BlankExpression 2011, BLANKSPACE launch
Thursday 27th January - Sunday 13th February, BLANKSPACE, Manchester
BLANKSPACE LAUNCH | BLANKEXPRESSION PUBLIC PREVIEW & BOOK LAUNCH:
Thursday 27 January 2011, 6-9pm
EXHIBITION CONTINUES
Friday 28 January - Sunday 13 February 2011
BLANKSPACE, Manchester
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:
Alexander Ashton | Andrew Broadey | Andy Nash | Andy Nizinskyj | Ben Sloat | Claudia Borgna | Daniel Fogarty | Hadas Tapouchi | Hannah Brown | Hannah Wiles | Jane Lawson | Jen Ross | Jez Dolan | Jude Macpherson | Karl Kolley | Katrina Vivian | Lucy Ridges | Lyndsey Searle | Matthew Stanners | Michael Thorp | Rachael Gittins | Rebecca Wild | Rose Barraclough | Ruth O’Brien | Scott Kershaw | Shreepad Jonglekar | Stephen White
EXHIBITION SYNOPSIS:
After four years of championing emerging artists, Blank Media Collective is now introducing BLANKSPACE, a new creative hub in Manchester. Blank Media Collective’s inaugural exhibition at BLANKSPACE, BlankExpression 2011 is the perfect start to a New Year and the exciting opportunities that it brings to artists and audiences spread far and wide.
BlankExpression 2011 is an ambitious and exciting showcase of works by twenty-seven emerging practitioners from London to Victoria, Barnsley to Tel Aviv and anywhere in between. Taken from an open submission call, works will engage, stimulate and challenge each and every viewer. With a wide variety of works spanning over a range of disciplines, BlankExpression 2011 there’s something for everyone. BlankExpression 2011 promises to be the start of something very special happening at the iconic 43 Hulme Street building.
Selected works from BlankExpression 2011 are available for purchase from BlankMarket, Blank Media Collective’s online store.
FURTHER INFORMATION:
BLANKSPACE | 43 Hulme Street | Manchester | M15 6 AW | 0161 222 6164 | www.blankspacemcr.org
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| OPENING TIMES:
Monday, Wednesday, Thursday & Friday 1-7pm | Tuesday 1-9pm | Saturday & Sunday 11-4pm
WITH THANKS TO:
Ask Developments, Manchester | Fred Aldous, Manchester | Lazy Daisies, Stockport
Participating Artists
Hadas Tapouchi: Artist Statement
Hadas Tapouchi is researching a possible link between the Holocaust in previous Nazi-Germany and the social reality of contemporary queer culture in Tel Aviv, using photography and video art.
Hadas has begun to photograph and interview people of the Tel Aviv queer scene. Hadas personally knows each one of the models and participants and found it interesting that every model was part of the “third generation”. That raised a question – “Is there a connection between wars and sexuality - especially in the heterosexual reality of Israel, which is ruled by patriotism and masculinity?”
www.flickr.com/photos/dasinka/
www.blankmediacollective.org/portfolios/hadas_tapouchi
Andy Nash: Artist Statement
Andy Nash’s work explores familiar commonplace objects that are often overlooked or taken for granted, yet at the same time are seemingly indispensable and necessary to the way we interact and engage with the world.
In particular he is interested in the meaning of these objects and seek to investigate the histories and associations that lie beyond function and utility.
Notions of nostalgia, social and cultural collision are considered as platforms for creative enquiry and using a range of strategies that include editing, appropriation, manipulation, corruption and archiving; objects are distorted, combined, deconstructed and reinvented to reveal new insights. From this position the context is changed and the objects are at once transformed into something inimitable, dysfunctional, amusing, duplicitous or hazardous.
www.nstcollective.co.uk
www.blankmediacollective.org/portfolios/Andy_Nash
Ben Sloat: Artist Statement
Considering China’s rapid modernization changing the fabric of the global economy and environment, this series of work refers back to Chinese Premier Deng Xiaoping’s “Southern Tour” of China in 1992 where he opened areas adjacent to Hong Kong as “Free Economic Zones.” Popular propaganda images of Deng of that era are repainted in southern Chinese painting factories, revaluing Deng’s image, but also commodifying him in a situation of his own creation. Furthermore, the paintings are commissioned in multiple from different factories, each are signed by the once anonymous painters, allowing a range of perspectives to be expressed on an intimate and familiar topic.
www.bensloat.com
www.blankmediacollective.org/portfolios/bensloat
Shreepad Joglekar: Artist Statement
“Photography, for me, is a medium for investigation and interpretation of messages. I am interested in sequencing images to produce narratives that address the psychological aspect of time. By breaking down a continuous action photographically, I recreate a flicker of images in an attempt to suspend the linearity of the time consumed in a dialogue.
