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ARCHIVE 2002 |
Roma Tearne
The House of Small Things
13 September to 9 October 2002
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The mixed media works in this exhibition spoke of concerns such as displacement, memory and self-identity. Roma Tearne, who is Sri Lankan by birth, arrived in Britain as a young girl. Now, as an adult, she revisited her past in Brixton through her haunting images of interiors - the rooms inside a doll’s house that she played with as a child, and oblique views inside her childhood home. A book of images and text by the artist accompanied the exhibition.
She arrived in Britain in 1964 aged 10 by boat from Sri Lanka on a journey that took 21 days. She said of this journey: "Crossing oceans we travelled 7000 miles, chased by monsoons and battered by rough seas. It was a journey I would never forget. Its impact on my life was far reaching but it would be three decades before its full significance would dawn on me." The disparate objects placed in the rooms - a piece of English furniture here, a Sri Lankan doll figure or a pile of textiles there - are the sole inhabitants of the miniature spaces. An oblique sense of melancholy reflects the sense of alienation that she felt as a newcomer in an unfamiliar country.
Delicate paintings of near-empty rooms with peeling wallpaper added force to this impression. They also feature a mix of cultures, with foreign text incorporated into the pattern of the background walls.
Also in the exhibition was a series of glowing images that combine photography, painting and daylight. Tearne placed a painting in daylight, photographing it to produce the subtly different images in this exhibition. These photographs reflect the artist’s developing interest in different lighting effects in interior spaces created through a variety of media.
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Urban Vision: Episode 1
21 June to 30 August 2002
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Urban Vision is a unique youth arts and new media education project addressing social exclusion through working with artists and young people in an alternative creative learning environment - 198 Gallery, Brixton. Led by arts professionals with skills and knowledge in a variety of media, the project engages young people from a broad range of backgrounds, reflecting the cultural diversity of Lambeth and the surrounding boroughs.
Urban Vision dovetails with the exhibition programme in an integrated and holistic way. Current exhibitions provide the stimulus for educational activities with input from exhibiting artists. The participants have the opportunity to produce work for an Annual Urban Vision exhibition and take part in other artist-led projects such as LWT's Whose London? film competition.
Many of the young people are referred from schools and other Lambeth agencies or come to 198 Gallery to pursue their creative interests and develop artistic and IT skills. Young people can experience social or emotional exclusion or find themselves under threat of exclusion from mainstream education; they may have English as a second language or have learning difficulties such as dyslexia; they may feel that they are unsure of their choices in life. Urban Vision provides them with access to the visual arts and new media in a creative, stimulating and safe environment. Others find the programme to be a varied outlet for their natural creativity. This programme gives them the opportunity to learn new skills in the visual arts and new media from arts professionals, possibly to take things further into a career in the arts. The programme offers hands-on experience of a wide range of art activities including photography, video and film and creative IT software.
The Urban Vision exhibition is the culmination of an academic year's worth of artwork in various media produced by the young people participating in the project. The exhibition celebrates their considerable and wide-ranging creative achievements.
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Eduardo Padilha
The Park
Residency January to April 2002
1 May to 8 June 2002 |
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Itinerant Brazilian artist Eduardo Padilha is a collector of fragments taken from people's lives. For years, wherever he has lived, he collected old Super-8 film footage from flea markets of people travelling, re-editing the material to create new narratives. He is fascinated by movement: this could be the movement of people between places and spaces, on travels abroad or going about their daily routines; repeated movements of objects in space, such as a kite being flown in the air or someone practising acrobatics; and also movement within mental and temporal spaces.
Following a four-month residency during which he filmed people's daily activities in Brockwell Park near Brixton, Padilha presented four edited films as part of his exhibition at 198 Gallery. The footage for the projected films were shot on grainy Super-8 film stock and have been slowed down to focus on the captured movements, giving them a somewhat otherworldly quality. The films feature regular users of the park, going about their daily activities in this community leisure space. As with his use of found material, Padilha is working with fragments of narrative, abstracting them to the point where they have 'no beginning and no end'. The idea of 'the park' interests Padilha as 'a reconstruction of "natural landscape" in an urban environment'. These landscapes are recorded and described in the form of maps, whose complex networks of lines and shapes have inspired Padilha to produce his response in the form of drawings.
This series of colourful and evocative drawings simultaneously appear both representational and abstract. He has created 'landscapes' of marks, suggesting movement in the surface. In one drawing, meandering parallel lines suggest the contours of an Ordnance Survey map. Elsewhere, there is a floral burst of colour. As a group they form a kind of map that goes off in different directions. The topography of this 'landscape' is also imbued with the sense of an open-ended and non-linear narrative. It could be compared to an album or diary, a record of life in constant development.
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Carlos Madriz
Pure Pueblo
6 March to 13 April 2002
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Venezuelan painter and muralist Carlos Madriz called his exhibition of paintings "Pure Pueblo" to 'represent all the good and bad things that make up Latin America': it is 'a "pure" expression of all that is "pueblo", which can mean "town" or "the people, the common people." The exhibition showcased his new paintings on canvas, as well as a temporary interior mural that he is making for The Brixton Studio education project. He takes as his subject matter what he sees around him in his daily life: ‘houses, markets, the media, people’s traditions, folklore, religion, social habits.’ His cultural background is a rich mixture of African, European and indigenous influences. He creates vibrant and expressive images using a method involving fragmentation and repetition combined with an innate feeling for colour, rhythm and composition.
