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Jennifer Chan

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Dan Brereton

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Exhibition text: John Henry Newton

John Henry Newton

Trust me, I'm firing on all cylinders

6 February - 14 March 2015

There was a crack that often appeared in the gallery wall and it was always up to me to fix it; a task that I found to be a respite from the more onerous chores of my job such as packing artworks and moving shipping crates.

On its first appearance the crack ran from ceiling to floor: I ran my finger along its jagged length to remove any loose paint before I filled it with too much filler, which I then sanded back and painted over. It was narrower on its next appearance and could be covered with just a coat of paint. On one occasion it was much wider and required me to cut away all the previous layers of filler and paint from either side of the chasm before sanding, filling, sanding and painting. On one occasion it was shorter, and, peculiarly, did not start or finish at the floor or ceiling, but instead levitated in the centre of the wall: on this occasion I simply hung a painting over it, with a couple of centimetres of crack protruding from the bottom of the canvas. Through repetition of this task I grew to understand the nuances of the crack; despite variations with each appearance, there were familiar angles, branches, bends and turns that remained. I came to know which intersections were most likely to flake, which meanders would split into an offshoot if I manoeuvred the razor carelessly, and which bulges had to be sanded more lightly than others; I understood how weather conditions could exacerbate the crack, to the extent that I knew, before I arrived at the gallery each day, whether or not the crack would be there. Each time I performed my repair works the memories of past repairs were invoked: not memories of the labour itself, but of what was going through my head during a previous repair. The crack became an abstract map of my memories of thoughts and emotions, like a mixtape I once made that some- how embodied the autumn of my 16th year. For John Henry Newton walking is of great importance to the development of his ideas. Just as I went for a walk and came back with no soles is an abstract map of its own production, so the rest of the exhibition, Trust me, I’m firing on all cylinders, can be viewed as a mixtape compiled to accompany Newton’s daily ambulatory activities from the moment he left his house every day for the last four years. The works within the exhibition act as markers on Newton’s various journeys; like the fork in the crack in the gallery wall, that chipped every time I repaired it, that reminded me of a song on my mixtape that reminded me of the bench where I used to stop to smoke and reflect on my way home from school every day: each marker the cumulation of memories invoked by an action repeated. - Barnie Page

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Review: Screen Play

Screen Play

3rd – 24th May 2014

SWG3 Gallery, Glasgow

Kathryn Andrews, Brendan Anton Jaks, Eva Berendes, Simon Denny, Carson Fisk-Vittori, Patrick Hill, Tilman Hornig, Dan Rees, Philipp Timischl, Anne de Vries

From the 14th – 17th May my Instagram feed was awash with photographs of two art fairs: Frieze New York and NADA. I enjoyed it; I could see the highlights of the fairs without the expense of going to New York, seeing only the favourite works of those whose taste I generally trust. Eventually I felt the urge to broaden my scope so I browsed the hashtags (#friezeny and #nadany), thus quenching my increasing fomo. As the fairs went on I quickly got bored of seeing the same pictures over and over. These most popular works - the most retinal, the most accessible, the most shared, the most liked, in all their quirky retro filters - had propagated through Instagram with the aid of a simple hashtag.

Around the same time as #friezeny and #nadany, a group of photographs on my Tumblr feed caught my attention. These were the documentation photographs of an exhibition, Screen Play, at SWG3 in Glasgow, curated by It’s Our Playground (Joey Villemont and Camille le Houezec). The photographs showed an exhibition of photographs that were hung on Chroma green walls and freestanding aluminium mesh frames, I recognised many of these photographs from previous online browsing of exhibitions, similar browsing to that which led me to view the photographs of Screen Play. Their bright colours and abundance on my Tumblr feed (having been reblogged by several tumblr users that I follow) led me to investigate. The photographs exhibited in Screen Play were not artworks themselves but the documentation of artworks, so I was viewing the documentation photographs of an exhibition of documentation photographs of artworks.

In the press release the curators admit to crude image-selection criteria: “online virility”, “visual impact”, and “quality”. Whilst the latter criteria of “quality”, assuming this meant ‘resolution’, seemed to be a reasonable practical requirement for the enlargement of a photograph; the two former got me thinking. The phrase “online virility” stood out to me: virility being an intriguing word to use in relation to art. I supposed that its use here, rather than referring to masculinity, was intended to be synonymous with “reproducibility”, or perhaps it was a typo and was meant to say “virality”. Either way I understood it as an image’s ability to proliferate online. The second criteria “visual impact” struck me as being incredibly blunt and subjective. But both made sense to me. The reason I was even reading about this exhibition at all was that the documentation of it was so vibrant and bountiful on my Tumblr feed and that I had recognised the photographs of artworks that were displayed in the exhibition: the curators had been successful in fulfilling their selection criteria. These aforementioned qualities were not only possessed by the artworks whose images appeared in the exhibition, but also by the documentation photographs of the exhibition itself. I then had the realisation that I would not have had these realisations had I actually, physically, in person (AFK) visited the exhibition, in the gallery, in Glasgow.

I couldn’t to say for sure, but presumably for those who saw Screen Play AFK it was an exhibition about screens and their capacity for representation: all of the depicted works reference screens in some form, for example Eva Berendes’ GRID (2014) series which are steel mesh screens with objects attached to them, and Philipp Timischl’s recent series of works that consist of floor-based LCD screens with painted canvases attached to them such as Untitled (Two Parks) (2014). For me, Screen Play is about the flip-flopping of an image between its physical existence and digital existence until it becomes difficult or perhaps futile to distinguish its origin and endpoint. By seeing it online, on Tumblr, I experienced Screen Play at the most developed point of its concept, a level further than those who actually visited the physical space of SWG3 and saw the exhibition AFK: the point at which the images that had been made physical for display in this exhibition had become images once more.

- Barnie Page

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JupiterWoods is in SE15, London. It houses an exhibition space, residency program, and a shared research and studio space.

Established in 2014 by Hanna Laura Kaljo, Lucy Lopez,Carolina Ongaro, Barnie Page, Cory Scozzari and Emma Siemens-Adolphe.

JupiterWoods 61 Rollins Street London SE15 1EP

Opening hours: Thursday - Saturday 12 - 6pm and by appointment

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A Sense of Things at the Zabludowicz Collection

I co-curated this exhibition. Come along it will be fun.

More info.

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Harry Meadley at Paradise Row

I wrote this review of LEVEL 1, Harry Meadley's solo show at Paradise Row. You can read it on the WWLTD blog.

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Photos from El Gatito Rosa

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El Gatito Rosa

El Gatito Rosa is a Mexican restaurant set up by Patrick Best and Carla Valdivia in 2012. Influenced by the typical street taqueria (taco shop) that is abundant in Mexico City, Carla and Patrick make simple, authentic Mexican food with genuine Mexican ingredients. After a number of successful friends and family lunches in their flat in Hackney, B.C. invites El Gatito Rosa to set up shop at Rowing to offer their Mexican delights to a wider audience. @ElGatitoRosa www.bazandchaz.com www.rowingprojects.com Rowing Unit F, 443-449 Holloway Road, London, N7 6LJ Saturday, 20 April, 12-6pm

FACEBOOK EVENT

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New print

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I'm talking at this tomorrow night.

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phonearts.net

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B.C.#2.1

Tomorrow night is the Private View for the second part of the second B.C. exhibition, B.C.#2.1.

Come and have a look and a drink at Beach London tomorrow night from 6!

Facebook event.

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busty

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bust

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photos