Charles Avery
a spirit of philosophical enquiry
The Islanders: An Introduction was the latest instalment in Scottish artist Charles Avery's epic project which began in 2004. For the first time, the whole project thus far was brought together including several new works. Avery has created texts, drawings, installations and sculptures which describe the topology and cosmology of an imaginary island, whose every feature embodies a philosophical proposition, problem or solution. Imbued with a formal beauty, humour, and a spirit of philosophical enquiry, these vivid and intricate works invite the viewer to recreate the Island in their own minds, and to use it as an arena for exploring philosophical conundrums and paradoxes.
Frieze Review
@ The Guardian
Ridables and Unridables
It is often a source of confusion to visitors as to why the Ridables and Unridables are thus named, for ostensibly it is the Unridables who appear better adapted to supporting the weight of a person, given their much greater stature; it is not their physique but rather their temperament that would not support being ridden.
If you try to milk a Ridable you will lose your arm. To describe them as ridable is misleading for there is a great deal of whispering to be done before one can even get near such an animal, let alone hope to get on its back.
- Charles Avery.
' Avery was thrown out of Central St Martins after just six months, and the 35-year-old has spent the ensuing decade creating an imaginary island. Some have praised The Islanders, with its made-up maps, sketches of imaginary creatures and explorer's "notes", as a return to storytelling in art and a witty dissection of utopian tropes, while others dismiss his life's work as twee whimsy or sci-fi geekiness. Either way, it's hard to fault the dedication of the one-time Isle of Mull resident.'
@THE INDEPENDENT
The Islanders: An Introduction was the latest instalment in Scottish artist Charles Avery's epic project which began in 2004. For the first time, the whole project thus far was brought together including several new works. Avery has created texts, drawings, installations and sculptures which describe the topology and cosmology of an imaginary island, whose every feature embodies a philosophical proposition, problem or solution. Imbued with a formal beauty, humour, and a spirit of philosophical enquiry, these vivid and intricate works invite the viewer to recreate the Island in their own minds, and to use it as an arena for exploring philosophical conundrums and paradoxes.
Frieze Review
@ The Guardian
Ridables and Unridables
It is often a source of confusion to visitors as to why the Ridables and Unridables are thus named, for ostensibly it is the Unridables who appear better adapted to supporting the weight of a person, given their much greater stature; it is not their physique but rather their temperament that would not support being ridden.
If you try to milk a Ridable you will lose your arm. To describe them as ridable is misleading for there is a great deal of whispering to be done before one can even get near such an animal, let alone hope to get on its back.
- Charles Avery.
' Avery was thrown out of Central St Martins after just six months, and the 35-year-old has spent the ensuing decade creating an imaginary island. Some have praised The Islanders, with its made-up maps, sketches of imaginary creatures and explorer's "notes", as a return to storytelling in art and a witty dissection of utopian tropes, while others dismiss his life's work as twee whimsy or sci-fi geekiness. Either way, it's hard to fault the dedication of the one-time Isle of Mull resident.'
@THE INDEPENDENT
Ben Rivers
Origin of the Species
The Hyrcynium Wood
House
SLOW ACTION
From his ICA Page:
Rivers’ films focus on lives led at one remove from society, commenting on the desire to achieve liberty through the simplification of lifestyle.
The films of Ben Rivers (born Somerset, 1972, lives in London) are rich, cinematic portraits that explore wilderness environments and self-contained worlds, representing memory through visual fragments. Primarily shot on 16mm black and white film, sometimes on out-of-date stock, Rivers' work has the appearance of ageing, archival footage. The artist shoots on an old Bolex wind-up camera, and works creatively within its limitations – including contraints of duration, since its the longest continuous shot is 30 seconds. The aged appearance of the film is also partly a consequence of Rivers hand-processing each film in his own kitchen sink. He compares the creation of his films to assembling a collage, and although he places great emphasis on the editing process, he is in fact strongly involved in all stage of his films' creation, through his roles as cameraman, developer, editor and director. The distanced quality of Rivers work – albeit a knowing construction – extends to the spaces and subjects that the films focus on. Whether exposing desolate and crumbling interiors in works like Old Dark House (2003) and its sequel House (2005), or portraying the hermetic world of the 'outsider' figure Jake Williams in the much acclaimed This is My Land (2006), Rivers' work is engaged with zones at the edges of contemporary life. Other works, such as Ah Liberty! (2008) which depicts a community inhabiting a rural and seemingly sublime landscape, appear to exist outside modern living altogether, signifying less alienation from the mainstream than liberation from it. Although they depict real-life subjects, Rivers' films are not primarily documentary or ethnographic in style, despite drawing heavily on these genres. Rather, his work is personal and fragmented, reminiscent of the idiosyncratic styles of Scottish filmmaker and poet Margaret Tait and American director George Kuchar. Other influences – perhaps less apparent in Rivers' imagery than in his soundtracks – are as wide-ranging as thriller, film noir and horror. This range of sources reflects Rivers' work at Brighton Cinematheque, where he has helped run a regular screening programme since 1996, one that includes both recent and historical work. Rivers is presenting a special screening programme for Nought to Sixty, drawing on his experience at Brighton Cinematheque. The artist is showing his own work alongside that of other recent filmmakers, in an attempt to highlight different strategies for dealing with the histories of documentary and ethnographic film. Emphasising diverse and creative approaches to history is fundamental to the project, as is an attempt to establish a common language that lies between the confines of these problematic genres.