Mural
International muralist Madriz, whose works can be seen in many cities around the world including San Francisco, Los Angeles and London, created the mural for the exterior of 198 Gallery. This replaceds the previous mural that graced the east-facing wall of the building for the last five years.
Education project
Integral to this exhibition is an education project delivered in partnership with the Photographers' Gallery as part of London Arts's pilot initiative New Audiences: Enabling Diversity Gateway programme. The project took as its starting point an 'archive' of studio portrait photographs by Harry Jacobs featuring Lambeth residents, many of Caribbean and African descent, taken over five decades (1957-1999). Madriz created an interior mural based on the ideas of students at Stockwell Park Secondary School, after which the participants made photographic portraits in front of this backdrop in workshops with artist Faisal Abdu'Allah. This interior mural was part of Madriz's exhibition, and the young people's photographs were exhibited in July in the gallery's Urban Vision education project exhibition, and later during Black History Month in October 2002 at the same time as The Photographers' Gallery's exhibition of Harry Jacobs's work.
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Brian Hodgson and Ben Long
Northern Soul
Curated by Brian Hodgson
18 January to 20 February 2002
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Brian Hodgson moved from Newcastle upon Tyne to London in search of a place to make art. He noticed that London, as a cultural centre, would absorb people into its particular scene, where influences from other parts of the country would often be swallowed up by the dominance of metropolitan urbanity. While foreign cultural influences are increasingly celebrated as being representative of the diverse cultural mix in the capital, manifestations of 'regional' tendencies are perhaps overlooked within the bigger picture of the contemporary art scene in Britain. This exhibition addressed this gap by presenting the work of two artists from 'the north' whose methods and concerns derive their driving force from their particular cultural backgrounds.
Hodgson is interested in ideas to do with the duality of nature, with its cycles of deterioration and renewal. He remembers his childhood in Newcastle, in a time when the shipbuilding industry was in decline, seeing all around him the transformation of materials, particularly of painted metal, as they fell into disuse. He was fascinated by these phenomena, seeing beauty and creative possibilities in materials which had lost their original use value. For the works in this exhibition, Hodgson used found metal panels, with varying degrees of wear, giving them a new lease of life by transforming them into objects that, while retaining their history, gain a new identity. The result is a body of quietly beautiful works that speak of history, hopes, and a recognition of the constant renewal of life.
Ben Long also shows his cultural influences in his working methods, but in his case, these originate more from an observation of the cultural experiences of the people in his immediate environment. Raised in Lancaster, Long also moved to London to be an artist. Having experienced life outside an urban setting, he perceived a discrepancy between notions of art in the minds of people with varying degrees of knowledge. This gave him the desire to make art that would be of interest not just to people with a more specialised interest in art, but also to those who may feel puzzled by what they read in the media.
His ongoing project Great Travelling Art Exhibition invites people to look at, and reassess, their ideas about what they see as art. Using the dusty back panels of trucks and vans that travel around the country as his 'freshly primed canvas', he surprises people by the juxtaposition of easily recognised subject matter and their unfamiliar setting. Where people only expect to see inane statements such as 'I wish my wife was as dirty as this', Long presents images from their daily lives, attempting to stimulate thought on possibilities in art practice.
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Miwa Kojima and Takuro Mikame
Tsunami
An exhibition curated by Fernando Palma Rodriguez
31 October 2001 to 5 January 2002
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The impact of the tidal wave of globalisation on contemporary art and its appreciation has meant the inevitable transformation of both the practice of art and a review of the role of the artist. Technology has pervaded our way of life. On the one hand technological development has not fully evolved into what was once expected of it, the betterment of people, and on the other hand the current tendency towards globalisation has further blurred the innate differences of local culture. As a result cultural differences must now merge into one world-wide duty, to preserve the value of well-being, both environmental and otherwise. Environment does not simply mean the earth and nature to the exclusion of people but includes the everyday lives of humankind and the changes that people experience as a result of technological innovation.
The argument that cultural studies and artistic practice can, by themselves, change this existing condition is short-sighted and unrealistic, but unlike other forms of artistic expression contemporary art practice demands that the artist physically move about in the world engaging with host cultures and by default, become an ambassador of different values, prejudices and dilemmas. This role also demands introspection from the artist who while away from the safer matrix of home values must engage in a process of reassessing and transfixing those values. As a result the artist's role must now become a catalyst for our long overdue environmental concern given that they have a greater global focus through their experience of adaptation and cultural expression.
It is within this context that Tsunami brought together two artists, Miwa Kojima and Takuro Mikame, who are not exploring the environmental issue per se, either thematically or formally, but who share a common denominator in that they now live in two countries, Japan and the UK. This experience is not dissimilar to many whom, as expatriates, undergo the dislocated cultural condition which exists in the present way of life in many major capital cities.
Tsunami explored the parallel of a changing attitude to art and its practice, the blurring of medium, subject matter, artist and activity and showed work which ranged from the tradition of painting to the experimental in multimedia.
Fernando Palma Rodriguez
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