Wet beads on the line

INCUBE8 Part VIII 
Johana Hartwig

Pre-preview critique

led by Mike Murray:
Thursday 22^nd November, 6pm

Preview: 

Thursday 22^nd November, 7pm-late

Exhibition Continues: Friday 23^rd – Sunday 25^th November, 12-6pm daily

Wet beads on the line features a series of mini visual sketches, inspired by the humanity of the inanimate and the beauty of the incidental. Responding in a playful and intuitive way, Hartwig produces these sketches, captured on film, to form an elegant and thought provoking dance between multiple screens.  Sewing these screens together are some curious objects and maquette experiments, made in tandem with and apriori to the films. Hartwig shares with us exquisite symbiosis; a light touch, the small, often overlooked transitional moments as we touch our world and our world touches us.

‘Object muses’ and ‘objects of interest’ include ‘plastic bags’ and ‘overhead telephone lines’.  Like many good love stories Hartwig feels an immediate aesthetic attraction or fascination for the things that she films, followed by more thoughtful musings, including those around story, purpose, usage, impact and future.

“The magic of watching the elements play, on man made objects, on the every day.  Invisible wet beads gathering speed, then merging, surfing, falling, sprawling."

Hartwig’s works all involve a certain amount of impermanence, as the elements touch the manmade and a beautiful moment is suspended. This is grounded in the exploration of the form and function of everyday manmade objects.  Which includes the functional limits of objects and exalting the 'live' quality of an object, the humanity innate within it, which we as the designers pressed into their very making and is perhaps akin to a soul.

Johana Hartwig is an interdisciplinary artist based in Cardiff, working predominantly with video. Hartwig has a background in sculpture and a form-led approach to the making of film. Graduating in 2001 from the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff she has exhibited widely, most recently at the Oriel Canfas Gallery, Cardiff. Hartwigs’ films possess strong visual narratives that feed from intuitive, emotive responses to environmental quirks, sensual objects, obsessional patterns, flux anthropomorphism and humour.

www.axisweb.org/artist/johanahartwig

Over the last 12 years,artist Mike Murray has drawn inspiration from objects and images of mass production; using everyday objects to create dramatic installations and sculptures and studies using paint and other media.

Using the 'free association' work of Sigmund Freud and Christopher Bollas, Mike's work examines our unconscious associations with objects in our everyday lives. A fine art lecturer in Swansea,South Wales, Mike is also an internationally exhibited artist, with his work shown in Venice, the South of France and New York, as well as across Wales.

http://www.mikemurray.info/

 

Black Camp

INCUBE8 Part VII

Julian Claxton

Pre-preview critique 

led by Julie McCalden: 

Thursday 15^th November, 6pm

Preview: 

Thursday 15^th November 7pm-late

Exhibition Continues: 

Friday 16^th – Sunday 18^th November, 12-6pm daily

"Crunching over the broken glass at the end of the lay by. There, at the side, the faintest indication of a gap, and, moving further in, ignoring the now dried and faded fag packets, the dinosaur bones of plastic from unimportant places in cars, the discarded wheel hubs and drinks bottles, pushing past the snagging brambles and stinging nettles, past the rim of used and stained tissues, and deeper, beyond the next tide line of beer cans and vodka bottles, and the darker limits of unidentifiable items of clothing: socks, knickers, a dog turd covered trainer, on into the reach of condoms and needles.  But not stopping there, in further, darker and deeper, traces of cut wood, straps attached to saplings, strained and bent back, a roughly fashioned bench made from a plank on breeze blocks, a tyre perched on a milk crate, a broken chair, more rope, gun cartridges, plastic bags, sticks, logs, traces of fire – burnings and meltings, and you’re there, safe in the heart of darkness, the black camp, home to outsiders, drifters, anarchists, hunters, doggers, bait diggers, badger baiters, Nazis, nare do wells, bad boys, advancing new age armies, Raoul Moate, the Zwickau Three, hoboes, hippies, travellers, gyppos, weirdoes…" 

Julian Claxton lives and works in Bristol. He graduated from UWE in 2002 and has since  co-founded and co-directed Plan 9, established the Creed Art Club and initiated Spike Island's Test Space.  He was a member of the Spike Island Interpretation Group, including the design of Curating Degree Zero. Claxton has exhibited widely under a number of personas in the UK and, recently, in the United States.  Key recent unattributed/virtual projects include: Psychic Research, Kunte Howell-Ojidade (outsider artist), Creed Wall (collector/dealer), Gerard De Verre (recently dead artist), Mannequin Defense Caucus (a dumb insurrection), CITES (Convention on IllegalTrade in Extraterrestrial Species).

http://virb.com/creedartclub  

Julie McCalden is co-director of Motorcade/FlashParade art space. She is a practising artist with an interest in curating, operating in an arena of exchange where everything is in a perpetual state of becoming. She actively seeks new ways of working and imposes no artificial restrictions on her practice. There is always a political undercurrent to the work. She is a member of Girl Gang, Spike Associates and DIY Educate. She received a Turning Point South West curatorial bursary for her project Bread & Roses, also supported by The Collect's Spoon Fed micro funding scheme. She has exhibited nationally and internationally. 

