British Art Show 7: In The Days Of The Comet

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Charles Avery

Charles Avery's drawings, sculptures and writings investigate the inhabitants, topology and cosmology of an imaginary island. Central to this project is the character of the Hunter, a searcher after philosophical truth in a country where this is elusive, if it exists at all. In the large vitrine in BAS7, the Hunter is seen in an embrace with his would-be sweetheart, Miss Miss, while a one-armed snake lurks nearby. While Avery’s work depicts a fictional realm, it does so in order to reflect on the world around us.

Becky Beasley

Becky Beasley is an artist and writer whose photography and sculpture often trespass into the realm of literature. In her KORREKTUR series, seven photographs are each accompanied by an excerpt from the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard’s novel Korrektur (‘Correction’). These passages of prose act as a sort of voice-over or dislocated commentary on the images, in which the same small nugget of Fool’s Gold is greatly enlarged and viewed from different angles. The compass points that preface the captions indicate the shifts in perspective, while the images and texts suggest that reality is an ever-changing concept, constantly revised and corrected.

Karla Black

Formed mainly from loose materials – such as soil, plaster of Paris, powder paint, and soap powder – Karla Black’s sculptures are poised between fragility and robustness. She works with such unstable and impermanent materials ‘not because they easily change and decay but because I want the energy, life, and movement that they give.’ Whether earth-bound or suspended in space, her works are, as she explains, ‘actual physical explorations into thinking, feeling, communicating and relating’ and she emphasizes that she prioritises material experience over language as a way of learning and understanding. Despite their psychologically loaded titles, her sculptures are the result of ‘a need to just grab the world.’

Juliette Blightman

Juliette Blightman’s subtle interventions are always contingent on the exact circumstances of their showing. Time and space are equally in play: in one work she instructed her brother, at 3pm each day, to water a plant and feed the bowl of fish she had placed in the gallery.

For the Nottingham showing of BAS7, she has introduced an arrangement of objects, including a vase and a painting placed above a radiator in a peripheral space in the Castle Museum. How to judge this aesthetically, or indeed, how to look at it at all, is a question on which the viewer may be guided by the title.

Varda Caivano

Varda Caivano’s abstract paintings are explorations into colour, texture and mark-making. Describing her works as ‘thoughts or monologues, moments that grow over time’, she points out that they also demand ‘time and interaction from the viewer to reveal and unfold. I never know what's going to happen.’ Though there are suggestions of images in her paintings, form is ultimately elusive and deceptive. ‘Painting for me is a way of questioning images, where visible objects with a secret depth appear to reveal a kind of irrational truth,’ she remarks. ‘The paintings operate as a bridge, a transitional space that evokes an inner world.’

Duncan Campbell

Duncan Campbell’s works combine traditionally different styles of filmmaking. Documentary portraits of complex historical figures, composed of archival footage and animation in cinéma vérité style, are integrated into more abstract scenes, influenced by avant-garde writers and artists. By combining them, Campbell intends to ‘allow this difference rather than homogenise it.’

Bernadette (2006) is Campbell’s study of the turbulent relationship between the Northern Irish political campaigner Bernadette Devlin and the media during the 1970s, disclosed through the contradictory press coverage of her as a martyr, victim, and troublemaker by broadcasters who championed and later targeted her.

Spartacus Chetwynd

Spartacus Chetwynd’s works in performance, video, sculpture and painting knit together familiar sets and epic narratives from disparate sources. Overlapping themes emerge from excerpts and passages of classical literature, mythology, film and television. In its improvised and anti-professionalised fashion, her work introduces a measure of the carnivalesque into everyday life.

Chetwynd’s The Folding House (2010) is a tree-house-sculpture composed of old windowpanes and other discarded materials. Among its influences the artist points to the Dutch modernist architect Gerrit Rietveld’s Schroeder house, Peter the Great’s gypsy cabin, the Japanese tradition of origami and the contemporary designs of environmentalist architect Glenn Murcutt.

Steven Claydon

Steven Claydon’s sculptures, films, performances, paintings and drawings examine the idea of cultural history as a construct. The artist is interested in ‘the taxonomy of things,’ the conventions of classifying and displaying works of art.

Formally, Claydon’s sculptures are composed like classical statuary, but their contemporary materials and colour schemes hint at a more eclectic schema. Their materials, anachronistic hessian-covered plinths and galvanized cubic steel frames are all fabricated with new technologies, locating the works firmly in the present. According to the artist, ‘things do not only have to exist in their own time � they always have potential for future obsolescence.’

