POSSESSION (II) at Lanchester Gallery in Coventry

I am showing in the next incarnation of the Possession exhibition at Lanchester Gallery in Coventry, curated by Steve Dutton and Brian Curtin. The exhibition explores practices of appropriation in contemporary art. POSSESSION (I) was shown at the Bangkok Art and Culture Center, Thailand in early 2013. I am showing completely new painting in my Reconfigure Paintings series of work.

The show opens on Thursday 13 March 6 – 8pm for the private view and then runs from 14 March - 13 April 2014. More details can be found below and here

POSSESSION (II) acknowledges the distinct lineage of heavily theorised notions of appropriation from Anglophone art critical contexts. The project moves through an expanded set of concerns including internet and network cultures, conflicts of current and outmoded technologies of image production and contemporary visual art from disparate cultural and national contexts. Central to the two iterations of the exhibition is the idea that different versions of the exhibition format can possess and re-possess the objects of its own inquiry: the ideological and aesthetic instrumentality of forms, critically intrinsic and extrinsic relationships for contemporary art, and comparative questions of an artist’s agency in making and re-making visual and material culture.

POSSESSION (II) highlights the question of whether cultural and national comparisons provide a basis for considering what appropriation is and can do; and what exchange might mean in an international context of different and competing markets.

Other artists include;

Chan Dany, Michael Day, Doug Fishbone, Lesley Guy, Steve Hawley, Maud Haya-Baviera, Viet Le, Michael Lee, Olivia Notaro, Manuel Ocampo, Julia Schwadron, Chris Shaw-Hughes, Andrew Spackman.

A Machine Aesthetic in Lincoln

A Machine Aesthetic continues on its tour around the country at ProjectSpacePlus in Lincoln from 5th March till 4th April. The group show is curated by Eric Butcher and Simón Granell.
Details about the show are below and please visit the galleries website here

A Machine Aesthetic explores the various manifestations, uses and influences of mechanisation within the practice of a diverse range of contemporary artists.om the first daubings of pre-historic caves, through the invention of the camera obscura and ready-made oil paint in tubes to the use of digital media, artists have been among the first to embrace and exploit new technologies. The focus of A Machine Aesthetic, however, is at once narrower and broader, concerning itself specifically with the notion and implications of ?mechanisation? in its widest sense in contemporary art.

Since the late 1950s/early 60s there have evolved a plethora of artistic practices that involve the manufacture of machines to produce the artistic ‘product’. Where Jean Tinguely led the way, artists as diverse as Rebecca Horn, Chris Burden, Roxy Paine and Damien Hirst followed. While earlier analyses have tended to conceive of the machine in a narrow sense, A Machine Aestheticproposes a different perspective, achieved by consideration of the full range of artistic practices that embrace both subtle and sophisticated notions of mechanisation.

As the human condition moves further and further from a state of nature we become not only surrounded by machine-made objects, but the products and qualities of mechanised intervention. Even our experience of nature is modified and mediated by human agency and facilitated by the machine. Contemporary practices reflect this increasing dependence on machine production, whether celebratory or critical, artists exploiting machine produced products or components in both the development and construction of their work.