Unlike a video clip, the fracture of time captured in the individual picture of the flicker allows enormous flexibility in reconstructing the scene. By repeating the images and abandoning the original chronological order, I abstract the moment to capture a hallucinating memory.” Shreepad Joglekar
www.aabhaa.com
www.blankmediacollective.org/portfolios/shree
Jude Macpherson: Artist Statement
Jude Macpherson has an MA in The Study of Contemporary Art Theory, (Liverpool University 1997) and has been self employed since 2005. Her art practice encompasses painting, use of digital imagery, and site specific art works. Jude has created art works for several non gallery venues in the North West including Liverpool John Lennon Airport; Chorlton Ees Nature Reserve; Platt Fields Park; Victoria Baths and as part of Art Transpennine 08, on Flower Scar Hill, Todmorden Moor. This approach to presenting audiences with new work suits her unconventional methodology and use of diverse materials which has included pebbles, fur, latex, and plastic bags. Jude gains a great deal of satisfaction from collaborating with others, and throughout her career she has actively sought opportunities to work with other artists and art forms. Jude is an active member of Hot Bed Press Studios, Salford, where she is currently based.
www.judemacpherson.co.uk
www.blankmediacollective.org/portfolios/jude_macpherson
Lyndsey Searle: Artist Statement
Physicality is ever present within Lyndsey Searle’s objects. She is interested in the nature of receptiveness and physical connection through a representational, symbolic and intuitive way. In relation to this Lyndsey’s practice more specifically investigates the possibility of a portable objects ability to respond, interact or connect to its space/environment. Despite their scale all works are determinedly portable objects - they represent themselves as being in-flux place-wise (often with wheels, G-clamps or handles) occasionally through a questioning of the plinth. To get to the very root of physical experience and interaction the work has to refuse to relate to a specific place and in it’s own self-contained way indicate itself as being pliable, penetrable, absorbing, exploring or similar. The works Lyndsey makes vary from simply responding to universal forces such as gravity to liberally investigating the use of funnels and vents (or even the holes in knits determine a work as being penetrable and so receptive). Lyndsey Searle pursues greater understanding and makes increasingly inventive representations in relation to these issues however often conceptual concerns are undisclosed and occasionally conflicted with by other aspects of the work - believing the allowance of liberal investigation to be paramount in the way she approaches her practice.
www.lyndseysearle.com
www.blankmediacollective.org/portfolios/lyndseysearle
Michael Thorp: Artist Statement
Michael Thorp utilizes a wide variety of media including drawn images, found objects, vector graphics and photography, in order to create imaginative illustrations that respond to the chosen poetry or prose. His work starts largely as creative doodles, ideas or musings which are then expanded upon, layered and adapted to create the finished piece.
www.michaelthorp.com
www.blankmediacollective.org/portfolios/Michael_Thorp
Jane Lawson: Artist Statement
Jane Lawson’s current practice is based around mark-making, materials, process and the attempt to remain mindful. She is interested in the idea of the abstract landscape, of images that could represent either the very small or the very big, the far distant landscape of space or the internal landscape of consciousness.
Jane tries to make pieces that can act as aids to contemplation. She is especially interested in transitions and traces, the marks that are left behind, and in the act of paying attention – how this can lead to looking, seeing, wondering and understanding.
As an artist Jane Lawson seeks to broaden her understanding of the world and of her place within it. She tries to avoid having fixed ideas about how pieces should progress, instead remaining open to and developing new possibilities that present themselves. This does not mean being completely random; choices still have to be made - but they may not be the choices she expected to be making.
