ART SHEDS @ VICTORIA GALLERY & MUSEUM, LIVERPOOL

This week I attended the Art Sheds exhibition at the Victoria Gallery and museum as part of a group show for the Liverpool Biennial. We were fortunate enough to meet the participatory artist behind the Art Sheds, Susan Forsyth and curator, Moira Lindsey.

In her talk to the group,Forsyth contextualised her work, by explaing how she found inspiration in the history of the building (VG&M) itself; From 1894 – 1905, makeshift Art Sheds in the Quadrangle behind the VG&M were used by the University’s School of Architecture and Applied Art.

More than 100 years later,  Susan Forsyth, re-imagined the iconic sheds in the VG&M gallery space and invites visitors  to draw and paint inside these quiet spaces and exhibit their work for others to enjoy.

`Art Sheds’ features three unique sheds designed by the artist and constructed in Liverpool. In creating these individual studio spaces Forsyth applied 2,500 leaves of 22-carat gold leaf to the roofs using the traditional Renaissance technique she explains. Within each Art Shed, traditional Victorian subjects of portraiture, still life and the nude have been carefully chosen by Forsyth to inspire visitors.

The second space in the exhibition houses Forsyth’s personal selection of early paintings, drawings, prints, textiles and sculpture from the VG&M collection including works by artists who taught in the original Art Sheds

Susan Forsyth Portrait shed , 2014.

Susan Forsyth, Still Life shed, 2014.

Susan Forsyth, Nude Shed, 2014.

.VG&M Curator, Moira Lindsay, said: “This exhibition celebrates the site’s creative history but it is very much a contemporary installation and we hope that visitors will spend some time within the sculptures.

“It was a delight to work with Susan and we are pleased she chose to use our collections. Looking at historic collections with an artist brings a fresh perspective and hearing what inspires artists is insightful and often unexpected.”

Susan Forsyth added: “I was inspired to create this participatory exhibition by the history and collection of the Victoria Gallery & Museum. My public art work contains a strong sense of place and a link to history and `Art Sheds’ combines elements of the wonderful collection with the architectural and social history of the institution. It is also important that this work is site-specific and has open-ended participatory outcomes for anyone to come and enjoy.”

‘HYDROZOAN’ @ THE ROYAL STANDARD

Joey Holder – ‘HYDROZOAN.’ The Royal Standard – Liverpool Biennial 2014 Programme.

For the Liverpool Biennial 2014 The Royal Standard presents three consecutive solo exhibitions of new work by Rob Chavasse (UK), Sam Smith (AU) and Joey Holder (UK) over a 16 week period. 

Joey Holder's latest show, HYDROZOAN,  comes as the final instalment in this three part series.

Holder’s work extends across a range of contrasting media; she paints and sculpts, but also creates videos and builds installations and manages multiple image streams, exploring the “structures and hierarchies of the technological and natural world” through the various forms and their abstractions.

Joey Holder – ‘HYDROZOAN.’ The Royal Standard – Liverpool Biennial 2014 Programme.

This exhibition comes as the result a six-month residency that Holder completed with 'Near Now' in Nottingham, working with genome scientists and biochemists to research future urban farming methods and commercial fish farming. Holder’s answer is a gallery simulation of an ‘Aquaponics’ system: “a food production method that combines conventional aquaculture with hydroponics”.

After viewing the main exhibition space, visitors are  given the opportunity to view the artists various studios in the building – I felt that being able to explore their personal workspaces and view many works in the process of production brought to life the creative process, allowing a better understanding of the exhibition and its context.

A selection of the more  chaotic studios and workspaces of the artists, we had access to view at the Royal Standard.

                                              

NOT ALL DOCUMENTS ARE RECORDS: PHOTOGRAPHING EXHIBITIONS AS AN ART FORM @OPEN EYE GALLERY, LIVERPOOL

The current exhibition at Open Eye Gallery states in its hand-out literature that ‘a document is … amendable and changeable whereas a record is not.’ While this claim can most certainly be disputed, this self-reflexive display explores interesting and complex territories. In particular, the exhibition reconsiders the role of photography in documenting the official story, impact and legacy of large-scale exhibitions. Assembled works from four artists investigate the role that photography has played in the documentation of three significant platforms, documenta, the Venice Biennale and the Liverpool Biennial, over a period of over fifty years. These question too whether images of exhibitions can and should stand as artworks in their own right.

