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ARCHIVE 2000 |
Mechatronic Circus Schools Exhibition
in collaboration with Fernando Palma Rodriguez, Chestnut Grove Secondary School
Guy's Evelina Hospital School, Hayes School, Parkhill Junior School, Stockwell Infants School
6 December 2000 to 16 January 2001
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Education Through ExhIbitions
198 Gallery’s Schools Exhibition 2000 presented work made by school children in response to Mechatronic Circus, based on the residency at the 198 Gallery by the artist Fernando Palma Rodriguez, from 22 March to 13 May 2000, followed by an exhibition from 23 May to 24 June. 198 Gallery commissioned the artist to make new interactive work for exhibition, which furthered the characterisation and technical possibilities of robotic machines created by the artist.
The 198 Gallery ‘Education through Exhibitions’ programme based on Mechatronic Circus invited the artists Hew Locke and Brian Griffiths to interpret the work of Fernando Palma Rodriguez in a series of gallery and school based workshops. Five schools contributed to the programme: Stockwell Infants School, Park Hill Junior School, Chestnut Grove Secondary School, Hayes School and Guy’s Evelina Hospital School.
The Artist And His Work
Fernando Palma Rodriguez is a Mexican-born artist who has shown his work internationally, and the exhibition at 198 Gallery is his first solo exhibition in the UK. His work bridges the gap between technology, art, storytelling and ecology, and addresses issues particularly relevant at the dawn of the new millennium. By conferring upon his machines a mystic dimension, Palma Rodriguez challenges the usual status of technology and explores new possibilities of expression. Moreover, by using recycled materials, the artist presents an investigation into the responsible production and use of new technologies.
Palma Rodriguez’s recent work has been instigated by a firm belief in the necessity to research new possibilities of expression in a number of contemporary technologies: electronic applications, computer programming, fine mechanics, robotics, etc. These are but a few elements of a larger context, where technology is perceived to be a changing ideology of social activity transforming the world.
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Emmanuel 'Papa' Essel
From Kumasi to Kensington
24 October to 25 November 2000
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"Painting to me is a form of dialogue. It entails more than mere image-making for decoration. It involves the artist interrogating his environment and the general taken-for-granted attitudes of society. For me, it touches everything - political to spiritual, personal to social."
Ghanaian artist Papa Essel showed image and text-based paintings that have been made over the last six years, both in Ghana and in London where he now lives. Some of the works have travelled extensively abroad but have only now been exhibited in the UK.
The artist also has travelled, and this has affected the content of his work. Essel explores a complex network of themes centering around Africa's relationship with the West, and issues in the lives of African people living in a variety of situations. Having previously considered these themes from an African perspective, his time in London has given him a wider outlook with which to examine his subject matter.
Essel paints with oils, watercolour and acrylics on various supports. He uses both figurative images and text in his carefully balanced compositions. This integration is a significant element in his work. 'It seems to me that word and image are two vital components in the presentation and dissemination of information, ideas and aesthetics. The written word becomes a text representing an image of the spoken word. [...] Once painted these words/texts become images in themselves'. The paintings that are thus created display a rich sense of colour and texture, as well as drawing attention to the issues he finds in modern society.
The artist acknowledges many influences from his native culture. Some examples he gives are 'wall paintings by the people of Northern Ghana, the Asafa flags of the Fantes and the Adrinkra symbolism of the Asantes.'
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Dokun Oyetunde
Silence Builds Roads
12 September to 14 October 2000
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Dokun Oyetunde exhibited new work after completing an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art, producing a powerful exhibition that incorporated key works from his recent MA course with new elements including text to create Silence Builds Roads.
Oyetunde makes work which fuses influences from ancient Benin culture and Yoruba tradition with contemporary and futuristic iconography. Oyetunde has re-connected himself with the artistic processes of his ancestors through his work in cast bronze, fired clay and beading. The alchemy of materials is expressed through his use of earth, fire and other elements.
His recent work uses the skeletal form to re-interpret the human condition and is inspired by Yoruba mythology fused with Western popular culture. The resulting work is universal, exploring the condition of mankind rather than relating to a particular cultural tradition
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Joshua Hilton
New Work
4 July to 4 August 2000
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Joshua Hilton is a South London resident and artist. Having studied and lived in the vibrant communities of Brixton and Streatham, he uses his local environment as his greatest source of inspiration.
