Opening on 11th March is Stoke, a three-person show in which I will be exhibiting alongside Phil King (who is also curating the show) and Pascal-Michel Dubois.
From the exhibition's press release:
The problem of Art’s possession of a place’s protective spirit is an old quandary, maybe one that contemporary art has generally worked hard to avoid, it's somewhat laughable when someone talks of genius these days. Landscape painters, commissioned by landowners to show off their classically manicured properties, initially worked to enslave the particular genius loci of such feudal land banks… to make it conform to the geometries of the classical state that it was supposed to inspire. And when artists started to wander romantically about, they maintained a desire to hunt such genius down, chasing it into wilder and wilder places, aiming to render its now fugitive nature in watercolour washes, in sketches and oils. Some tried to become it. If each place did once have an enchanting protective spirit, some particular genie security guard, it is one that has long been muzzled and locked, hapless, into art. Now, after years of habitual property speculation, unable to protect anywhere anymore, these pale inhibited spirits have no spirit left, they can no longer even trigger defensive superstitions… except perhaps in fantasy computer games. Art bound genii are regularly regurgitated at auctions, stashed ignored in museums, they gather dust on walls and in attics… coordinated perspectives and prospects lock any unique imagines in, ship them away in golden frames, organise them in iPhoto or worse. Artists squint hard whenever they sense any sign of genii in the vicinity… they sharpen their pencils, focus their cameras, reduce any magic to a mere impression of themselves for god like collectors to collect, keeping warning barks kennelled far away from the lost places of the world. Without genius, everybody and everything becomes a Stoke... unprotected and everywhere … Little, Bradley or Gifford - Bristol and its nibbled green belt has more than its fair share of Stokes. Everything and everybody now has to know its place.
Stoke brings together aspects of the work of three, quite different, post-art artists in one place so as to look at and fuel this problem without being defined by it.
Pascal-Michel Dubois sees his work as an idle observation of life like a doodle… therefore, it is always in the making, constantly re-interpreting
Charley Peters’ investigations are concerned with the spatial potential of the painted surface, explored through the construction of geometric configurations that map the pictorial relationship between two and three dimensions … her paintings use subtle variations in colour, tone and scale to construct illusionary light and structural depth. They often exhibit properties that present as disorientating or other-worldly, but are perhaps also familiar through our experiences of the 3D environments of computer games or digitally-gener
Gathering new and old paintings local Phil King unpacks and deals them in different sets. Not subject to a given identity they demand a different approach than one based on the identification of an a-priori common sense. For ‘Stoke’ however he has chosen to present an array of landscape paintings - inviting us to wander through manifold implications, past and future.
