“Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.” Wolfgang von Goethe
I am in discussion with RCA Printmaking to curate a show of internationally established and recently graduated RCA Alumni.
Opuntia, golden acrylic and observer book of flowers, 2023 by Augustine Carr
Sad to learn Reach Out RCA - the outreach program at the Royal College of Art has come to close, it seems to me if there were ever any time to reach out it would be now. Here is a photo of a movement and drawing class in which I collaborated with the dancer Katsura Isobe. Where Katsura worked with muscle memory and spatial improvisation with the students; which we translated as a group through modest modelling, expedient drawing and sequential movement. Culminating in an improvised dance by Katsura, from her observations of our students, through out the morning.
Photo by Michele Panzeri
Excited to have joined SPACE Studios, at the Triangle in London Fields. Much moved by this film of the how SPACE began.
The SPACE Story from SPACE on Vimeo.
We hope to put edgelands - a lense based show initially proposed for Peckham 24 2020, on later this year, when the government allows us to hold exhibitions again. Which should include my film “An Investment For Economy”.
David Gates supporting text for edgelands our proposal for Peckham 24 in May.
“based on Blanchots assertion that poets must practice a peripheral vision we have selected a group of artists whose use of photography may also be seen to inhabit the edgelands.
all the artists in this proposed show lean on photography, they trust it, they bear down on it, they test its strength, its rigidity, they feel around for where it cracks, bends, breaks, stretches, distorts, and use this newly found material to weave and mould in a new undiscovered direction, an unknown and improvised dance, an untrodden path of overlaps, cross references, nods and winks. they kick start the image back into action, refusing its recession, they hold it open to the possibility of possibilities, plunging through the surface into unknown spaces, spaces which are singular, odd and very much alive.”
“After his decades-long explorations of American deserts, the British architectural theorist Reyner Banham stood defiant against the historical imperative of understanding deserts as places of self-discovery. In the last pages of Scenes In America Deserta, Banham declares he has done little more than lose himself in these seemingly baron landscapes. In doing so he encountered continual and shifting oscillations from centre to margin, embracing an inexhaustible wonderment over the pursuit of self-knowledge.”
Neal Rock, 2019
Transfer (On The Margins) at Transition, September 6-29, 2019.
Non, 2019 on the facade of Transition by Augustine Carr
Cordon Bleu II, 2019 with Summa Theologica VII, 2018 by Augustine Carr and Untitled, 2019 by Neal Rock
Untitled, 2019 by Neal Rock
Photos by Ben Westoby.
An from extract from GLOSS IN SIX SCENES, 2019 by Isobel Wohl
“Around the corner from a greengrocer’s, three C-prints show polaroids that show small clay objects against a clay background. I can see the impressions of fingertips. I can see nervous activity. We enter the gallery space. A boat, a tic, a finish, a tongue, a blind, lying on a black metal frame. I see it from its contours and from the light that slides over them, pools in their crooks and junctures. It shows me a dark shape. What I don’t know is its first form, plasticine or clay somewhere else. On another frame lie two open Cordon Bleu cookbooks, and on their pages black masses weight instructions that tell me how to make oranges en surprise. In the photograph that accompanies the recipe light from some bulb in some photoshoot falls on meringue and orange. I want to touch sleek sides and rounded tops, touch the object from which touch was removed in replication, expansion, and lacquer in order to make the finish that makes me want to touch the thing that was removed from me. Sight is most tender where it borders and so forms its limit. You may have held it in your hand before you knew what it was. ”
To return to play its purely profane vocation is a political task.” - Georgio Agamben, p.77 In Praise of Profanation
"This house is a threshold, a prelude, an opening… mingling and dissolving on the soft palate. What results is a collection of objects which enact a continual palimpsest; where recognisable narratives unfurl and roll off the table and into the street to be trodden on with mucky subjectivity."
Kit Edwards, 2019
APPARATUS by Nick Scammel
Contraptions, gear, systems and frameworks. Housed within the ruins of Safehouse, Augustine Carr’s Apparatus cheerfully skewers beauty, kitsch and the unknowable, twiddling the resulting melange for a closer peek. Less of a curatorial closed circuit and more of an exercise in jelly-nailing, Apparatus seeks, with playful seriousness, to collide divergent practices into fruitful new shapes and arcs.
