Exhibition Review: Masters at the Minories

By Simon Kaye

Masters at the Minories runs from the 26th of July until the 23rd of August, 2014, at The Minories Galleries, in Colchester.

 

On Friday 25^th of July, The Minories Galleries opened to the public its new exhibition entitled Masters at the Minories. The exhibition features the work of students graduating from three MA courses run the by the Colchester School of Art and taught at the art gallery.

Having done a practical degree at the School of Art, I know how hard it can be to curate a show embodying such a large variety of unique pieces. As well as being successful individually, they also need to functions together to create a unique experience. The MA students and the curator overcame this difficulty impressively. They used the space very distinctly. Whilst it seems to be divided between the three professional practices, the exhibition also juxtaposed work from different area of expertise.

I first entered the Morning Room featuring the installation, What are we doing today? by Rosie Wilford and the art of Joanna Marlow from her series Being Bound. This first encounter gave me an overview of one of the overwhelming themes the exhibition implements. By looking at Joanna’s maps, not only did I relate them to my personal experience, but also the visual format of the work reminded me of a sculptural practice. In-between the flatness behind the glass and the 3D effect of the work, I questioned whether the work was a sculpture, or another, as yet undefined medium.

Most of the sculptural pieces challenged the space and hence my experience, as I had to adapt my journey through the gallery. When I stepped in The Girling Room, I did not feel alone. The ceramic works of Liam Henessy (Doppelgangër) made me feel uncomfortably overwhelmed by their presence. Despite this busy yet lonely atmosphere, I walked around these exotic humanoids to then look at the very emotional work by Samantha O’Kelly. When I first thought I was looking at a photograph, Spatium, I soon realised that again my preconceived notions were in question as the work almost entered the sculptural realm.

Katarzyna Babinska and her work Third Impression also recalled the characteristics of the medium used. Potentially made on purpose, the title reminded me of Roland Barthes acclaimed essay, “The Photographic Meaning” in which he expressed to potentiality of creating a new valence from a first and a second term (Barthes, 1977). Although focused around photography, those ideas seemed to have been a ubiquitous theme underlying most of the works.

In the Front Room and the Garden Room, Bernie Stephens and Poppy Wallis both used the ceiling as the anchor of their work. Albeit sharing visual similarities, the two projects remained extremely distinctive in their form and content. Whilst Bernie’s work disputed painting as a sculptural form, Poppy’s installation felt multi-sensory.

Finally, Karen Cooke’s work diverged from book making, to photography and silkscreen printing. The seats displayed welcomed me to sit and engage with what she had provided for the visitor. Mainly aimed at children, this particular work almost brought me back to my childhood. Overall, she achieved creating a very personal atmosphere by not using only one visual format but varying her pieces.

The Final Show of the MA students appeared to me as a must see for anyone who engaged with Bruce Mclean’s exhibition at Firstsite. During one of his talks, when Mclean spoke about his practice, he expressed an everlasting reconfiguration of his subject of study. The MA students both individually and collectively provide a fresh outlook to such debate around medium specificity.

Bibliography

Barthes, Roland., Image, Music, Text London: Fontana Press, 1977.

Graduation Day at the University of Essex

By Simon Kaye

Last Friday marked the final day of the University of Essex experience for the 2014 graduates of the School of Philosophy and Art History. Three years of rushing to meet deadlines and of an overwhelming exams’ stress at the end of every year are now over. The long journeys to London to visit galleries, the sounds of the projectors during seminars, the persistence to make it for 9 am lectures after a night, and the late evenings writing essays in the library are now things of the past. They will nevertheless soon be replaced by the regular morning alarm and job applications.

Although it started raining in the morning, the weather quickly shifted to a sultry summer heat, which graduates and their parents enjoyed on the square throughout the celebration. Having been living like a hermit for the past month whilst writing my dissertation, it was very refreshing to see some of my friends graduating.

Music and barbecues were on the menu and as a frontrunner I got to enjoy this particular atmosphere whilst taking some pictures of joyful moments. I was wandering around campus in between photographing and congratulating until a bell rang calling this vast crew to make their way to the graduate ceremony. Streamed on the university website, I was glad I could see what my ceremony would be like. Sitting under the shades of the Pagoda I sat with a few others watching Prof. Wayne giving a very insightful speech before graduates were called and went up to shake the hand of the chancellor. 

Following the ceremony, which took place in the Ivory Crew Lecture Hall, graduates and parents gathered at the SPAH marquee in Wivenhoe Park to enjoy the warm weather and share a drink with their - now - former lecturers. Refreshments and food were provided to congratulate and celebrate the success of the students. Perhaps a little bit nostalgic but nevertheless embedded with a sense of completion, the atmosphere in the tent was very cheerful and convivial.

Already, I could feel that the graduates will soon miss their university life and the communal sense the campus has got. The little things such as Campus Cat waiting to be stroked in the Tony Rich Teaching Centre, the paternoster of the Albert Sloman library and its check point will always bring a smile to those who came here to study. Memories of the sport centre and its “blades” whose students’ passion embraced on Derby Day, the sport federation’s nights every Wednesday, Art Exchange and its private views where students and lecturers gathered together to speak about art, will be dearly missed by those who now enter “the real world.”