www.juliemccalden.co.uk

                                                                                                                                                        

Spoil Your Paper 

INCUBE8 Part VI

Samuel Hasler

Peer critique:  led by David Trigg

Saturday 10^th November, 2pm 

Preview: 

Thursday 8^th November, 6pm-late

Exhibition Continues:  

Saturday 10th November only

12-6pm

Samuel Hasler is presenting a new selection of artworks that look at absurd and political ways to think about the act of drawing. Spoil Your Paper is in keeping with his previous performance, text and multiple printed image works, where Hasler exposes the creative and critical processes of the artwork. This often happens as performance and discussion with the audience. An element of chance and unpredictability is important.

"The posters, images, texts and performance include ideas such as;  artists exhibiting used toilet paper as drawings and anti-political campaigns to encourage spoilt election ballots. I suppose there's a destructive theme to it too.

"The artworks reflect the research and pursuits of my practice. I try to make intuitive responses to things in the world that interest me such as religion, politics and art history or theory. These intuitive responses often lead me on weird tangents into fiction, autobiography, jokes, games, design. This kind of working allows things to feed into the work according to aesthetic choices, or my ideas about things that I feel drawn too.

"It's become of particular interest to me in recent artworks to use a performance environment as one where the audience can question and interrogate the artwork. I like the idea of performance as a space to talk about things and to try things out where the results are unknown. It's not improvised performance but I try to be responsive and reflexive with artworks the situation, the space and the audience."

Samuel Hasler is a visual artist based in Cardiff . He has made performance and installation work across the UK in Galleries and alternative spaces. He has exhibited at EXPO festival in Nottingham, National Review of live art in Glasgow and as part of the 'if...' series at g39 in Cardiff.  His work uses drawing and writing within a structure that allows decision making and creative responses to space, often within the performance.

http://www.samuelhasler.co.uk/

David Trigg is an art writer based in Bristol. He is a member of the International Association of Art Critics and a regular contributor to Art Monthly, a-n, Art Papers and Frieze. His writing has also been featured in Art Review, Untitled, Circa, Flash Art International and Metro. David gained his degree in Fine Art from Bath School of Art and Design in 2001. Since then he has worked as Reviews Editor for Bristol arts publication Decode as well as holding positions at the Arnolfini Gallery and more recently as a visiting lecturer at UWE.

                                                                                                                                                      

The Students of Mr. D. Brook

INCUBE8 Part V

Laura Reeves

Pre-preview critique
led by Nia Metcalfe: 

Thursday 1^st November, 6pm

Preview: 

Thursday 1^st November, 7pm-late

Exhibition Continues: 

Friday 2^nd–Sunday 4^thNovember 12-6pm daily

This is the first solo exhibition of work by Laura Reeves, recent graduate of UWIC and Winner of the Young Artist Scholarship. Reeves presents a body of new work for INCUBE8 investigating what it means to be a graduate artist.

Reeves collects, now redundant, analogue photography in a variety of formats including 35 mm slides. She creates her own archival system that often leads her to assume the identity of others, following in their footsteps and exploring concealed narratives. Her work encompasses found photography, text, lecture presentations, small publications, ephemera and film.

Reeves’ practice is research based and uses archival processes, working like a detective she follows clues and makes links between her life and those of others. Using the found photograph as a starting point for research, Reeves explores common feelings of nostalgia and the revival and activation of lost stories.  

During her final year at university, while working with a photographic archive featuring the life of Richard and Beryl Grunwell from the 1960s, Reeves coincidentally stumbled upon a retired lecturer’s collection of 35 mm slides. These images document UWIC students of the 1980s generating work in their studios and their final exhibitions. Incube8 will see Reeves consider the value of these lost works, the clichés inherent in art school and questions the validity of how art was ‘taught’ in the past by often reproducing ‘great’ and ‘important’ artworks.

Laura Reeves grew up in the South West and moved to Cardiff to study Fine Art specialising in sculpture. She recently graduated with a first, receiving the Eisteddfod Young Artist Scholarship of 2012, and has exhibited widely amongst her peers. Reeves works as studio assistant to Sean Edwards producing works that have been shown at Limoncello, Tanya Leighton and Spike Island galleries.

www.laurareeves.tumblr.com/

Trained in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University, Nia Metcalfe now lives and works in Cardiff as a curator. She has worked with artists in various roles and organisations, with a focus on art in the public realm and cross-disciplinary practice. In 2011 Nia undertook a period of curatorial research in Venice, working with artists from Wales, exploring the boundaries between Artist and Curator, the potential for collaboration and art making over distance and investigating ideas of authorship in artistic production. Nia is one of three founding Directors of Elbow Room, a co-operative established in 2010, whose aim is to create the space, capacity and opportunity to make and experience art in public places.

http://www.elbowroom.org.uk/