With Pythia and Heracles, Alix Marie presents a Giallo-infused meditation on female prophecy and soothsaying, together with an exploration of male display, via her upstairs room full of wheezily rotating body-builder arms - sculptures of sculptures mimicking sculptures. Augustine Carr’s fascination with the extremes of aspiration and kitsch sees him exhibiting Cordon Bleu, with 3 suggestively soft crowns substituting for stars, atop deeply-outdated, sickly cookbooks. (Is there a genre of literature that dates faster?!) Carr’s fabric-based work upstairs is duly counterpointed by performance artist Anna Perach - who presents as a soft, warm, comfortingly owl-ish spirit, shuffling gamely, wordlessly about the Safehouse.
In his untitled work Albert Grondahl explores ideas of idyl and value, creating images that speak of photography’s earliest processes and dabblings in landscape and seascape. Photo-sensitising gold, he creates an image that might have been folded up and carried in a pocket. With Carland, The Rural College of Art walks an improvised street in the isolated and deeply deprived estuarial community of Jaywick, whose informal, frozen-in-time architecture is the nearest England gets to shanty. Photographing every stride, in order to build up a jumpy homage to Ed Ruscha’s documentation of Sunset Boulevard, Gates appears to have produced a two-legged road movie, perfectly backgrounded by the raddled walls of the Safehouse.Upstairs, The Rural College of Art echoes the DIY approach to make-do-facture of Jaywick, presenting a huge back and white photograph of woodland, created by a tipped-up caravan converted into a pinhole camera.
Also upstairs, a series of shelves displays a selection of works the artists exchanged with each other by post, prior to the show. With the leaf as thread and motif, the artists have produced some deft, delicate and diminutive works that offer keyhole views onto their respective practices, while producing an artwork whose sum betters its parts. A show within a show. A visual touchstone.
Untitled, 2018 by Albert Grøndahl and Cordon Bleu, 2019 by Augustine Carr
Pythia, 2018 by Alix Marie
Carland, 2016 by The Rural College of Art
Heracles, 2018 by Alix Marie
A collaborative shelf of posted and small works, by the five artists in APPPARATUS.
Photos by Ben Westoby
A performance by Anna Perach.
Photo by Karl-Peter Penke
Very much looking forward to collaborating on some work sent through the post and a curatorial project for Peckham 24 with David Gates of The Rural College of Art at Peckham 24 in May. David archived Fluxus’ Ray Johnson’s Mail Art in New York, so it’s like a baton being passed which is really nice. And with Albert Grøndahl whose work I first saw a Sunday-S in Copenhagen in 2017.
Albert Grøndahl at Sunday-S
The Rural College of Art
Much looking forward to planning a two man show, with Neal Rock for the new year, at the Transition Gallery.
Neal Rock at the Walsall Gallery
Working on a new series of tapestries where modest crayon drawings are translated into digitally embroidered tapestry. Pleased to be working with former Dolce and Gabbana knitwear designer Genevieve Sweeney on this.
Preferred By Teachers, Digitally Embroidered Cotton on Linen, 230x140cm, Augustine Carr 2018
Very much enjoying the play of the sculpture and Otto Ford's print in the Nature Blick show, seen here in Ben Westoby's documentation.
Pablo In Pieces, Archival Print, 250x200 cm, Otto Ford 2018
Summa Theologiac VII, CNC milled SikaBlock finished in Black, 55x110x63 cm, Augustine Carr 2018
Glanz, CNCed SikaBlock finished in Black, 133x87x86cm, Augustine Carr 2017
Natur Blick Instalation, 2018
Review by Olivia Aherne
The eye scans, searches and stutters across ‘Natur Blick’, the new group show curated by Augustine Carr and Paula Zambrano at The Koppel Project in London. Before visiting the show I read the short accompanying text by the artist, writer and academic Chantal Faust. The text traces the different sensory and digital guises of scanning and, as my eyes crossed the page from left to right, simulating the rhythmic and repetitive action of both human and machine, I became hyper aware of the ease with which we scan images, ideas and information.
