Tuesday 31 August 2010

Coming Soon - 12 Pages

The new edition of 12 Pages, 12 Minutes, will be available soon featuring specially commissioned work from members of TBC Artists' Collective.

For an exclusive preview: tbc-artistscollective.blogspot.com

Saturday 28 August 2010

Work on Viral II begins


The start of a second work for the forthcoming TBC exhibition Delineation: Contemporary Dialogues with Drawing, which translates mechanical information into an analogue drawn language. Toner traces from enlarged, distorted photocopies are redrawn by hand.

Tuesday 24 August 2010

Sketches



'The photocopier is one of the most recent in a long line of instruments conceived for the mechanical reproduction of visual material. But unlike predecessors such as lithography and photography, which originated from an artistic as well as a mechanical urge for perfect representation, the photocopy was not conceived in any way as a tool for artists...

...The price paid for the factual reproduction of reality was termed 'the loss of the aura' by Walter Benjamin, who in the 1930s meticulously chronicled the extermination of the artistic aura (unique singularity) through mechanical reproduction. According to Benjamin, 'the dynamite of the tenth of a second' in photography and film blew away traditional notions of art appreciation as contemplative fetishism. If we extend Benjamin's chronology to the present day, then photocopying and video can be seen as successors in the 1980s to photography and film. Yet our present vantage point also permits us to advance beyond Benjamin's verdict on the aura and to see our destruction not only as inevitable due to technological progress, but also, in artistic terms, as necessary.'

From Christian Brensing, Refracted Origins, A Brief History of the Photocopy.

Monday 23 August 2010

Studio News: New work for Delineation exhibition


Viral I (2010)
Graphite on paper
200cm x 150cm

Delineation: Contemporary Dialogues with Drawing opens in October 2010. The exhibition considers drawing as an expanded field that explores what it is to draw within the context of contemporary art practice. In the elegiac setting of The Crypt Gallery, Delineation will present works from TBC Artists' Collective that contemplate the nature of current drawing activity in physical, cognitive and virtual contexts. The exhibition will focus on the processes of drawing itself, and also assert its relevance to writing, sculpture, sewing, technology, mark-making, language, gesture and performance.

27 October 2010 - 31 October 2010
10:00 AM - 6:00 PM
The Crypt Gallery, Euston Road, St Pancras Church, London NW1 2BA

Day-to-day

Progress of a new drawing 13

Thursday 19 August 2010

Day 11: Six pencils down...


I'm running out of graphite fast, I've just placed an emergency order for more of my favourite yellow pencils.

Saturday 14 August 2010

Sketches

Xeroxized to infinity

Our present condition has been described in terms of an “ecstasy of communication.” In an era of multiple media, technological advances in telecommunications and in methods of visual reproduction ensure that we are constantly being inundated with images. Televisions, faxes, photocopiers, and computers have become the virtual windows of the age of the information highway, conduits of digitalized impulses that link the individual with a global network of communications. The modern office and home are deluged with reproduced images and information: news on the hour, every hour; movies previewed, premiered, released, cloned into videos, and drip-fed through cable TV. It is a culture of the copy, a society of saturation, the second flood. The world has become “xeroxized” to infinity.

From 'The Saturation of the Image'
MIT Press.

Saturday 7 August 2010

Unconscious Optics

'...The enlargement of a snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject. So, too, slow motion not only presents familiar qualities of movement but reveals in them entirely unknown ones “which, far from looking like retarded rapid movements, give the effect of singularly gliding, floating, supernatural motions.” Evidently a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye – if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man. Even if one has a general knowledge of the way people walk, one knows nothing of a person’s posture during the fractional second of a stride. The act of reaching for a lighter or a spoon is familiar routine, yet we hardly know what really goes on between hand and metal, not to mention how this fluctuates with our moods. Here the camera intervenes with the resources of its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, it extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions. The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses...'

From: Walter Benjamin (1936), The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Thursday 5 August 2010