BRACE
Private View: Friday 5th April 7pm to late
Exhibition continues Saturday 6th and Sunday 7th, 12 to 5pm
Bringing together eight
undergraduate artists, to work in pairs, Brace is an exhibition
showcasing collaborative works across a range of media. Working from
such diverse theoretical platforms as extended painting,
architectural intervention, and institutional critique, these artists
have set aside their differences in order to explore their practices
outside of themselves.
In order to participate
in Brace, each artist must discard any feelings of preciousness
towards their own work. Individual practices and aesthetic
preferences will be compromised as ideas are relinquished to the
greater project. The issue of who came up with what must be set aside
for the benefit of the project and the viewer.
Working in four pairs,
the artists are grouped according to their practice: painting, media,
sculpture, and installation. Brace is an attempt at finding out
whether two heads really are better than one.
Charlie Cousins
builds narratives through interventions with found imagery; using
analogue photography to hint at the intrinsic value that we imbue
within cultural artefacts. In a digital world saturated with imagery
of questionable origin and authenticity, the work reminds us of the
photograph as an object in its own right, layered with psychological
narrative and nostalgic association. Esme
Rogers-Evans is
interested in the relationship she has with the materials used during
the creative process and how that relationship reveals itself in the
completed work. A secondary, but equally important aspect of the work
is the interaction between it and the viewer.
Immersive in their nature, the
works of EllaCunliffe are, at
their heart, about the moment of encounter. Her material
interventions break down the physical distance between art and
viewer. Placing the experience at centre stage, her works often alter
the way people move through a space - in this sense, Ella’s works
invoke a bodily response before an intellectual one. Georgie
Winfrey is also
concerned with altering spatial perception, in such a way that her
work questions the very institutions in which they are situated. Her
practice considers how social and institutional forces operate to
mediate and even control perception and behaviour. By using materials
imbued with cultural significance, she seeks to subliminally confront
both the viewer’s and her own preconceptions about the
way things are.
Colour is one thing that art,
design, advertising, industry, and commerce all share. Desire,
aspiration and taste are also entwined in these different sectors of
the ‘cultural’ and the ‘commercial’. Inextricably linked with
tastefulness, colour has the potential to subvert and mislead
meaning, by modifying the functionality of the familiar, facilitating
a re-definition of terms. Colour allows meaning to be lost and the
role of aesthetic to take over; it acts as a mask that conceals the
true identity of what lies beneath. Colour allows for humour to be
accepted within the idea or action. It mocks but at the same time
complements its surroundings. By DafyydSamuel and Joseph Turnbull
In a world
smothered by popular culture and running at a digital pace, IdaHolbrook
and Joseph
Nicoll
attempt to reflect the ongoing modern preoccupation with the problem
of reconciling one's individuality. Acknowledging their position as
consumers of the visual, their works reveal a sense of escapism
borrowed from the computer screen and advertising: Joseph finds
consolation through personalizing modern day icons, whilst Ida
recognizes the impact of new digital technologies with trepidation.
Seeking to create situations in which the viewer must remain
partially unaware of reality in order to engage with the work, Ida
invokes a sense of spatial precariousness as objects and forms are
broken down and reassembled.