Once prizes and speeches were finished, students made their way outside for the famous hat throw, the final and maybe last moment of their University life. I was glad to see that postgraduate students still came for their graduation even a year after they finished their program. It galvanized me to make sure that I will be able to attend mine next year where I will be standing there wearing black, red and white throwing my hat in the air a second time.

Exhibition Review: Intimations by Cinzia Cremona

By Simon Kaye

The course leader for the MA Contemporary Art and Professional Practice, and Art Design and the Book, presents the outcomes from her current research at the Minories Galleries, in Colchester. The exhibition runs until the 16/07/14.

Cinzia Cremona’s installation – The Other Person (2009) – consists of a duvet and a pillow that are displayed in a dark room. It is one of the first pieces the spectator encounters. In an almost sculptural fashion, the disposition of the two objects, missing the wooden frame and the mattress, reminded me of a place where someone had just slept. The woollen fabric reveals the form of the former sleeper, yet there is no one there. 



Cinzia Cremona, Before You Now, (2013)

A video of the artist looking out at the viewer – or the camera – disturbs this strange display. Half slumbering and questioning the viewer, the character of the video suggests an active engagement with the piece: “Come! Yes, it is for you”

The made up bed no longer appears as a mark left by someone else, but almost as an invitation to share the experience with the persona acting in the piece. This process of emancipation – from lucid viewer to active participant of the work (Rancière, 2009) – only happened in my mind as the gesture that formed the folds of the bed sheet left me dubious: in lying on the floor, I could disturb the piece.

Nevertheless, staying within this confine environment and chiaroscuro created by the photons coming out of the television screens, I turned around to see the two other filmed performances by Cinzia. Slightly different is their disposal; none of these pieces featured a second apparent component other than the videos themselves, each of them immersed in their own acoustic world. I picked up the headphones and dived into a very different encounter.

Before You Now (2013) challenged my apprehension of the act of performing presented in the piece. Even though the direct question alluded by the artist draw upon notions of identity and visual reality, another process occurs whilst undergoing the conversation. In a similar way that Bertolt Brecht encountered the performance of Mei Lei in 1935 and discovered what he later described as the Estrangement Effect. In this context ‘the . . . performer does not act as if, in addition to the three walls around him there were also a fourth wall. He makes it clear that he knows he is being looked at. . . . The audience forfeits the illusion of being unseen spectators at an event, which is really taking place.’ (Brecht 1961: 130) Even if my experience was restricted by the use of the camera, my ‘dialogue’ acquired veracity the more Cinzia questioned my role as a viewer. And the fourth wall, the glass of the television screen, had been dropped between the artist and me.

The longer I stayed, the dark room progressively became a layering of experiences: as an active viewer, while I remained listening to a particular video, I could decide to break up my gaze to look at another piece. This dystopian effect emphasized the last confrontation of the show. In Are You Talking to Me? (2011), a conflict zone appears between two distinctive selves apparently belonging to the same person. Filmed from two vantage points, the screen is divided in two parts both featuring the artist who seems to be sitting in front of a computer screen. The noisy image and grainy sound are reminiscent of the lack of quality of a ‘poor image’ (Steyerl, 2009) often used in contemporary digital culture. Here in this particular work, the conversation no longer happens as an interaction between performer and viewer but between those two distinctive personas created by the artist.

The exhibition left me with a bewildered feeling. Even if I am familiar with the screen-based life, which takes over our daily activities, I still sensed one of the question asserted by Cinzia if whether or not I was within or outside the screen. Façade or true character, the constant dichotomy of the works challenged my virtual reality.

Bibliography: 

Brecht, Bertolt and Bentley, Eric., "On Chinese Acting" in The Tulane Drama Review, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Sep., 1961)

Rancière, Jacques., "The Emancipated Spectator" in The Emancipated Spectator, London and Brooklyn, NY: Verso Books, 2009. 

Steyerl, Hito., "The Poor Image" in e-flux journal, no. 10, November 2009. 

Art History Higher Education and Careers Fair

By Simon Kaye

The sun shone all day on Friday 27^th , and I was off to meet Sophie Dickey in London to help out at the Art History Higher Education and Careers Fair.

After leaving the old town of Colchester, I made my way to London. From Liverpool Street, I took the Hammersmith and City Line and I arrived at my destination, the Godolphin and Latymer School, a wonderful institution located two minutes away from the Hammersmith station.

 

Straight away, I could fell the warm sense of community of the school. With a history of more than hundred years old, I felt privileged to step into the establishment where W. B. Yeats was a pupil during his younger years. The fair was organised in the vaulted hall, whose architecture contrasted magnificently with the new buildings of the school.

Sophie and I set up our little stand and we were ready to speak to students about Art History and the University of Essex. Throughout the afternoon, we met some interesting students very attracted by the opportunities the University has to offer, especially with opportunities such as study abroad, language for all and the variety of joint degrees that we have here at Essex.

Although a lot of A-level students chatted with us, a few teachers who did not know much about our campus also took time to learn more about our institution and the School of Philosophy and Art History. Curious about the prospect of their students to potentially make a move to Essex, they left us nearly empty handed of our literature (which I was grateful for because I had to carry back with me!).

After a few cups of tea, we left the place at five o’clock and went to eat a well-deserved subway whilst watching on an outside screen Petra Kvitova defeating Venus Williams at Wimbledon. All in all it was a great day, and a lot of fun!