Cullinan Richards

Charlotte Cullinan and Jeanine Richards create mixed-media installations that foreground the aspects of art and exhibition-making that other artists might wish to conceal. Tools of the technician’s trade, such as tape, touch-up paint and plastic sheeting, feature prominently in their work, along with old newspapers spattered with accidental drips of paint in the studio.

In the grand stairwell of Nottingham Castle Museum, plastic sheeting forms a thin membrane between the walls and the canvases on display. The paintings include two images of young women on horseback performing high dives into a swimming pool, an apparently popular spectacle in Atlantic City in the 1920s.

Matthew Darbyshire

Matthew Darbyshire's installations address the design and look of today's experience economy, in which shopping is much more than just about buying things. The upbeat, attention-grabbing signs and symbols of consumer culture promise to transform our lives. Borrowing this language, Darbyshire investigates the conventions of display in the spheres of commerce, property development and leisure.

In BAS7, Darbyshire creates a display of contemporary design, entitled An Exhibition for Modern Living, after a 1949 exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Arts that set out to showcase modern taste. The work explores the mass availability of design classics and the pervasive idea of achieving tasteful living through their acquisition.

Milena Dragicevic

In Milena Dragicevic’s paintings, faces and objects mutate into masks or ambiguous sculptural forms that often are doubled, stretched or reversed. The Supplicant series, begun in 2006, mixes the visual languages of portraiture and abstraction to create not a ‘psychological’ portrait (although a photograph of a friend or acquaintance is usually her starting point), rather something stranger, and perhaps ultimately unknowable.

Dragicevic was born in former Yugoslavia and emigrated to western Canada in her youth. Among her multiple references, she often draws on north-west coast First Nations masks and totemic imagery, as in the pillar-box mouth in Supplicant 77.

Luke Fowler

In film, sound is usually incidental; an accompaniment for visual images. Luke Fowler reverses that equation: in A Grammar for Listening (part 1) the subject is sound, and visual imagery takes second place. In this dialogue between listening and looking, Fowler collaborates with sound artist Lee Patterson, whose environmental recordings capture sounds that are usually unheard: recordings of underwater life such as fish, aquatic plants and insects; the explosions of burning walnuts; and even the pulsations of neon light. These micro-sounds are complemented by performances to camera involving found objects, such as a discarded lighter, whose electro-magnetic spring – amplified by contact microphones – produces harmonic overtones.

Michael Fullerton

Michael Fullerton’s subject is the political nuances of art and the aesthetics of persuasion. The conventional ‘official’ portrait of a present-day company director is not far removed aesthetically from a Soviet-era poster of Leon Trotsky, or indeed from Sir Joshua Reynolds’ idealisations of the 18th-century English aristocracy. (Fullerton borrows Reynolds’ colour scheme for his reworking of Trotsky’s portrait.)

Fullerton’s image of Vidal Sassoon, embodying of a corporate brand, is accompanied by silk-screen prints of the Executive Board. ‘How do we decide that something is beautiful?’ Fullerton asks. ‘I liked the idea of a bunch of guys sitting round a table pondering these issues in a corporate environment.’

Alasdair Gray

Alasdair Gray is a Glaswegian artist and writer best known for his semi-autobiographical, time-travelling novel, Lanark. His paintings and drawings also draw on his personal life, mostly depicting friends and family. Often he turns a drawing into a painting several years after its completion, using heraldic colours to capture moments from memory rather than direct observation. The drawing of his son Andrew lying on a quilt made by Gray's first wife, for example, was drawn in 1972, painted in 2009. Remarking on how odd it is to be 75, Gray adds: I disapprove of time. When working fully, productively and without interruption we live in a continual present.

Brian Griffiths

Brian Griffiths’ sculptures smudge the line between reality and artifice. Employing a junk-shop aesthetic, his work draws on popular entertainment, particularly the melancholy humour of British sitcoms.

For BAS7, Griffiths presents a giant bear’s head stitched from sagging, half-defeated canvas. Supported by ropes it suggests a tent and a theatre backdrop, a place of refuge and a moment of illusion. Decorated with embroidered patches bearing the names of various international destinations, it seems to belong to an old-fashioned travelling fair or carnival, ready to be rolled up and shipped onwards as soon as it has worked its doubtful magic.

Roger Hiorns

Roger Hiorns investigates alchemical transformations of ideas, actions and materials. Organic matter and chemical compounds and processes – brains, fire, crystals, sperm and drugs – are introduced into man-made structures, among them buildings, engines and street furniture. His crystallisations of copper sulphate have produced encrustations of ultra-blue on car engines and, most spectacularly, invaded a council flat in South London.