Rose Barraclough: Artist Statement
“I have often been struck down with artist’s block, requiring something to present itself that would be both intelligent and brilliant, or indeed this was my desire. I decided that my brain could not function in this fantastical way and so needed a reliance on something more solid; a mechanical scientific structure that held nothing but facts, figures and possibilities, a place where a ‘mistake’ could not transpire. I am the inventor of processes that instruct an artwork. Any responsibility of the artist as a designer of the finished product is taken away, leaving no personal bearing on the completed ‘art’, extending it instead to the agencies of chance, machinery, numbers and process. My aim, although unattainable at its extreme, is one of detached engagement with creativity.
This creation of a system removes the personalisation of humanity that it derives from. The absurdity and human-chaos can be found however, in its construct of domesticity and alteration of everyday into sublime, leaving it tarnished with a non-digital fingerprint.
This irony is conveyed through its impossibility; as I am present within this writing, I am also involved in my work. Nothing can exist without a beginning, and to begin, one must first decide how.” Rose Barraclough
Lucy Ridges: Artist Statement
Lucy Ridges’ photographic practice is an ongoing, visual, exploration of intuitive understandings and unexplained meanings. She likes to think of her work as a bewildering, unfinished idea, with an open narrative.
The images Lucy creates sit somewhere between unconventional portraiture and staged photography. The elements that most interest her are that of the surreal and nonsensical. She works with disposable ideas that stay with her for the duration of a photographic shoot, and no longer.
www.lucyridges.com
www.blankmediacollective.org/portfolios/lucyridges
Stephen White AKA John Deer: Artist Statement
The work is an exploration of the self: an investigation into what effects the different states of consciousness have upon each other in a self referential dialectical process in the forming of the individual self.
The work is an exploration and response to the volume of visual messages experienced everyday; a confusion and bombardment which occupies Stephen White’s conscious and unconscious self. The subject of each work can come from a variety of sources such as topical news stories, to types of food, but what is important to the work is the recording of his reaction and exploration of these subjects. The work explores the effects and reactions of the inner self to these stimuli through the mode of an alter-ego. The alter-ego (John Deer) is merely a mode of working to be able to communicate what he cannot say or do in the real world, and so what he would really truly like to say and do but is restricted by physicality, whereas John Deer is not. Steve White is only the assistant to the real artist (some say genius) John Deer.
www.idrinkcoffeeanddraw.moonfruit.com
www.blankmediacollective.org/portfolios/stephen_white
Scott Kershaw: Artist Statement
Scott Kershaw has been working internationally as a professional photographer for over six years. Working mainly in the areas of Advertising, Fashion and Portraiture.
Recent clients include: BBC Four, EMI records, COI and Barnabus, a homeless charity based in Manchester with whom he is working on a portrait exhibition to be shown in Spring 2011.
Measurement House Triptych is the culmination of an exploration of video experiments Scott Kershaw undertook during his MA in Design and Art Direction at MMU which he completed in Summer 2010.
www.scottkershaw.co.uk
www.blankmediacollective.org/portfolios/scott_kershaw
Jez Dolan: Artist Statement
Jez Dolan is an artist and educator who is interested in collaboration, social engagement, and in challenging the defined roles of artist, participant and viewer. An understanding and exploration of the nature of community, and our own place within it, is central to his work. Jez is particularly interested in the connectivity between creativity, teaching and learning and how artists make connections with others to become co - authors of their collaborations.
In his work Jez utilises a variety of art - forms, tools and techniques, often moving between the roles of artist, educator, curator and producer. His current practice builds on over twenty years experience as an artist working in the field of community and participatory engagement.
www.jezdolan.com
www.blankmediacollective.org/portfolios/jezdolan
CLAUDIA BORGNA: Artist Statement
Claudia Borgna’s work entails the investigation of what she calls the “evolution of landscape”, a process started and effected by modern life-style and consumerism.
Looking at how man-made objects are very much transforming and creating new environments by becoming more integrated into nature has been Claudia’s focus.
Her artificial momentary landscapes are the materialization of an ongoing observation and questioning of how the “plastic” and the natural realms interact with one another and thereby come to create new ephemeral orders.