Ellen Altfest
From her White Cube page:
Jerry Saltz once described painting as “…one of the greatest visionary tools ever invented, and among the most effective ways to alter reality, see it better, or invent a new one.”
...
For Altfest's second New York exhibition in 2005, the writer and artist David Humphrey elaborates on her practice:
"Ellen Altfest asks us to slow down, to crawl, to feel our way across the variegated surfaces of her depicted objects until we experience them as materialized hallucinations. The dense skin of her paintings invites us to travel into nether-spaces of bewildering complexity where we become lost in a thoroughly mapped world right in front of our eyes.
Altfest’s work is an exercise of extreme and deliriously inefficient will seeking both accuracy and metaphor. Altfest looks at her motif then looks away to perform precise labors in the fading memory of that perception, over and over again. Everything must be touched into existence, part by part. In her painting of tumbleweed, Altfest first immobilizes it in the corner of her studio and then renders it on the canvas. But our eye continuously tumbles through the weed’s tangled geodesics to find purchase in its many areas of perplexing coherence.
The tumbleweed, like all her subjects, suggests a brain, a world or an animate being, before inevitably cycling back to its origin as nothing special. Ellen Altfest’s paintings celebrate the way objects become engulfed by their surroundings and simple acts of identification multiply and transform. Her disciplined vigilance encourages an ecstasy of matter and vision."
Katy Moran
Encountering this Stockport-born artist's paintings is an almost synaesthetic experience; their thick, luscious layers of creamy paint look good enough to eat. Moran, who completed her MA at the Royal College of Art, uses oval canvases and almost floral imagery suggestive of 18th-century French painting, but the fluidity of the composition and the use of recurring forms - an oval 'dish' of colour, like an artist's palette, in the centre of the work, for instance - frustrate an easy reading.
(ArtReview, 2005)
After tantalizing appearances in group shows, Katy Moran’s first New York solo affirms the young British artist’s talent for evocative abstraction. The paintings are rife with apparent contradictions: They’re small in scale yet best viewed from a distance; misty veils of white shroud the subject matter, and titles may mislead more than enlighten. Moran’s approach occasionally feels like a self-conscious gambit, but it keeps viewers guessing long enough to come to provocative conclusions.
Most canvases display the artist’s brushy, layered style and earthy, cool color palette, yet the mood of each comes as a fresh surprise. Lucas is an ethereal cascade of blue and white that could be a waterfall, a hazy beach or a snowstorm. Alarming splashes of blood red dot a dark oval form that might be a boat or an open grave in Volestere. Light paint daubed over dark in the show’s most dramatic piece suggests a battlefield at night, though the title, Wasabi Without Tears, turns the painting into a funny take on highbrow culinary machismo.
Other canvases distill the essence of different moments in the art-historical canon: A cow’s head emerges from a patchwork of Futurist volumes; elsewhere, a De Kooning–esque crone is rendered in dark Cubist colors; while in a third painting, a rough sailboat shape in a light-toned setting recalls a Dutch harborscape. Occasionally, Moran’s jumble of forms fails to materializes into anything meaningful, and her grungy color schemes can be garish. This is rare. Instead, the work convincingly stakes Moran’s painterly territory: historically astute with a dash of humor, making nods to Karen Kilimnik’s romanticism and to Cecily Brown’s jittery fluidity, while possessing an energy all its own.
—Merrily Kerr for TIMEOUT NY
April 9, 2008
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