In the spring of 2016, Adam King returned to the area south of Norwich, Norfolk, where he grew up. The semi-rural landscape is currently undergoing considerable road and housing development. Over a period of 14 months, King produced a series of constructions, along with related regular format drawings, to explore and make sense of the changes in the identity of a once-familiar landscape.
Adam King was born in 1971 in Norwich, Norfolk. He received a BA (Hons) Painting from Brighton University (1994) and an MA in Drawing from Wimbledon School of Art, London (2003).
Renee Spierdijk’s work responds to images of young women in formal settings, mainly from found photographs. Spierdijk’s current work is largely set in 19th century America during the civil war and its immediate aftermath; a time of upheaval when many were forced to search for a new identity or had a new identity imposed on them. This is an experience which is both timeless and in an era of continued forced migration as contemporary as ever.
Renee Spierdijk is a Dutch artist, born in Amsterdam, who came to England in 1977. She studied Fine Art at the Byam Shaw School of Art and Goldsmith’s College, and now lives and works in Cambridge.
Exhibition Preview, Friday 9 March from 7-9pm
Performance by Sophie Seita ‘Making Light: In the Temple of Formidable Hypotheses’, at 7:30pm (duration 15mins)
“Truth” is of no small importance to human affairs, yet it has been and remains a contested category. Its status shifts radically through time, place, religion, discipline— and today, social platform. Truth can be definite and mercurial, divine and political. As secularism, cosmopolitanism and positivism enter a moment of crisis, and as information seems to be ever more available – while also subject to algorithmic modification – anxieties about the status of truth and the transparency of information are on the rise.
“Post-truth” was the 2016 Oxford English Dictionary word of the year, denoting “circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” The crisis in objectivity that this new word unveils has been accompanied by an unprecedented proliferation of homemade images that excel the art of “remixology”, the “practice of recombining preexistent content”. These images result in often-fake contents that circulate both virally and ephemerally online. The “post-truth phenomenon”, however, is not only fuelled by low-tech and intimate creativity, but also by technologically sophisticated and politically driven techniques of image creation, alteration and destruction. These sustain electoral agendas, responses to catastrophe and affective relationships to powerholders.
While fake news has a long history, its contemporary currency has been enhanced by the ways in which new biopolitical regimes, from genetic testing to big data, confront more entrenched epistemes. These regimes are potentially capable of bypassing old forms of expertise and knowledge production. The ethical and aesthetic significance of this shift in the status of “truth” is pending critical debate, as is art’s response to the current wave of iconographic politicization, conspiratorial fears, and data skepticism. Reality Machines addresses this “knowledge controversy” while intersecting it with the work of artists from a multiplicity of countries working as activists, social critics, and human rights advocates. Curated by Mara Polgovsky Ezcurrain.
Both exhibitions run from 11 July – 25 SEPTEMBER 2016
The Private Views for both exhibitions take place on Wednesday 13 July from 5.30 – 7.30PM
PeterHawksby‘s exhibition ‘Personal Space’ is showing works which mark a return to a style he first adopted in late 1960’s, using acrylic paint on watercolour paper, applied with a blade. The works explore the spatial tensions between the illusion of the design and the paper as object. The colour schemes are an intuitive response to the design and evolve as the work progresses until they are in harmony with the structure.
Object Objectbrings together objects, made and found, to reflect the everyday lives of its seven participating women artists. Working in isolation from each other, the women came together to curate the objects, in the expectation that shared concerns and experience would lead to common themes, and it is these that have informed the grouping of objects. The artists have been brought together by Jane Hellings.
On Saturday 10 September Object Object will host a multi-disciplinary symposium; Objectification and Gendered Violence, bringing together frontline workers from Women’s Aid and Cambridge Rape Crisis, with visual artists, performers, poets, filmmakers and musicians to explore the role played by objectification, in the perpetuation of gendered violence. Further details will be available on our website shortly.
Jill Eastland‘swork is research based, usually growing from a social, political or environmental issue. She enjoys collecting things and these collections are often incorporated into her work. Jill is founder of Rebel Arts, presents on Rebel Arts Women’s Radio and organises Eastern Bloco Arts Area at Strawberry Fair.
Jane Hellings often works collaboratively, sometimes with Up t’Arts women artist’s collective and also with Rebel Arts, on acts of creative resistance.From her studio at home, she uses low-tech processes and everyday materials to make work about daily life. She has a first class honours degree in textiles from Bretton Hall, Leeds University and an MA in Print from Cambridge School of Art.
Susie Johnson graduated from Cambridge School of Art with a first class honours degree in fine art. From her studio at Cambridge Artworks she creates clever, quirky work in which she explores the taxonomy of shape, the mathematical treatment of movement and the tension between nomothetic and idiographic views of the world.
Alison O’Neill has a BA in Fine Art from Falmouth College of Art and an MA in Feminist Theory from Leeds University, where she studied with Griselda Pollock. Her concerns are class, gender and motherhood and her work incorporates drawing, installation and video.
Eirini Kartsaki is teaching fellow at Queen Mary University of London. Eirini writes and devises performances which she shows nationally and internationally and is currently working on a book entitled Repetition in Performance: Returns and Invisible Forces. She also makes things, primarily, but not exclusively, as performance props.
Jane Waterhouse graduated from Cambridge School of Art with a first class honours degree in fine art, she then added to this, a distinction in MA Print. Jane combines traditional techniques with her own innovative processes to make exquisite prints. Her subject matter; daily soundings, wayfaring, belonging, tokens, imbue her work with a poetic quality.
RachelWooller is interested in the power of materiality. She likes to juxtapose materials to create visual metaphors, which explore the structures we are bound by. She is drawn to issues of power, yearning and the intangible.
8 FEBRUARY – 1 APRIL 2016
ALL FLOORS OF THE ARB
PRIVATE VIEW 5 FEBRUARY 2016, 6.00 – 8.00 PM
‘Fulcrum’ presents the work of three painters from Cambridge. Their work ranges from the abstract to the figurative, from the gesture to the construct. Together they balance on the tipping point between representation and abstraction. Here we find more or less painterly ways of working, experiments in pictorial possibility that test the image against the abstract potential of the material and history of paint. In bringing the work together in one show we hope to provide an opportunity for viewers to explore this territory with us.
Born in 1948, James Faure Walker studied at St Martins (1966-70) and the Royal College of Art (1970 to 1972). He had already exhibited widely in the seventies (the Hayward Annual 1979) and eighties (a solo exhibition at Manchester’s Whitworth in 1985), and was one of the founders of Artscribe magazine in 1976, which he edited for eight years. He has exhibited eight times at SIGGRAPH in the USA, won the ‘Golden Plotter’ prize at Computerkunst, Gladbeck, Germany in 1998, and featured in ‘Digital Pioneers’ at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2009. His book, ‘Painting the Digital River: How an Artist Learned to Love the Computer’, was published by Prentice Hall (USA) in 2006, and awarded a New England Book Show Award. He was one of the five English artists commissioned to produce a print for the 2010 South African World Cup. Till 2014 he was Reader in Painting and the Computer at Chelsea, University of the Arts. In 2013 he won the Royal Watercolour Society Award.
Critics have commented on the lyricism and exuberant colour of Walker’s paintings, surprising given that since the eighties computer graphics has been central to his work, alongside oil paint and watercolour. They have also mentioned his independent stand, using photos of pedestrians, birds, shops, at the same time as having developed an ‘abstract’ language. As Stuart Morgan wrote in 1985, “His doubt may lead to one of those careers which bridges older and newer practice, and which opens more doors than it closes”.