‘Not all Documents are Records: Photographing Exhibitions as an Art Form’ is a partner exhibition of the 2014 Liverpool Biennial. Cristina De Middel’s commissioned work responds to this specific context, using archival materials from the media in a new installation that imagines this year’s Biennial presentation. Covering three walls are a series of blown-up images of exhibitions and performances, and quotes from newspapers that criticise and sensationalise previous festivals: ‘£300,000 FOR THAT!’ and ‘Inflatable liver, a giant stain and a map of dogs,’ for instance. Such media interactions are an integral part of the history of art’s display, even if they might be typically expunged from official records by the exhibition organisers. De Middel has placed over these a series of framed photographs that have sections of other artist’s works censored by blocks of pink colour. Her work here questions copyright regulations pertaining to image reproduction and the prevalence of appropriation: just how far can one alter an existing artwork before it becomes a new piece altogether? No longer official records of previous Liverpool Biennials, De Middel has made new works which now exist as malleable and highly ambiguous documents that will form part of its future archive.Works by Ugo Mulas push this political bent further. They comprise a series of photographs that respond to two years of the Venice Biennale in the 1950s and 1960s. Some of these depict exhibition installation photographs, behind the scenes images and glamorous opening events, while others document protests by students and other artists against the Biennale. These protests resulted in many included artists removing or closing their displays. Evocative public demonstrations in the Piazza San Marco are contrasted with VIPs sipping coffee at Caffé Florian: the anti-establishment politics of the disenfranchised versus the privilege of the few. These are images which remain familiar even today.

Ira Lombardia exploits the truth that is so often presumed is manifest in records. Her works, displayed in vitrines in the upstairs gallery, are fictional accounts of documenta 2012 featuring an artist that doesn’t exist inserted into the programme. Lombardia’s books, appropriating the official catalogue of the fair, show how easily records can be manipulated and falsified entirely, and how a legacy shaped by such publications onlyseems to be more reliable than memory.

Pollock Bench Child.

Mondrian Pair.

The star of the exhibition is undoubtedly Hans Haacke. His black and white photographs made at documenta in 1959 are wry and humorous portraits of gallery visitors. Images such as ‘Pollock Bench Child’ and ‘Mondrian Pair’ give an indication that the artworks depicted are less significant than the visitors themselves and their interactions or non-interactions with the exhibition. A far cry from typical installation photographs, instead these show children playing, men reading and taking photographs, people in conversation and generally not looking at art. These images don’t fit into the official canon of images for documenta: this isn’t how visitors are supposed to behave either now or then. There are no clichéd wistful, contemplative images here. Instead, Haacke reveals something a little closer to the truth of the exhibition experience for many people, producing documents which are more mutable and perhaps more authentic than the kind of press images one is used to encountering. Capturing small narratives within the exhibition galleries brings together new experiences for the viewer of his work. A photograph of a Kandinsky painting hung behind a child in a push-chair who is turned toward the artist (and the viewer) with a puzzled expression on his face is no longer just a Kandinsky painting, but a new work entirely.

LIVERPOOL BIENNIAL 2014 - A NEEDLE WALKS INTO A HAYSTACK @ THE OLD BLIND SCHOOL

My visit to the Liverpool Biennial Group Show at the Old Blind School was accompanied by a guided tour of the exhibition ‘A Needle Walks into a Haystack,’by the Biennial Curator, Rosie Cooper. The exhibition hosted works of such artists as; Christina Ramberg, William Leavitt, Marc Bauer, Nicola L as well as Rana Hamadeh and Amelie Von Wulffen.

“A Needle Walks into a Haystack is an exhibition about our habits, our habitats, and the objects, images, relationships and activities that constitute our immediate surroundings. The artists in this exhibition disrupt many of the conventions and assumptions that usually prescribe the way we live our lives. They attack the metaphors, symbols and representations that make up their own environment, replacing them with new meanings and protocols.” – 8th Liverpool Biennial Exhibition.

Christina Ramberg.

Hand, Handkerchief,

1971.

Christina Ramberg

Untitled (five shoes)

c.1969

Christina Ramberg c.1982

Christina Ramberg

It was clear that this was a scrupulously  curated exhibition, not only for the apt location  choice of the Old Blind school, but also in terms of the interior layout of the exhibition space. The works appeared to be arranged in terms of there contextual likeness and relevance, in what appeared to be a thematic rather than a chronological curatorial approach; For instance, one room of the ground floor exhibition space, was dedicated to Feminist artwork. One such artist who featured here, was the work of Christina Ramberg, her work demonstrates  a representation of memories of her  mother who the artist witnessed 'transforming' herself in order to conform to male perceptions of idealised female beauty, or the so-called ‘perfect vision’ of the female form.

The artist was part of a movement in the nineteen nineties that focused  on drawing the female body in unrealistic or distorted proportions. A theme in Ramberg’s works displayed here seems to be the idea that women are taught to believe that they should suffer for the sake of their physicality , with  'beauty is pain’ being a repetitive motif. This convention is emphasised within the ‘Untitled (five shoes)’ c.1969, reminiscent of  the constraints imposed upon Japanese women who had their feet bound.