 |  |
|---|---|
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
| |
|---|---|
| |
| |
| |
ART PARLOUR - D CAFFE
Daniel Curtis, an alumnus from the MFA 2017 course, showed us around the Peckham area while pointing out interesting venues we could use to do free exhibitions in. He also gave us ideas of how we could support our own practice suggesting, for instance, that we work in a coffee shop or as a hairdresser etc, while living in London.
"Art makes us self enquire about the existence of the outside world; it makes us wonder about space and time and how they affect us. The artist’s identity is almost always trying not to fall in the reconstructions made by others surrounded in the same space as us."
As a result of this - and as a response to what we learned from this trip - we decided to make a little coffee shop at our university that we named "Caffe D". We agreed, as a group, to run our own little coffee shop during the Art Parlour presentation. This is so as one of the places that we visited while in Peckham had a small coffee business operating near a children park, so the people running it could financially support their own gallery. Everyone in the group was excited with the idea of creating a space that would provide us with money to sustain our art rather than having to rely on selling our art alone; something that can be very difficult indeed.
We successfully executed our idea and we were able to sell cakes, drinks, tea, brownies and doughnuts. After 10 minutes of ‘officially opening business’ we were able to raise 21,50 pounds.
All in all, this was a very good way of showing and trying out creative ways that help us support our art practice as emerging artists.
SPARKS EXIBIHITON
The Sparks was the first exhibition organized outside Wimbledon College of Arts. This idea of starting exhibiting our work outside the university arose after a fellow student and I had a conversation about the importance of being more active as artists in the art world. Looking back, everything started with us having a small meeting in Coco’s room at university. We sent a message asking everyone from our class to join us, and 15 students came to meet us. After the meeting, everyone was excited with the idea the two of us had, and for some people, this would be their first time planning a show outside the ‘coziness’ of UAL. A risk we were all excited to take.
We started by having loads of meetings and we were quick to find a place, with help from Liliana, where we could potentially host our first show; i.e. The Legge Studios. Liliana became, then, the head of the project given their friends were the ones allowing us to exhibit at their workshop gallery.
Briefly, The Legge Studios is an old metal workshop driven by alumni of UAL. The first thing we did after securing the place was to divide everyone into separate groups so as to maintain order. We divided the groups as follows: the catering team, the curation team, the workshop team(s), the budget team, the publicity team, and, finally, the instalment team. Since I knew and enjoyed the work of a curator, I decided to join the curation team; a challenging task. Given this was the first time many of my peers exhibited something, our team had to explain to them the role of the curator in organizing and establishing a cohesive space for our art to be displayed in. The whole idea of working together with people that barely knew each other was a huge challenge from the point a view of the sheer organization to set up the work itself. I learned a lot from the practicality part of this, but even more from a creative point of view.
LITTLE TALKS
The corridor exhibition was a brilliant opportunity to work in a collaborative project for the very first time with Fiona, Sen Kei, Miki and I. This tested our capacity for communication and our organizational skills, but it also showed us how to curate in a strange space, i.e. a passage than an actual space to exhibit.
We decided as a group to respond and to acknowledge (or to give voice to) some objects that make the space function. For example, we recorded and played the sounds made by the electricity fuse board as part of the exhibition. When I was doing and organizing previous shows in the same space I felt like some of the objects around the corridor were distracting and almost detaching the artworks from the viewers, making it more difficult to curate as they normally do not belong there. We were constantly trying to somehow make them disappear into space. But instead of trying to focus the viewer’s attention away from these objects, we decided, as a group, to actually give them the ability to become art rather just objects. A nice and convenient twist of the space: they now had a purpose and function in our little art world.
Moreover, we wanted them to be able to tell their own stories and their life experiences while living at Wimbledon College of Arts. In a way, we ‘humanized’ these objects. To do so, we recorded their sounds (i.e. their own language) and we wrote four different stories about each one of them (i.e. the radiator, the fire alarm, the electricity fuse box, and, finally, the card reader that every once in a while made noises that, at first, seemed disturbing). Again, we were almost humanizing them so people would have more empathy and respect for their job.
By doing this we also able to give and studied the nature of art and our experiences of it. The definition, or the sense of beauty, of the object itself, is not always as important as its value or function. A contraction to what art is in many ways. Besides, and importantly, as I trust that beauty or the aesthetic of some pieces – be it art or everyday objects – is not always ‘superior’ to the theoretical stance of an artwork.
QUICK AND DIRTY
Helen and I decided that it would be a good idea to make a second exhibition to make sure all of us were active in making and producing some artworks. Loads of us were still ‘floating’ around ideas, as we did not have yet a research question for our art practice. Everyone felt rater lost because it was the beginning of the semester and we were still in the experimenting phase; however, holding a second exhibition, we trusted, would help some of us come up with ideas while producing some work of our own. It also helped some of us try out new practices that could be later used for our assessment in a way that would not be counter-productive.
For my project, I decided to transform used tea bags into bronze ones in attempts to metaphorically detach the normal meanings given to tea bags – its purpose and consumer symbolism – into a more aesthetically and materialistic form. The rationale here was to ‘play’ around with everyday objects (in this case a tea bag) and showcase how its perception and value can be easily manipulated if used for/or in a different context. Here, by making it more appealing to individual’s in a society like ours by creating bronze molds of it. In other words, I was capitalizing on everyday simple objects. First, I used bronze, after trying out several other materials, to symbolically place an economic value to a cheap tea bag. Thereafter, and secondly, I used glass to do the same thing, but here in attempts to symbolize the fragility of value in a society whose trends shape what is deemed valuable. Important to note, however, that both materials used to display a religious connotation – bronze because it is a material used in many religious artefacts; glass because of religious stained glass windows – in attempts to transgress what many believe are temporal boundaries.
This is not to say that religion is, or must be, central to our everyday life, but rather to highlight how in some instances, objects that carry a religious connotation may more difficultly lose ‘value’ – and more easily earn it – due to their symbolic value. I also displayed them in a wood chair, as, due to my role in this exhibition, I was unable to find other ways of displaying it. However, the chair quite nicely fits with my overall theme, as the contrast between the materials (i.e. glass, bronze and wood) was rendered more evident; but also, as the chair is too an everyday object that, somehow, ‘carries’ value.
FIRS SHOW ORGANIZED BY THE PROFESSORS
In the first exhibition organized by the professors, Helen and I had the fantastic opportunity to curate what is known as the corridor space. I am happy to say it went extremely well despite the fact that we barely knew each other at the beginning of this course. It was also interesting and challenging to have to work and curate a space with no previous knowledge of the context of the art we were setting up. Socially wise, I also got to know and talk with my classmates in a more personal way than ever before. I also had a little interactive installation in our first exhibition at University.
In my piece, I was exploring the idea of feeling lost and how that feeling affects your self-esteem and perception of yourself. Feeling lost often throws you on a limbo where you feel like you do not belong, or that your work is not good enough. However, I trust that being in touch with these feelings is crucial for one’s growth. My ‘solution’ for this, if I may, was to ‘clean’ myself of these feelings in a metaphorical way; hence, why, in my rather intimate sound clip used in the installation, I was heard cleaning myself. The lack of video, or visible performance, was to purposefully grant the listener discretion in what he/she might conceptualize ‘cleaning’ with, due to the intimate nature of feelings.