Plastic bags have been Claudia’s main medium; they epitomize the perfect and quintessential discarded object. To her plastic bags are symbolic embryos that contain our lifestyles and are the vessels that carry them out in their journey. Their contradictory qualities mirror the neurotic course of our life: plastic bags are in-fact both worthless and useful, disposable and recyclable, flimsy and strong, ephemeral and eternal and above all they are universal.
The fundamental strive is to understand if our environmental crisis is a cultural, therefore a social and ultimately an existential crisis of the individual. Or is it all nature intended?
Claudia wants to consciously experience for herself and therefore underline the relationship, or the conflict, between culture and nature, and how they influence, reflect and are depending from one anther.
She likes to lure the viewers into a virtual lyrical extension of modern life that substitutes the old idealized concept of nature and landscape with a romanticised contemporary one. A dreamlike floating vision: drifting from the tangible to the intangible.
Ultimately Claudia cannot help but mimicking the cyclic and repetitive rhythms of nature to explore the tensions between the contradictions of our neurotic but beautiful world, where the desire for creation and destruction seem to coexist side by side.
www.claudiaborgna.keepfree.de
www.blankmediacollective.org/portfolios/claudiaborgna
Rachael Laura Gittins: Artist Statement
Rachael Laura Gittins’ work is primarily concerned with the transferal of information from the artist to the audience. It generally stems from her research into a certain area of interest, and the visual responses that follow. Rachael believes that art can be an incredible tool to describe and explain things to people, to open their eyes to new ideas, knowledge and experiences, and this is something that she is constantly trying to utilize. Rachael is also interested in exploring the ways in which audiences interact and experience art pieces. The artists that inspire her the most are those which encourage the audience to involve themselves with the work, which she believes breeds a much more emotional and intimate relationship between the two worlds, as well as being more engaging for the viewer. Originally from North Wales, Rachael lives and works in Manchester, where she is a final year Interactive Arts student at Manchester Metropolitan University.
www.gittins.wordpress.com
www.blankmediacollective.org/portfolios/rachaellauragittins
Rebecca Wild: Artist Statement
Rebecca Wild is a full time student at Manchester Metropolitan University studying BA (Hons) Interactive arts. Rebecca has exhibited previously as part of a group called ‘Creative Transit’ as part of the free for arts festival during October 2010 and has also had pieces featured in places such as the Museum of Science and industry and at the Capitol theatre. Rebecca has also recently become part of the Art handling team at Blank Media Collective.
“Creating art has always been a passion of mine since a young age. It has been one of the strongest influences in my life, helping me to express things that I usually cannot put into words”
Rebecca specializes in the technique of scanography, resulting in work that is both experimental and spontaneous. With her childhood passion lying in painting, she has been combining these two elements to create work outside of the social normality. Using the scanner as both a camera and a canvas, she questions that way art is formed and approaches the idea of creating art in a new light. Rebecca’s practice allows for the viewer to form their own explanations about the work and apply their own connotations to it. The idea of the abstract has been a key feature in her most recent work; however she also explores ideas that are on a more personal level, usually through mixed media and/or installation to communicate things that usually cannot be expressed with words alone.
www.wix.com/thebexfactor/the-bex-factor
www.blankmediacollective.org/portfolios/thebexfactor
Ruth O: Artist Statement
Ruth O is fascinated by the effect that the internet has upon our everyday lives, especially in the way that access to ‘images’ that in the past would be difficult to explore, is available to anyone at any time. She takes what is considered ‘taboo’ and uses them as a means of further exploration - a platform - on purely artistic terms whilst accepting the moral properties they already hold. Ruth transforms the thoughts she has of such images and combines them visually with a painterly expression of the experience of modern society, responding through colour, materials and shape.
Process itself has become an integral part of Ruth’s work. She culls random images from the internet, which she sees as a kind of contemporary wilderness and develop them into hand drawn illustrations. Ruth then ‘copy-and-paste’ sections from different illustrations onto MDF, which form the basis of the painting. She transforms and abstracts the drawings through the use of paint (acrylic and house paint), pencils, pens, and crayons. The handling of paint is influenced by many art movements and references the history of painting throughout the 20th and 21st century, either aesthetically or through process.
