal moments, of how an individual or group expresses or identifies themselves through their rituals or the environments they create around them. Often working on series of several large paintings at a time, she depicts everyday lives in all their oppressive reality, underlying dreams of escape, and obsessions. Her work uses images from the internet, magazines and books, as well as her own snapshots and from life, in order to transform them into an archive of constantly recycled wishes, dreams and memories. Captured and adopted motifs combine in her paintings with the vague promise of desire, fulfilment, and adventure. Jorn Ebner Jorn Ebner creates internet-based, photographic, print and sculptural works that reveal ordinary spaces and locations to be punctured through by inconsistencies, tensions and contradictions, using personal ritual and excessive gesture in order to defamiliarise the everyday. He creates imaginary realms which seem to hover somewhere between a vision of utopia and dystopia. His actions of marking and mapping are an individual response to place: small gestures of trespass or disruption, exploring and testing out a logic of formalism in the most unlikely of spaces. Nadia Hebson Nadia Hebson makes melancholic portraits, marine-scapes and flower studies coalesced from a proliferation of collective art historical imagery. Her miscellany of jumbled imagery thwarts a logical narrative interpretation but its elemental nature suggests a psychological intent. The search for an arcane image and a fascination with the mutable, alchemical properties of oil paint leads her to delve into the collective unconscious but also to rifle art history. In doing so she attempts to understand the once emotive currency of dramatic iconography. Simon Le Ruez Simon Le Ruez makes sculptures, installations and drawings which reflect on notions of escape, longing, desire and possible places sought in order to seek relief. Working with materials as varied as leather, pearls, copper, wax and artificial trees his recent work conjures a sense of imagined yet dislocated landscapes that seemingly oscillate somewhere between utopian and uncertain identities. If the interpretation of landscape expresses an uninhibited narrative of fantasy in his work, other works take on a more ambiguous and conceptual form, injecting a dose of conflict into the proceedings and jolting the viewer back to a very particular, visceral place. Dodda Maggy Dodda Maggy creates a series of female characters based on personal experiences, which are then enacted in front of a video camera, sometimes accompanied by piano music composed and played by herself, re-worked using a simple recording technique, building layers as if sculpting. She creates narratives that objectify the female body without degrading it to the status of a mere object. Digitally manipulated in post-production the characters are eerily illuminated often set within a void space, adding to the theatrical nature of the work. She edits the video in the same manner as one composes music; with highs and lows and a certain rhythm designed to create tension and heightened emotions. Jock Mooney Jock Mooney explores the cultural outpourings of the human mind, whether his own or that of the world at large. He meticulously crafts his tiny models himself. Like the contents of a dysfunctional Kinder Surprise egg, this collection of bastardised 'toys' coalesces into a rabble of votive figurines, in turn creating what might be described as a kind of 'ritual topography', each figure a potential harbinger of fear, threat or ridicule. With their exaggerated and distorted physical characteristics, they appear offered in a kind of appeasement to an unknown deity, an alarming appeal for release from some unspeakable affliction. Stephen Palmer Stephen Palmer's paintings and drawings catalogue his collection of free, found and received objects as a means of auditing and archiving his life through everyday mementos. The objects depicted are drawn from a larger collection that is neither wholly random nor entirely specific in composition. The objects can be classified by type (matchbox, pen etc) and also by how they came to be in the artist's possession (found, received as a gift from a friend or more frequently an unknown source, borrowed or 'stolen'). Recently Palmer has turned his attention to his own record collection, creating a series of paintings featuring images of charity shop purchased 7inch singles. Josué Pellot Josué Pellot makes work that examines cultural identity as defined through popular culture and consumer products. He creates minimalist hybrid objects that give an impression of being a cross between painting and sculpture, manufactured and handcrafted, both poetic object and social sign. Thus he creates an aesthetic and symbolic abstraction of Puerto Rican (Caribbean) identity and finally juxtaposed to a 'de-contextualised and sterile' space of the white cube gallery. Morten Schelde Morten Schelde's work depicts the intersection of physical and imaginary spaces. His drawings sample images from different media, collecting and combining them in the construction of new narratives and blurring reality and fiction in the process. Through this recycling and re-invention of images he explores the gap between romance and melancholy, belief and scepticism, mirroring and obstructing. However, this is not a nostalgia trip or 'boy's own' adventure. Within his 'inner landscapes' Schelde creates a new universe, where the unfamiliar penetrates, populated by shadowy scenes, figures, and objects. Matthew Smith Matthew Smith works across media in sculpture, drawing and video, but all his projects share a concern with fictionalised and idealised representations of nature and of place. His work has appropriated images from advertising, maps, postcards, tourist brochures and food packaging For example, he takes utopian pastoral scenes of food packaging and the artificial pictorial world of the supermarket and uses them as the motif for a series of traditional landscape watercolours. His work seeks to question how we think about nature, exploring how our ideas of landscape and the rural are mediated through mass culture. These images however cartoon-like or unreal they may appear inform us how we experience the world; the representations become part of (our) reality. Alison Unsworth Alison Unsworth works both in the public realm and the gallery. Her recent work has concentrated on the generic and 'placeless' elements of the urban landscape, creating work that looks at sameness and generality, becoming almost the opposite of a site-specific piece of work. She depicts urban landscapes that appear simultaneously familiar and unknown, whether through her digitally composited imagery that apes the computer realisations of the architect and town planner, her meticulously drawn images of public monuments showing all the scars of age and vandalism or in her 3D sculptures that use the urban materials such as tarmac and yellow traffic paint. Barbara Walker Barbara Walker addresses the personal, social and political factors that impact on the formation of the identity of the UK's African-Caribbean community. Living in Birmingham, she has witnessed at first hand a curious and potent collision of several different factors that together contribute to the forming of this identity in British society today. Birmingham has for decades upon decades been a very multicultural city, though more recent influxes have served to add layer upon layer to that multiculturalism. Her work analyses the attitudes that form the identity of the Black community in British society today. Flora Whiteley Flora Whiteley collects images like a magpie and plays with them like a cat with a mouse. The source material for the paintings is diverse but like the paintings they are quotidian. Snapshots of friends, pictures ripped from the newspaper, an arrangement of objects on the kitchen table: her paintings are part of a daily routine, an imposition of rules and patterns onto subjects and styles as she tries to understand the language, clichés and the particular poetry of pictures.