Hilton's work explores various themes: his journeys through his local community as an agoraphobic, and the distorting impact of his disability on daily life and reality. Unable to use public transport as a mode of travel, Hilton's travels through his local community by foot have prompted him to study the local landscape and people in great detail. These observations have provided the rich imagery and ideas for his work. He recreates the daily physical landmarks and faces that offer him reassurance and tranquillity.
He incorporates his raw responses to the gritty urban environment he moves through into his work by illustrating recurring visual stimuli on canvas. For example, architectural landmarks frequently recur in Hilton's paintings, as if to recreate the comfort he associates with them.
Agoraphobia provokes a heightened sensory awareness within Hilton. This enables him to explore and deconstruct his perceptions on canvas, for example, through the balance of colour and texture. He aims to use his medium to create new meanings for the eye and to challenge conventional perceptual dimensions.
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Fernando Palma Rodriguez (4th International Artist In Residence)
Mechatronic Circus
in collaboration with Oriel Mostyn Gallery
22 March to 13 May 2000
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'I seek the place where the sun lives: I am sent to speak to him. Millennium's first spring.'
Fernando Palma Rodriguez is a Mexican-born artist who has shown his work internationally. During his residency he created new work for his first solo exhibition in the UK which opened at 198 Gallery on 23 May 2000. His work bridges the gap between technology, art, storytelling and ecology, and addresses issues particularly relevant at the end of the 20th Century. By conferring upon his machines a mystic dimension, Palma Rodriguez challenges the usual status of technology and explores new possibilities of expression. Moreover, by using recycled materials, the artist presents an investigation into the responsible production of new technologies.
During this exhibition the artist created, within an extraordinary environment made up of soil and vegetation, fourteen robots that interacted with the audience and with each other by means of radio control, infrared, and light and sound sensors.
Mechatronic Circus told a surrealistic story about the modern world in real time and a 3D format using up-to-date technologies. Each robot was composed of recycled materials and represents a character based on those present in Native American creation myths such as "Old Man of the World", and a contemporary "Super Barrio" and "Super Ecologista" Mexican characters. Although they look like machines, in fact they are spirits who choose to speak to us in the language we might know the best: technology. The powerful process is possible because of the Nomadic Engineer, a concept that is the driving force of Palma Rodriguez's work. By choosing specific forms, the Nomadic Engineer helps the viewer to understand the relevance of its message.
A 198 Gallery touring exhibition in collaboration with Oriel Mostyn Gallery.
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Sigal Avni
Next of S’Kin
3 February to 18 March 200 0
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Avni's work attempts to display 'the "impossible" cohabitation of two bodies in one space. What is not nameable and therefore "impossible" is nevertheless there'. (Barry Taylor, Palpable Signs, Nexus Vol 6, Scarlet Press, 1999)
Using basic techniques in black-and-white photography to extraordinary effect, Sigal Avni is well known for dealing with female identity through the prism of the mother-child relationship. Her work draws the viewer into the metaphorical realm of universal conflicts between mother and child (and specifically between mother and daugther): it touches on issues such as facing death at the moment of giving birth and the unresolved conflicts between growth and castration, acceptance and rejection, dependence and alienation. It is this thin line between symbiosis and alienation with the inevitable pain of separateness that runs as a thread throughout her entire work.
Next of S'kin included Sigal Avni's new work stemming from her MA thesis (titled A Voice On the Skin), in which she discusses self mutilation as an alternative feminine language in Western Patriarcal Society. By presenting bodies articulated in other ways than the norm, this sublime work destabilises the viewers, inviting them to rediscover and interior landscape of the body, the senses and the psyche.
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Lambeth Mencap
Framing a Sound
17 January to 26 January 2000
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Framing a Sound was a celebration of 'can' and 'will' and 'ability' - "Yes We Can, Yes We Will and Yes We Are Able" which flies in the face of disability.
The exhibit was the creation of twelve members of Lambeth Mencap's Friends Support Service who have severe learning disabilities. The exhibition was a culmination of a series of six workshops exploring sight and sound.
Framing a Sound showed their audio-visual response to everyday sights and sounds in their domestic, urban and natural environment.
Their response was through a maze of colour and sound which is soft and loud, vivid and subtle, using a plethora of different media, marrying the old with the new - combining the use of traditional and natural art materials with modern technology.
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