Editorial

par Gabriel Gee & Sophie Orlando  

MFA Show Belfast & Void Gallery, Derry

par Gregory McCartney  

Here and There:

Artists Selected for Fort Dunree

par Gregory McCartney  

Bartlett Summer Show 2011

par Tom Clark  

St Martin’s MA Fine Art Degree Show

par Anne-Laure Franchette  

Camberwell College of Arts Degree Show

par Ana Martinez Fernandez  

Free Range Artists and the Hypermarket

par Sophie Le Filleul  

Goldsmiths Postgraduate Degree Show 2011:

A Labyrinth (No Minotaur)

par Daniel Rourke  

Northumbria University Degree show

par Innes Meek  

Newcastle University Degree show 2011

par Gabriel N. Gee  

Sheffield Steel

par Toby Juliff  

Contributors

par Sophie Orlando & Gabriel Gee  

 

Graduate exhibitions are always interesting for the curator, particularly the independent (or freelance or whatever the latest moniker is) curator with an interest in the local emerging artist scene. Thus I was pleased to be given the opportunity to review the MA show in Belfast and its coda so to speak in Void Gallery, Derry. It’s difficult to treat a graduate show as simply a group show as there isn’t usually an over-riding thematic apart from year of graduation so it’s necessary to treat each work on its own merits. Thus I concentrate mostly on the Belfast show and focus only on those which I felt worked well in Void. The most successful pieces in the Belfast MA show possess an ambivalence or enigmatic quality that attracts the spectator. For a curator if not the casual visitor these shows are about potential. The stand out pieces in the Belfast show are essentially sculptural with Rebecca Coffey’s wall mounted satellite dish/inverted umbrella piece A line is a Dot that went for a Walk the most striking, an enigmatic but elegant, monumental but fragile work that seems to demand the viewer’s attention. Likewise Lynn Cromie’s sculptural pieces are elegantly animalistic with her centre steel floor piece lithe, light and yet quite aggressive in an abstract manner. Alistair Freebairn’s heavy (looking) wooden pieces, particularly those on the walls offer at once an intriguing blankness which at once attracts and repels something that is again apparent in his Deep-Seated ‘door’. Alice Clarke’s dying plant-line constructions seems to exist in the space between life and non-life, death and decay, the natural and artificial, the slight and spectacular and are all the more impressive for that. Martin Kinlough’s playful fabric takes on art-history heavyweights such as Rothko and Brigit Riley are rather engaging and show a potentially intriguing approach to painting with a healthy dose of humour added. Both Tim Millen in painting and Paola Bernardelli’s excellent photography and video explores art history standards with the sublime being to the fore in Millen’s work whilst Bernardelli re-stages paintings in photographic and filmic form. Lesley Cherry explored issues of memory, domesticity and class often in an humorous and ironic manner particularly in her knitted pieces. Cathal McGinley’s pieces reanimated found objects giving them a puzzling and intriguing new existence balancing on the edge of mutation, the artist literally a creator of new if artificial life. Artifice is also a part of Cherith Brown’s concerns as her eerily created landscape questions what constitutes reality and thus our faith in what is ‘real’. Faith becomes apparent in Ruaidhri Lennon’s work. Neatly situated in a hidden space between walls at Void we see a somewhat disturbing red button which seems to challenge us to press it and as we nervously do the word ‘Faith’ appears asking questions about our belief in ourselves and others. Julie Lovett’s work looks at the methodologies and conventions of art production. In particular she uses the activity of painting to describe these conventions as social problems both inside and outside of the art world. Laura O’Connor video pieces (multiple in Belfast, singular in Void) consider beauty and the gaze in terms of the public and private. The viewer’s gaze is directed to the ‘raw material’ of the exhibition space. She concentrates on the fabric of the building and we are directed to the bare bones of the room, panel stripped back, naked and exposed. We reflect on the fragility of the traditional spaces of exhibition and indeed existence. There is potential within this group and it’ll be interesting to see who succeeds. It isn’t always the obvious ones. That’s what make curation difficult but interesting.