Project News: A Message to... Marfa

Marfa, Texas, located at 30°18′43″N 104°1′29″W

TBC members Laura Davidson, Charley Peters and Beverley Bennett are currently working together on a collaborative project, A Message To... Marfa. Marfa is a town in the desert of West Texas, founded in the early 1880s as a railroad water stop. Marfa Army Airfield was located east of the town during World War II and trained several thousand pilots before closing in 1945, the abandoned site still being visible 16km east of the town. In 1956 the film Giant was filmed in Marfa, famously the last film featuring James Dean, who died before filming was completed. The city is now best known for housing Donald Judd's Chinati Foundation, occupying more than 10 buildings and permanently exhibiting work by artists including Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Richard Long and Roni Horn. 

A Message To... Marfa involves Peters and Bennett, in London, providing Davidson with a list of instructions for actions that she must undertake in Marfa. These actions will generate material that Davidson will send back to Peters and Bennett, which they will curate and interpret to generate a remote 'drawing' of Marfa. The project will be realised over the next two months, and published online shortly afterwards.

Coming Soon on 12-pages.com...

The Terror Issue of 12-Pages will be published online in March 2012. For more information about the project and details of how to submit work click here.

A Message To... Houston

As part of TBC Artists' Collective, I will be taking part in the A Message To... Houston project during August. My piece of work is inspired by the legendary firefighter 'Red' Adair, who, during his career extinguished and capped oil well blowouts, both on land and offshore. The project will involve a collaboration between myself and TBC's Laura Davidson, based on Laura's interpretation of a set of instructions I supplied her with relating to a series of my drawings made for the project. The instructions and my drawings - made from folded paper, reminiscent of flame forms - are below. The second part of the project will be documented on the TBC Online Project Space, 12-Pages, at the end of August.

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A Message to... Paul Neal 'Red' Adair

I have made six drawings out of folded paper.

The drawings are now on the wall of my studio in London.

On sheets of white paper I have recorded each fold as a line, thereby producing six new line drawings.

I have given these line drawings to you and they are to be taken to Houston, Texas.

In Houston the lines should be turned into folds and the original drawings recreated.

The six recreated drawings should be burned and their ashes scattered in Houston Heights, the area where Red Adair spent his childhood, to commemorate his career extinguishing hazardous oil well fires until his retirement at the age of 77.

Charley Peters, A Message to Red Adair (2011), Folded paper on wall

Project News: Altered States on TBC Online Project Space

Charley Peters, DS329-1/DS9-5 (2011), Hazard Tape on Canvas

“A revolutionary action within culture cannot have as its aim to be the expression or analysis of life; it must aim at life’s expansion. Misery must be pushed back everywhere.”
Guy Debord

Available on TBC Artists' Collective's online project space is Issue 8 of 12-Pages, a publication of contemporary drawing. July's issue, Altered States, edited by TBC member Laura Davidson, asked contributors to consider art as a catalyst for change. It was important that these ideas were considered in the widest possible sense, to bring a sense of plurality to a changed state. As we know too well, the drive for a reformed state in Europe post WW1 lead to in Germany, Italy and Spain the spectre of Fascism and in the East of Europe the steel face of Communism. Such extremes of belief today seem less significant in the age of Web 2.0, where multiple states of exchange between individuals can seemingly co-exist. As 12-pages’ editorial remit is to create a discourse around contemporary drawing practice and its definition, the featured outcomes additionally challenge the ‘drawing’ in some way.

For Altered States, I submitted the work DS329-1/DS9-5, a drawing made by stretching hazard warning tape over a canvas. The title refers to the pantone references of the yellow and black of the tape, colours synonymous with danger, emergency or violent criminal activity. Altered States editor Laura Davidson wrote about the work, 'Removed from its original signifying concept the tape has been used to make marks, instead of warning of imminent danger. This removal of signifier through drawing practice gives an engaged process based response.'

Altered States can be seen at: http://www.12-pages.com/2011/07/altered-states.html

Project News: Altered States (Coming Soon)

Coming soon on TBC Artists' Collective's online project space is Altered States, a publication featuring newly commissioned work from a range of international artists. Altered States will be edited by TBC member Laura Davidson and will be available on 12-pages.com later this month.

Project News: Radicals on TBC Online Project Space

Charley Peters, Inter/Zone 01-04 (2011)

The latest issue of 12-Pages, Radicals, is now available to view via TBC's online project space. Edited by Beverley Bennett with design by James Tuitt, the Radicals issue took as its inspiration the Romantics whose radical ideas revolutionised 19th century thinking, and invited artists to consider corresponding figures of the last twenty years.

The figure referenced in my work for Radicals was writer William S. Burroughs. Inter/Zone, the works created for the Radicals issue of 12-Pages take their name from the working title of Burroughs' Naked Lunch. The series is generated using Burrough’s cut-up literary technique, which provided a non-linear alternative to traditional reading and writing systems. In the works made for Radicals new drawings were cut vertically down their centre and pieced randomly together to make new works where lines of varying weight and direction fuse together to create new visual states of being.

