Gallery Interaction by Tom Estes at The De La Warr Pavilion
Posted by Tom Estes on Friday, June 1, 2012 Under: Gallery Interaction
Tom Estes ~ Gallery interaction~ The De La Warr Pavilion, 29th of August, 2010
"I have been collecting newspaper articles for about twenty years. Basically it’s a bit autobiographical as the collection is made up of things I have found of interest or things that I like or think are funny. I use to put them into drawers and then bin liners but now I have so many clippings now that I have started to put them into ring binder folders with plastic sleeves. I guess it probably seems a bit mad, as I often get strange looks from people on the tube when I am tearing an article out of a paper I am reading and then stuff it in my bag. I have even gone so far as to rip them out of magazines in the doctors or dentist office- and though I gotten very stern looks from the receptionists it still doesn't stop me from doing it!
So for instance I have a rather fascinating article about Andy Warhol and the 'factory' or an article that was published in Vanity Fair about Catherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy- that shows that both were in fact Gay, and that their 'relationship' was a canny cover up for their Hollywood careers. Or a more recent article in The Times, charting the history of police violence in the UK and the fact that no police officer has been charged in the last fifty years. Others are a bit lighter, things like travel experiences that are written in the most deliciously funny way or an article about a man who always stands behind news people on television."
Tom Estes
Antony Gormley: Critical Mass
On the roof until 26 September
Critical Mass, one of Gormley’s best known works, is an installation made up of 60 lifesize cast iron body forms which is on display on the roof of the De La Warr Pavilion. The term Critical Mass comes from nuclear physics and is the necessary density within a radioactive isotope for fission to take place. When applied to social issues, Critical Mass usually means the necessary level of density within a collective that allows for something transformative to happen.
Critical Mass is made up of five casts from 12 discrete moulds of Gormley’s body, developing from a low crouching position to squatting, sitting, kneeling and standing - an ascent of man ranging through the complex syntax of the body. In this case, the bodies appear to have fallen from their normal context. The first impression is of some kind of trauma though the individual body forms will evoke contradictory readings and emotions from the viewer depending upon which way they are orientated.
Cast from the outside of a plaster mould, all the imperfections of the mould surface are reproduced on the finished work, as are the signs of the loose pieces in the sand mould, the flash lines that exist between
them, and the out-runners of the metal-pouring which are integrated into the surface.
Tomoko Takahashi: Introspective Retrospective
In the galleries 3 July - 12 September 2010
This summer the De La Warr Pavilion brings you Introspective Retrospective, an exhibition by Japanese artist, Tomoko Takahashi. Takahashi has established her reputation through the playful recycling of everyday detritus of everyday life into illuminating works of art. This exhibition is the first time that a comprehensive collection of Takahashi's work has been shown together anywhere in the world.
Scavenging from skips for raw materials, the artist champions the obselete and disregarded. These random objects are positioned and arranged precisely to give her work their particular beauty. This intricate process is an important part of the work and often involves her living in the installation space prior to the exhibition opening. Her fascination with the different ways in which we inhabit space becomes apparent through the complex and sprawling installations that she produces.
Living and working in Bexhill over the last few months, Takahashi has produced a major new installation for Gallery 2 entitled Paperwork @ the Seaside that engages with the Japanese phenomena of manga. She has trawled through dozens of volumes of manga comics, copying, categorising, and arranging the images into different subject matters which she has used to create a unique installation work. The piece highlights our need to make sense of the world and the bombardment of information with which we are confronted each day.
The De La Warr Pavilion
The De La Warr Pavilion is a Grade One listed building and is Mendelsohn and Chemayeff’s English masterpiece and Modernist icon for the contemporary arts on the sea-front in Bexhill on Sea, East Sussex. The De La Warr Pavilion opened in 1935 as the first public building built in the Modernist style in the UK. Constructed with steel and concrete, it posed a new and exciting challenge for its structural engineers F J Samuely and Partners who built their reputation on their association with the Pavilion.
The De La Warr Pavilion Charitable Trust, Charity No. 1065585, Registered office, Bexhill on Sea, TN40 1DP, Company No. 3446307
For more information please go to: http://www.artreview.com/
In : Gallery Interaction
Tags: gallery interaction by tom estes at the de la warr pavilion antony gormley critical mass tomoko takahashi introspective retrospective
As an artist I have always leaned toward making Live Art performance work that is participatory or immersive in some way. In my Live Art performance I stage an 'action' and then ask members of the audience to take pictures on a communal camera. In this way, the audience becomes part of the performance, and the pictures are then posted on on-line social networking sites and web sites for another, wider on-line audience.
For me, fantasy and illusion are not contradictions of reality, but instead an integral part of our everyday lives. There is a real Peter Pan Syndrome at play in my work and I suppose I would consider myself to be a carnival sideshow conceptualist, combining a bare-bones formal conceptualism with an eternally adolescent, prank DIY comic-approach.
At the core of this work is an attention to the flickering, fading definition of our lives as dictated by the computer monitor and the rapid reply of instant messaging. I strive, not to break down these introverted, often self-imposed boundaries, but to look at how dataflow from the virtual realm impacts on the significance and symbolism of real-world human senses. But in doing so, I have begun to generate unexpected questions about how art might be able to inscribe itself on the surface of reality- not to represent itself on the surface of reality –not to represent reality, nor to duplicate it, but to replace it.
