Standard Candles

This group exhibition was devised for this ex-tram depot space, which is a high, top-lit, brick-walled box suited to the big panels, wall paintings and extended display structures that comprised the show. ‘Standard Candles’ was conceived as a conversation about display, painting and periodisation. It featured works that were diverse but had in common an obliqueness of approach to painting - by Gunter Reski, Simon Bedwell, John Chilver and Yonatan Vinitsky. ‘Standard Candle’ [SC] is the term used in astronomy to designate an object, such as a type of star, of supposedly known luminosity that’s used as a benchmark in determining extreme distances by a comparison between absolute and apparent luminosity. Main problems for using SCs are: [1] that of defining a type of object and gathering enough reliable examples of that type to calculate its absolute luminosity; [2] the post-definitional problem of actually recognizing ultra-distant examples of the type in practice. As well as measuring space the SC is a distance indicator also for time, meaning the ultra-distant past from which light has travelled. The works in the show mark their relations to painting as mediated through tactics of display and (counter-)periodisation. The show considered the work done by painting as always also a matter of estimating and stylizing its distance from comparable past and future objects

Use and Mention

This was an exhibition of artworks by 40 artists. Works included collages, drawings, posters, archival materials in files, paintings on canvas, prints, sculptures, a video projection and a spoken performance. The focus of the project was collage. But instead of simply presenting a variety of objects and images that could be immediately recognised as collage, the exhibition was designed to invite viewers to question the boundaries of the category. So photomontages were shown alongside archive materials, text works, sound works and video, etc., such that a narrow conception of collage as a single specifiable material process was challenged

Use and Mention

This group exhibition examined the continuing resonance of collage for a variety of contemporary artists. The appearance of collage in early twentieth-century art marked an immense alteration in visual experience. In collage, space and time could be sliced and spliced in ways previously unavailable to photography or painting; collage could be additive (placement, juxta-position,com-position) or subtractive (cut, removal). Although mainstream visual technologies have today normalized methods that originated in collage, and although the becoming-orthodox of appropriation and post-production have homogenised the terrain it traverses, collage nonetheless still empowers tactics that play at de-skilling while invoking intimacy, interrupted passivity and subtractive force. A reliance on dramatic juxtaposition was characteristic of classic modernist collage, as in Hannah Höch’s virtuoso works of the 1920s and 30s. Whatever their variety, contemporary applications of collage increasingly tend to forego the method of explosive juxtaposition, often favouring instead an intricate and implosive thinking. Catherine Malabou's writings propose a concept of plasticity that is intimately linked to explosiveness and emphatically separated from elasticity: an elastic form can return to its earlier state after suffering deformations, whereas a plastic form cannot; instead it retains the signs of alteration when stretched, gouged, scarred, re-moulded or cut. Collage in this exhibition is understood as a transferable and mutable apparatus of subtractive plasticity. 'Use & Mention' offers a broad selection of current collage-related activity. Most of the works shown are on paper but also included are texts and video works