In ‘Natur Blick’, scanning - the instinctive visual movement of the human eye, a gesture co-opted by modern technology - is the subject of the work of ten contemporary artists: Augustine Carr, Chantal Faust, Otto Ford, Gili Lavy, Clair Le Couteur, Samantha Lee, Alix Marie, Anna Skladmann, WARD and Andrea Zucchini. Their work each explores scanning as a multi-faceted operation: as a creative method, a mode of representation, research and rehearsal and as an encounter with contemporary art.
This specific exhibition encounter is one of many different surfaces, sizes and synchronicities and is presented across the two floors of the gallery space. From photography to installation and video to sculpture, the show is an intriguing balance of analogue and digital, two-dimensional and three-dimensional. Positioned in the centre of the ground floor are two 3D rendered sculptures by Carr titled ‘Summa Theologica’ (2018) and ‘Glanz’ (2017). Carr’s sludgy sculptural forms offset the precise nature of the scanning technology used to create them, it is here that the digital emerges as something fluid and perceptive. Hung on the opposite side of the room is another work by Carr, ‘Preferred By Teachers’ (2018). The two metre digitally designed hanging fabric puts a modern spin on on the ancient tapestry. Also presented on the ground floor is Otto Ford’s ‘Pablo in Pieces’ (2018) which preserves the movement and expression of a paintbrush through effect and rendering. By employing digital mediums that scan, print and imitate, both Carr and Ford remodel the traditional mediums of painting and sculpture whilst challenging contemporary digital aesthetics.
Tucked downstairs in a room of its own is Alix Marie’s ‘Orlando’ (2014), a large-scale photographic installation composed of prints of close-up body parts which have been dipped in wax, crinkled, scanned and reprinted. Marie’s process results in a melting and crackling effect where human flesh becomes blurred and ungendered. The title, which references Orlando, a character that turns from male to female in Virginia Woolf’s novel of the same name, works to reaffirm Marie’s blurring of binaries, a blurring which is symptomatic of scanning, where blindness and awareness occur simultaneously.
The title of the show loosely translates as the ‘nature of looking’ and is derived from a quote by the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.” Much of the work in ‘Natur Blick’ speaks to Goethe’s proposition, its appeal is found in its aesthetic qualities and visually exposed artistic processes - scanned, printed, recorded - each work reveals its own traces and perceptions. These traces and interpretations are most engaging in the three-dimensional work where depth is explored and the immaterial is made material. The abundance of two-dimensional prints feels too flat, too familiar and too easy to scan. In today’s flattened and scannable landscape, where surface and process is squashed to screen, the allure is in the sculptural works that glare back, causing an optical stutter.
Assisting Alix Marie in remaking my favourite work of hers - Orlando for Natur Blick this week. So grateful for CJ Everard to suggesting Alix to me for our Natur Blick show.
Alix Marie, Orlando, Photographic Instalation, Various Dimensions.
Chantal Faust, 2018.
Supporting text for Natur Blick.
Such a pleasure to be showing alongside Mustafa Husuli and Soojin Kang in Adventitous on the fourth floor of the soon to be demolished Whitleys, from the 8th to the 22nd of March.
Really pleased to have Clair Le Couteur RCA PHD opening and closing Natur Blick, a show I am curating a the Koppel Project around the idea of scanning. Where to scan might be 'where the digital meets nature' or 'to look at something with real intention'. Clair will perform with Carli Jefferson as the Lunatraktors. "‘Scan’ first comes into English to describe analysing the rhythm or structure of verse by tapping the foot. Performance research duo LUNATRAKTORS work with an intuitive, collaborative form of scansion, re-awakening lost songs from the folk archive into embodiment. Working with harmonic singing and body percussion, voice and rhythm are used to scan the gallery space, picking out resonant frequencies and ringing tones. This singing practice is combined with LUNATRAKTORS’ wider project of self-transformation through scanning the archive of folk song for moments that resonate with their theoretical, personal and political concerns, scanning the written verse to ‘hear’ the music in it, and re-archiving that material into the body by ear and by heart. ” Here is a clip of Clair performing at the Horse Hospital.
Click Here for Issue 14 of Floorr Magazine
A clip from the Summa Theolologica Film, in an edition of ten. Contact me for availability.
To view a PDF of the my Summa Theologica Catalogue with essays by Ansel Krut and William Horner - click here.
Very pleased with this crisp scan from Sample & Hold for a new work, in progress for a private commission.