Andy Broadey: Artist Statement
Andy Broadey’s practice focuses upon the capacity of art galleries to transform the displays presented within them into art. Since the 1950s, the white cube has served as the primary format for galleries showing contemporary art, providing uniform environments that situate exhibits within seemingly pure and timeless spaces. The repeated staging of exhibitions within white cubes has created a cultural perception that these galleries signify the presence of art.
White cubes therefore facilitate the development of unconventional practices and new modes of artistic display, helping art to grow and diversify as a discipline. Artist-run spaces and experimental art museums have sprung up – structures which combine the visual appearance of white cubes with other forms of architecture, organising diverse spaces around the singular function of art appreciation. The white cube model thus has a homogenising function, enabling different spaces and artefacts to attain the particular cultural status of ‘art’ or ‘gallery’.
Andy creates installations within white cube galleries that explore this function, incorporating familiar objects and situations which the audience might not otherwise consider as ‘art’. The white cube context allows the visitor to re-negotiate his established patterns of engagement with these objects and situations, and to question how his responses might be (re)conditioned by the gallery environment.
www.axisweb.org/artist/andybroadey
www.blankmediacollective.org/portfolios/andrewbroadey
Matthew Stanners: Artist Statement
Matthew Stanners is a filmmaker, 3D Designer and projection artist with an MA in Media Arts as part of the Media LAB at MMU. His Installation “Swing Away” was shown in the Green Room in 2009 as part of a specially selected BA 3rd year show. Stanners further developed “Swing Away” into a film that was shown as part of the 700is 2010 International Film Festival, which he also participated in through their artist development workshops in 2008. During 2010 Stanners was part of the Media LAB team sent to represent MMU at the Istanbul Triennial and showed “Open” at differing developmental stages at 52 Princess Street and the Hotspur Press in Manchester.
Stanners’ current practice explores motion, rhythm, light and visual interfaces. He use’s a video camera as a sketchpad, capturing moments from daily life. This footage generates the inspiration for the development of new visual interfaces, which then generates inspiration for new footage. Stanners presents this imagery to his audience through a unique fusion of technical and analogue forms.
alexander ashton: Artist Statement
Despite being a deeply handsome and charismatic individual, Alex Ashton is an artist. With a passion for spiritual discovery and an unrelenting zeal for artistic development, his current practice centres around the concept of nicking ideas from other artists and repackaging them as his own. In doing this, he is able to cunningly manipulate the viewer into believing that he is a really talented and thus forcing them to pay vast sums for his work, which frankly, anyone could do if they didn’t have a proper job. Enjoy.
www.alexanderashton.blogspot.com
www.blankmediacollective.org/portfolios/alexander_ashton
Daniel Fogarty: Artist Statement
Daniel Fogarty’s work often takes the form of a derivative of publishing a poster, banner, newsletter, flyer or magazine and is in constant dialogue with the purpose of publishing; the process of production and dissemination of literature or information. The work apposes the notion of publishing sitting in flux, before the moment of publishing, waiting to be resolved.
In this vein the work is constantly in the process of being created and being deconstructed, never concluding or bringing about a point of exit. The situation, object, predicament, conclusion is talked about but without conclusion.
The work delivers an inner-dialogue in which the conversation is revealed over and over again, revealing little but the production and consumption of themselves.
The work both justifies and resolves itself, speaking with a varied selection of voices and viewpoints. Fogarty’s work is concerned with the gap between disciplines, roles and jobs. The designer, the artist, the typographer, the architect, the landscape designer, the journalist, the writer and the publicist. Each in constant dialogue.
www.danielfogarty.co.uk
www.blankmediacollective.org/portfolios/fogartydaniel
Karl Kolley: Artist Statement
“We live with the legacy of modernism and I believe that we still identify ourselves in terms of modernity, so what happened to the utopian optimism that it offered? My work is both homage and an attempt to recapture the integrity and invention of that era, a tribute but also nostalgic lament to futures that never quite were. In seeking to revive the revolutionary spirit of the avant-garde I strive to invoke memories of the future… the way it used to be.” Karl Kolley
www.karlkolley.com
www.blankmediacollective.org/portfolios/karl_kolley
Hannah Brown: Artist Statement
Hannah Brown’s art practice centres around the production and collection of physical matter. She generates unified items in a repetitive manner and indulge in the materiality of the process. The body of work is placed in response to the available environment and each individual object is positioned in relation to each other.
