Emotional Pie Chart - Davina and Daniel

(click to enlarge)

Virginia Phongsathorn: Chicken Soup (The Commune), 2007 - Gemma Sharpe

Drive to form, to play, to another body, to a certain end.

I wanted to write about Ginny’s work, so watched Chicken Soup (The Commune) a few times. On Wednesday we had spent a few hours in her studio, talking about her paintings. So to talk of her film today, is to refer to those hours, before those paintings.

As if looking from the navel-eye-view at a kitchen crowded with objects, the film watches the preparation of chicken soup. Music plays in the background of the kitchen, and text on the screen accompanies the movements of cooking. The text takes the tone of recollection, behaving like an absent soundtrack, or the rehearsal of a dialogue with a particular other. We see the action of hands: washing, breaking bay leaves, or wielding a short knife. At one point an image of comic violence is described in the text/soundtrack: a vulture is eating a fox, ‘the vulture stuck its head up the foxes arse, it started to move as it if it were alive.’ It is a perversion of the natural order, of birth, death, and desire for nourishment. Particularly interesting though, is the clash of word to image at this point. These feminine hands occupied with gentle domestic activity - wielding that short knife - become possible arbiters of violence. Directly, there is no such threat, but an alternative power is gifted upon these hands, and the potential for their diversion from a closed set of actions.

The space of the film’s display was once a Methodist Hall, and the film is shown at the upper level of the main hall, on one of three tiers that would have separated an audience – allowing optimum view for the optimum number of people. The wooden surface solicits you to procure a splinter, if only to demonstrate its age and texture. There are remnants of fluff between the boards, and a penny (Queen side-up) has been dropped on the tier below Ginny’s film. It reminds me of her paintings.

Along the course of a drive – to form, to another body, to a certain end – the paintings demonstrate a fixation with peripheral items accumulated on the way. Think of ‘pervert the course of justice’, a perversion is misdirection. To interrupt the drive is to deviate, to become too interested in peripheral items – the objects of the drive over its object. But there is beauty in the protracted linger upon those objects, in what might be found along the journey of the diversion.

Untitled - Julia Calver

(click to enlarge)

Contingent Ground: Post Foundational Politics, Violence and the Art Object - Robert Dingle + Dominic Rich

(click to enlarge image)

Untitled Sketch - Dominic Rich (click to enlarge)

Contested Ground Artist Disco Mix-Tape

songs selected by the dj's from the contested ground artist disco

Robert Alex Rush
The Flirtations – ‘Nothing But A Heartache’
Leeroy Stibbles – ‘Express Yourself’
Yo Majesty & Enya – ‘Fuck That Shit / Sail Away’

Antony Faroux
Don Cherry – ‘Symphony For Improvisers’

Gay Faze
Animal Collective – ‘My Girls’Maurice Fulton – ‘Let’s Get Sick’
Jona Lewis – ‘In The Kitchen At Parties’

Gareth Bell-Jones
Mike Mareen – ‘Double Trouble (Zeppelin Remix)’
Love Club – ‘Hot Summer Nights’
Glass Candy – ‘Beatific’

Put Out The Bin
Pat Benatar – ‘Love Is A Battlefield’
Queen & Montserrat Caballe – ‘Barcelona’
Amii Stewart – ‘Knock On Wood’

Tom Trevatt
Cinematic Orchestra – ‘To Build A Home’
Georgie James – ‘Grizzly Jive’
The Cure – ‘Fire In Cairo (Digitalism Mix)’

* compiled by Alexandra Terry

Room 11

Room 11, installation shots

Vanessa Billy, Robert Holyhead and Sam Porritt

Curated by Gemma Lloyd

Addressing the viewer from both entry points are two components of Sam Porritt’s No Problem, Everyone’s Invited!, 2009 (a). Screwed into the floor, these aluminium carpet cover strips invoke a certain familiarity in their proximity to the doorways. Straying into the space however and going against the grain of the dark seasoned floorboards they start to suggest positions for the viewer to stand. Two further strips by the radiator are laid closely next to each other but begin to scissor away at one end. They are committed to this position and will never be parallel or aligned with each other; generating an uncomfortable stance that gives weight to this side of the room.

Horizontally demarcating one third of the room, Waist Line, 2009 by Vanessa Billy (c) plots out a stretched rectangular circuit in a continuous strip of punctured metal. The chain-like quality of the material sits uneasily at waist height and challenges or interrogates the possibility of looking closely at the painting behind it. Examining the two lines in parallel creates an optical experience asking the eyes to re-register and make sense of the illusionary depth. Like Porritt, Billy’s work elevates the viewer’s awareness of his or her own presence in the room. The tension, width and distance lend themselves to playground skipping games, which lead to an inviting experience in contradiction with its other more hostile qualities.

Wiped out edges interrupt the horizontal movement of the lightly painted surface in Robert Holyhead’s Untitled (Yellow), 2008 (b). They have in fact been removed with the artist’s thumb – and therefore introduce a third intimation of human presence into the installation. The painting works confidently in the room with a single command of sandy yellow. Much like the daylight coming through the window, this work picks out elements in the room, bringing out the faded sea green in a floor panel below and the luminescence of the doorway to its left. Poised at the bottom two corners of the canvas sits an accumulation of paint; the weightiest part of the work. The edges, of which we can only see one (unless we cross Billy’s work) hold a slight bleed of paint – there is deft negotiation in the painting and hung next to the window the natural light emphasises the light, fast paced yet measured surface.

Where Billy and Porritt introduce discrete household materials, Holyhead offers concrete forms in the composition that perhaps suggest the physical foundations of a space. Selected specifically in response to the room, the linear forms in all three of the works are in dialogue with the existing bands, stripes, panels and lengths in the space. Simultaneously, the installation frames and is framed by the wall, floor and space inside the room. The works carve out space and extend beyond the physicality of themselves, affecting the experience and behaviour of the viewer.

Gemma Lloyd, 2009