In Nottingham, Hiorns places a generic municipal bench in the gallery. At unspecified intervals, a flame will flare at one end of the bench, occasionally tended by a naked young man. Elsewhere in the gallery space, a thin slit in the wall becomes a receptacle for bovine brain matter.

Ian Kiaer

With an economy of means, Ian Kiaer mines the history of ideas, art and architecture. Made up of disposable materials, his installations are refined in terms of colour, texture and scale, evoking delicate, physically and ideologically distant landscapes. He often turns to idealistic figures of resistance, such as dissidents in the Soviet Union, or to visionary modernist architects.

For BAS7, Kiaer considers the pioneering Russian architect Konstantin Melnikov who, becoming increasingly alienated from Stalinism in the 1920s, turned to painting traditional portraits in his cylindrical house studio. Kiaer creates a lyrical arrangement of allusions, pointing to ideas once believed capable of radically transforming the world.

Anja Kirschner & David Panos

The films of Anja Kirschner and David Panos make use of a wide variety of historical, literary and popular narratives to explore the relationship between class, politics and aesthetics.

Their new feature-length film, The Empty Plan, takes its organising principle from the German playwright Bertolt Brecht's Messingkauf Dialogues, which Brecht described as a ‘four-sided conversation about a new way of making theatre’.

Depicting Brecht's life and work in Los Angeles during World War II, The Empty Plan contrasts Brecht's theoretical writing in exile with preparations for various productions of his political play The Mother, staged in the contrasting conditions of the pre-war Weimar Republic, in 1930s America, and in the post-war German Democratic Republic.

Sarah Lucas

Of all the British artists to emerge in the 1990s, it is Sarah Lucas who perhaps deals most persuasively with the human body and the ways in which sexual identity becomes encoded in everyday objects. In her recent series, NUDS, pairs of nylon tights have been stuffed and fashioned into ambiguous biomorphic forms.

The collective title evokes knots, nodes, nudes and the English slang for nakedness: being 'in the nud'. Although bulging with connotations, these forms never quite settle on a fixed meaning. They could stand among the Surrealist-inspired modernist sculptures of Pablo Picasso, Louise Bourgeois or Henry Moore.

Christian Marclay

For three decades Christian Marclay has deftly manipulated recorded sound and its associated imagery from his early work as a pioneering turntablist to assemblages of record covers and montages of clips from Hollywood movies.

His new work, The Clock, features thousands of found film fragments of clocks, watches, and characters reacting to a particular time of day. These are edited together to create a 24 hour-long, single-channel video that is synchronised with local time. As each new clip appears a new narrative is suggested, only to be swiftly overtaken by another. Watching, we inhabit two worlds; that of fiction and that of fact, as real-time seconds fly inexorably by.

Simon Martin

Simon Martin’s paintings, sculptures, and photographic and video works examine the ways in which art and artefacts are displayed and reproduced. For BAS7, he has created a new installation with three elements: a series of photographs, a dual-screen video and an ancient Mexican sculpture borrowed with its plinth and label from the Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts. This Olmec statue stands beside the fading image of a sculpture by conceptual artist Sol Le Witt. Their union is curiously provocative, suggesting the cultural value of all iconic artefacts, as things gathered along the corridors of history.

Nathaniel Mellors

Nathaniel Mellors' new film and sculptural installation (a co-production for BAS7 with De Hallen Haarlem) is shown in a series of chapters over the run of the exhibition. Ourhouse opens with the arrival of a hulking male figure at an English country house. The occupants, a wealthy bohemian family, initially fail to recognise him as human, and dub him 'The Object'. It soon becomes apparent that The Object controls language in the house, roving its rooms at night in search of books that he swallows and excretes as odd, foul-smelling sculptures. These objects are the key to the fantastical episodes the family are forced to play out.

Haroon Mirza

Haroon Mirza’s complex audio-visual installations are assembled out of domestic furniture, electronic equipment and lights. Regaining a Degree of Control, a new work created for BAS7, uses previously unseen footage of Ian Curtis, frontman for the post-punk band Joy Division.

Curtis’s song ‘She’s Lost Control’ concerns a girl with epilepsy, a condition that Curtis himself suffered from and to which the strobe light in Mirza’s installation refers. Here, as in much of Mirza’s work, the central proposition is about transforming noise into sound, and making hearing and listening as important and relevant as seeing and looking. His aim is to ‘explore visual and acoustic space as one sensorial mode of perception.’

David Noonan

The complex imagery in David Noonan’s large-scale monochrome works is sourced from archival photographs, film stills, textiles, books, magazines and ephemera. This tapestry reproduces a densely layered collage, in which images and patterns are superimposed in a play of positive and negative, subterfuge and camouflage. The resulting tableau possesses a disquieting dream-logic of its own. For Noonan, it evokes a time he spent in an Ashram in India and the parallel reality of that experience: ‘there is a guru sitting in the middle and an arm offering her flowers. And the peacocks: there were peacocks all around the Ashram...’