Katrina Vivian: Artist Statement
Katrina Vivian’s ideas and work are created through inspiration from a number of areas in life: dreams, beliefs, vision, a desire to rework and re-form, investigating the depiction of surface; physical surface, spiritual surface together with the elusiveness of those surfaces within the realm of reality, time and space.
Attempting to portray the mental and physical complexities of the human spirit, and the splintered, dissection and distortion of visual perception. The presence of death and experiences of loss: loss within family, communities and cultures as a whole through the use of banal everyday objects.
Inspiration not only comes from other artists and their work, but more importantly it comes from within: a desire to translate a vision or thought into physical form.
For every action there is a reaction. For every subject there is a material for response.
www.katrinavivian.com
www.blankmediacollective.org/portfolios/katrinavivian
Andy Nizinskyj: Artist Statement
Andy Nizinskyj’s work surrounds the notion of duality and conflict, he is fascinated by disgust and enthrallment, opposing forces and the ties that bind them.
His sculptures and video are manifestations of these conflicts, serving both as displays of frustration, the clash of cultivation and self-indulgence, and the noticeably overused and banal that is born of disengagement.
His portfolio explores contradictory and conflicting qualities within societal structures; individual works offer critiques into alternative ideologies, media and human nature. Utilizing cultural icons, repetitive actions and household objects in his work he transforms them to create passive yet intimidating sculptures and video with dual sensibilities, producing visual and conceptual contradictions.
Through their use of industrial materials such as gloss and polystyrene, his figures convey a sense of blankness through their highly polished aesthetics far removed from their individual contexts. His collection of suggestive voids, like human nature, are constructed through contradiction, their stability retained by their conflicting attributes.
Andy Nizinskyj was born in Keighley in 1986. He received his BA in Fine Art and Art History at the University of Leeds and University of California Berkeley. He Lives and works in Barnsley and is currently exhibiting both nationally and internationally.
studio.berkeley.edu/art23/fa08/art35/
www.blankmediacollective.org/portfolios/andy_nizinskyj
Hannah Wiles: Artist Statement
Hannah Wiles recently gained a Masters Degree in Fine Art Textiles after having graduated with First Class Honours from the school of Art and Design at Manchester Metropolitan University in 2007. Her practice is rooted in the urban environment and deals with issues surrounding dereliction and abandonment. She is concerned with regeneration, modernisation, and the smoothing over of the past to make way for a uniform space of consumption. Her work has been described as a form of site-specific interventionism, as she interacts with an existing space in a way that may challenge the expectations of the intended audience, in the hope of reconstructing the urban narrative. She has been involved with such projects as Manchester’s International Festival and this year was selected to take part in Hazard MMX, Manchester’s micro-festival of sited performance and intervention. She just finished exhibiting in the Liverpool Biennial where she created new site-specific work at Wolstenholme Creative Space and is currently exhibiting at CUBE gallery in Manchester as part of the annual CUBEOpen exhibition.
www.hannahwiles.com
www.blankmediacollective.org/portfolios/hannahwiles
Jennifer Ross: Artist Statement
Jennifer Ross examines the materials of mass media, not to find a true self, but to explore subjectivization inside the boundaries of modern culture. By manipulating materials that feed into contemporary culture she seeks to reveal their function within society.
Jennifer’s footage is subjected to a labor-intensive processes of editing and reworking, weaving together sequences and narratives. Working with music, film and television footage from the past 60 years. She feels appropriated footage embodies the symbolic order; a construct that allows for freedom only within its boundaries. By manipulating the fabric of the symbolic order, Jennifer explores how we may influence the world around us.
Producing multi-channel installations, where hypnotic imagery seduces and entices the viewer into a world constructed entirely from mass media. This experience of how the viewers navigate themselves through the myriad of information is comparable to how we navigate the symbolic order.
www.jennifer-ross.co.uk
www.blankmediacollective.org/portfolios/JenniferRoss
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