Charley Peters, Inter/Zone 05-06 (2011)

The cut-up is actually closer to the facts of perception than representational painting. Take a walk down a city street and put down what you have just seen on canvas. You have seen a person cut in two by a car, bits and pieces of street signs and advertisements, reflections from shop windows – a montage of fragments. Writing is still confined to the representational straitjacket of the novel … consciousness is a cut up. Every time you walk down the street or look out of the window, your stream of consciousness is cut by random factors.
William S. Burroughs

Project News: Radicals (Coming Soon)

The new issue of 12-Pages will be available on TBC's online project space on 8th June. Entitled Radicals, it features newly commissioned work by TBC artists and international collaborators.

Project News: Movement (Coming Soon)

May's issue of 12-Pages, Movement, is coming soon to TBC Artists' Collective online project space. Edited by Paul Mendez and Charley Peters, it will be available online in early May featuring new work from TBC artists and selected international contributors.

Project News: Pinpoint Introspective on TBC Online Project Space

Charley Peters Psychoparadoxa I-IV (2011)

My new works, Psychoparadoxa I-IV, are available to see online from today at 12-pages.com. The latest edition of TBC's publication 12-Pages is entitled Pinpoint Introspective. The works selected by this month's editor, Liz Oniri, represent a search amongst the building blocks of humankind for a means of expression. In a world in which we are forced to process volumes of information far beyond the scope of any computer, by placing the minutiae of our being under a microscope, we are forced to constantly recontextualise anew, always creating new lines of creative investigation.

Project News: Hybrid on TBC Online Project Space

Charley Peters Ghosts (2011)

The latest issue of TBC's 12-Pages publication is now available at www.12-pages.com. Featuring work from TBC Artists' Collective, associates and from open submission, participants were asked to respond to the theme of 'Hybrid'.

Concerned with issues of hybridity between analogue and digital methods of producing artworks, and hybrid words, which combine etymologically Latin and Greek parts, my work Ghosts (2011), is a series of three digital halftone drawings of analogue television static. The word 'television' is derived from a hybrid Latin and Greek origin meaning 'far sight': Greek 'tele', far, and Latin 'visio', sight.

Hybrid is online now.

Project News: Hybrid (Coming Soon)

The next issue of 12-Pages, the online publication from TBC Artists' Collective, will be available from 8th March. Edited by TBC member Beverley Bennett, the forthcoming issue is entitled Hybrid and will include new work by TBC artists, invited guests and from open submission. I have submitted three new digital drawings, which are a development of my recent Ben-Day dot paintings, which will be seen first in Hybrid on the 12-Pages Online Project Space.

Project News: Windows (Coming Soon)

Charley Peters, Window V Windows (2011)

Window V Windows is a new work for TBC Artists' Collective's forthcoming publication 'Windows', which will soon be available to view on the 12-Pages Online Project Space. It used the photograph View from the Window at Le Gras as source material from which to make a work for the February issue of TBC's online publication. View from the Window at Le Gras was the first permanent photograph, created by Nicéphore Niépce in 1826 in Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, France. Niépce produced his photograph—a view of a courtyard and outbuildings seen from the house’s upstairs window—by exposing a bitumen-coated plate in a camera obscura for eight hours on his windowsill. In Window V Windows Niépce's seminal work has been glitched by opening it in Wordpad for Windows and intervening in the image's coding, creating a mash-up of analogue and digital photographic data.

'Windows' by TBC Artists' Collective will be online at www.12-pages.com soon, featuring specially commissioned work by TBC Members and their invited guests.

Nicéphore Niépce, View from the Window at Le Gras (1826)

Project News: TBC Do it Again, and Again, and Again

The Double Walkers (2010)

The Double Walkers, 100 drawings of a photocopier 'copy' button is my contribution to the current issue of 12-Pages, which can be seen now on TBC Artists' Collective's online project space. Edited by James Tuitt, 'Do it Again, and Again, and Again' focuses on the repetitive and absorbing nature of contemporary drawing practices.

See more at www.12-pages.com

Project News: Do Something Wrong

The new issue of 12-Pages, TBC Artists' Collective's online journal is now live on the TBC blog - www.12-pages.com. Edited by Charley Peters, the project challenged TBC members and their invited associates to 'Do Something Wrong'.

Project News: Artificial Intelligence

Detail from Document V: The I with which I see / Conversations with Berger (Helvetica 60pt)

Wrong, the new issue of TBC's 12-Pages Online Project Space features new work from me called Artificial Intelligence. On Friday 26th November 2010 I entered a university library in London and took a copy of John Berger’s influential text ‘Ways of Seeing’ from the shelf. During the next two hours I cut out all the references to sight, seeing and the visual from Chapter One of the book, rendering it meaningless. I replaced the book on the shelf and left the library.

New Homepage

A new homepage with links to online galleries of my work, TBC's 12-Pages and Carbon Particles:
charleypeters.net

12-Pages Online Project Space: October 2010

Above: Charley Peters Displacement (2010)

Graphite square (erased) and accrued erasings

12-PAGES introduces the Online Project Space, a monthly project set to create specially-prepared works for the 12-PAGES blog, that interrogates individual theory and presents works on a digital wall space.

The theme for October was notions of the home, incorporating the importance of having a home, and perhaps experiences of not having a home. Contributing artists were asked to spend a short time applying this theme to the process of their current practices.

To see more work:

tbc-artistscollective.blogspot.com/