The Otolith Group

Shortlisted for this year’s Turner Prize, The Otolith Group is named after the parts of the inner ear that give a sense of balance. The Otolith Trilogy roams between documentary and fiction, social engagement and the luxury of visual pleasure that cinema offers. From Indian socialism and Soviet-era space travel, to the modernist architect Le Corbusier’s utopian city Chandigarh, and an unrealised film by the Indian film director Satyajit Ray, the trilogy is set in a ‘high international documentary style...the kind of left-wing essay that was always our obsession.’

Mick Peter

Mick Peter’s sculptures misrepresent everyday objects, replacing them with handcrafted replicas in the wrong materials. What should be heavy is in fact often made of near-weightless polystyrene. Illusion is disturbed by the knowledge of substitution.

In BAS7, two architects’ drafting tables – now almost obsolete in an age of digitised drawing programmes – are coated in red jesmonite. Linked and punctured by a sagging saw, they speak perhaps of lost crafts. Fascinated by comics and obscure sci-fi, Peter draws subtly inexplicable scenes that might be one frame from a strip, or illustrations to a metaphysical novel. Like the sculptures, they lampoon the authority of fine art.

Gail Pickering

Gail Pickering stages tableaux vivants which often use specific historical sites or political events as points of reference. The artist proposes a type of dialogue in which both professional and amateur actors improvise within a tightly directed framework to explore the boundaries between the authentic and mediated, the live and the archived.

In Nottingham, she presents a one-off performance that takes the form of a live broadcast from her studio in London. Close-up fragments are interrupted through vision-mixing and the insertion of pre-recorded material. Gritty British social realism is remade into discordant choreographed gestures as Pickering’s collaborators ‘stage’ their own image, fully aware that their actions are being perceived by a distant audience.

Olivia Plender

Much of Olivia Plender’s work is grounded in historical research. In drawings, graphic novels, videos, performances and installations, she has examined 19th- and early 20th-century spiritualist and social reform movements, and the British Empire Exhibition of 1924. She is interested in exposing ‘the ideological framework around the narration of history’ and how this impacts on present-day politics and culture.

In Nottingham, Plender will present a performance, as part one of an evolving collaborative project with Craig Burnett and Nick Santos-Pedro. This seeks to recuperate ‘The Lost Works of Johan Riding,’ a fictional filmmaker supposedly active during the 1970s and 1980s. As the work grows it will incorporate artefacts, ephemera and fragments of film.

Elizabeth Price

User Group Disco is the second video in Elizabeth Price’s series New, Ruined Institute. Each episode takes place in a different room within a fictional institution, this time inside a museum’s Hall of Sculptures. Kitsch porcelain dolls, ebony records and disco balls rotate to the music of Aha, while text borrowed from corporate power-point presentations and literary and philosophical tracts materialises on screen.

Price presents us with strange and miscellaneous objects to classify. ‘I don’t want my work to be seen as institutional critique, but perhaps one of its descendents. I’m interested in working with it not as a failed project but as an unfulfilled narrative.’

Karin Ruggaber

Karin Ruggaber’s wall-based Relief #90 presents an arrangement of tile-like forms resembling finds from an archaeological dig. Made from an amalgam of natural and man-made materials – shredded tree bark, concrete and plaster – each component part is cast using a process that produces unpredictable outcomes. Assembled on the wall, the individual parts engage with and activate empty space, while sometimes repeating, copying or mirroring each other. As Ruggaber comments, the work is ‘a kind of tableau, and in this sense it contains and plays with the elements of scenery, such as a focal point, background and foreground.’

Edgar Schmitz

Working on the ‘politics of confusion’, Edgar Schmitz is uneasy with the authority invested in the apparatus of an exhibition. He chooses to inhabit ‘threshold spaces’ in each of the three galleries in Nottingham, producing sound and video interventions to accompany the exhibition, while remaining ambiguously distanced from it.

The cinematic trailer is a cultural product that does not quite exist on its own terms but only in relation to the film it promotes. The energy and excitement of trailer music is isolated by Schmitz and filtered into venues’ peripheral spaces. Elsewhere, a montage of movie and television company idents flickers near a doorway into the gallery.

Maaike Schoorel

Maaike Schoorel’s atmospheric figurative paintings give up their secrets slowly. These apparently abstract, predominantly white-on-white (or, in one case, black-on-black) canvases contain elusive, barely legible images that emerge, fleetingly, the longer one looks, like forms that can only be made out once the eye has adapted to bright light or darkness. Intent on slowing down looking and intensifying the process of perception, these works also address the ephemeral nature of memory and the difficulty of fixing a person’s image in the mind. Based on photographs that Schoorel has taken of herself, each of these self-portraits – once glimpsed – recalls an archetypal pose from historical art.

George Shaw

George Shaw’s paintings are excavations of memory, featuring the Coventry council estate where he lived as a child. He started to make these paintings out of a ‘kind of mourning’ for the person that he used to be, and says that these earlier works were ‘as much about what has been forgotten, lost, swept away, as about what is remembered.’ Working chiefly from snapshots, and using Humbrol enamel paints, his detailed scenes eliminate people and any signs of activity. In his new paintings for BAS7, he focuses on change: these works document once-familiar places that have been ravaged by time.

Wolfgang Tillmans

Wolfgang Tillmans constantly challenges photographic conventions. His immense abstract Freischwimmer 155 is one of a series of ‘free swimmer’ photographs made without a camera, by subjecting photographic paper to various forms of light and exposure. Truth Study Center (BAS), created for BAS7, is a version of his tabletop installations featuring selections of newspaper and magazine cuttings, pamphlets and advertisements. Tillmans, who has kept scrapbooks of printed ephemera since childhood, collects material on all the subjects that currently concern him, and uses the tables of the ‘truth study centre’ as a way of thinking about perception and truth.

Sue Tompkins

Using rhythm and repetition, layering, juxtaposition, inversion, elaboration, stresses and pauses, Sue Tompkins’s dynamic spoken-word performances re-energise language and give it new meaning. Her material – amounting to hundreds of pages of meticulously ordered and edited texts – is gathered omnivorously from literature and everyday life and, according to Tomkins, derives from ‘thoughts, statements, views, descriptions, feelings, emotions and things that are triggered by actual events.’

In performance, Tompkins’ fractured narratives, and the way they are delivered and voiced, act on our imaginations as palpably as paintings or sculptures. Apart from the ring-binder containing her texts, her only other accompaniments are a stool (on which to prop her file) and a microphone.

Phoebe Unwin

For Phoebe Unwin, looking at paintings is a ‘physical, felt experience,’ and she describes her own works as being ‘curious about materials, subjects and painting itself.’ Ranging in subject matter from domestic interiors, to human faces, to cinema screens and airline meals, her canvases are underlined by a constant and ambiguous play between figuration and abstraction. Though Unwin says that figuration matters to her because of ‘the relationship and tension it creates with materials,’ her compositions are often based on the uncertain stuff of recollection: ‘Memories are never just isolated images – they have strange specifics and large areas of vagueness. This works as an important editing tool for me.’

Tris Vonna-Michell

Tris Vonna-Michell’s performances are rapid-fire monologues delivered in dimly lit mixed-media installations. His narratives fuse elements from his personal life with history and fiction, and finally probe the limits that separate these categories. The stream-of-consciousness digressions that blend almost seamlessly into his percussive stories often drive them to near incomprehensibility. No two performances are ever the same; as he describes ‘it is impossible to narrate consistently’.

Subjecting himself to the testing processes of memory and the immediacy of performance under the pressure of time, Vonna-Michell describes the experience of his performances as combinations of ‘acceleration, adrenaline, both inducing a transformation of materiality into something visceral, inconsistent, and aloof from an intended meaning.’

Emily Wardill

Emily Wardill's films examine the combined force of rhetoric and melodrama in media and politics. Her work upsets the rhythm of traditional filmmaking through exaggerations or strategic diversions in script, set and editing.

Gamekeepers without Game is based on a play, La vida es sueño (Life is a Dream), 1635, by the Spanish playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca. Wardill relocates this story of prodigal children and patricide to contemporary London. Here, a father tries to reintegrate his daughter into the family home, after nine years of her life in social care. The artist says she wanted to shoot the film like airline food, so you have this sense that everything is separate and nothing ever touches.

Keith Wilson

Named after the massive stepped pyramids of Mesopotamia, Ziggurat is a skeletal pyramidal shape formed from galvanised steel. Walking around its open framework, the work poses visual and epistemological riddles. 26 of its 61 cubic spaces are filled with objects that together constitute a sort of dysfunctional alphabet; a repository of knowledge somehow gone askew. What do these particular objects stand for, and why have they been corralled here? Keith Wilson is interested in the fact that objects can possess both a fixed meaning and a multiplicity of conditional meanings that shift according to context. Ziggurat is part of his ongoing enquiry into ‘the limits of what we can ask an object to signify.’