Posts Categorized: Exhibitions
‘Composites’, Matt Calderwood
HS Projects presented a new series of sculptures and works on paper by Matt Calderwood, in direct response to the site at 5 Howick Place.
Matt Calderwood is well known for his modular works, made of interlocking elements that explore the potential of sculptural language and examine the properties and dynamics of different materials. Taking the dynamism of urban architecture as his starting point – the chevron shape is a familiar theme – Calderwood experiments with balance, tension and chance to produce site specific works that become a record of a specific place.
‘I have been thinking about adaptability and the potential for change in response to changing external factors. All the works I have chosen to install at Howick Place are essentially modular, and as such, have the potential to be expanded, contracted and reconfigured in response to their environment.’
‘Rubber (Pile)’, 2013-17 and ‘Untitled’, 2017 are configurations of elements that have previously been used as printing blocks in the studio and exhibited as components of earlier sculptures. The element of chance plays an important role in Calderwood’s process-based but also carefully choreographed practice. The components in ‘Rubber (Pile)’, 2013-17, previously shown at Baltic 39 in a loose and scattered manner, are here pulled together into a much more dense and energetic pile. In their current location they could be seen as something like a camp fire.
Component parts of ‘Untitled’, 2017 were previously used for his work ‘Strapped’, 2013, which was exhibited during Frieze Sculpture Park in Regents Park, physically strapped-up and leaning against a tree in the park. At Howick Place the components transform into a totallly new work, a modernist and abstract towering structure, still bearing the imprints and residues from the elements, after being exposed to the weather conditions of Regents Park.
This performative and experimental aspect of Calderwood’s work remains a constant throughout his practice. For his exhibitions ‘Paper Over the Cracks’ at Baltic 39 and ‘Exposure’ at the De La Warr Pavilion, he exposed a series of geometric structures, made from welded steel and clothed in white billboard paper, to the natural elements to fend for themselves. During the four months’ exposure to heavy wind, rain, strong sunlight and salty air on the outdoor roof terraces, a slow process of transformation took place. The paper weathered and faded, and the steel began to rust in patterns, a visual record of how the sculptures met the elements they were exposed to.
Opposite the lifts, ‘Composites’, 2017 is a new series of large-scale works on paper, hand printed directly from 3d sculptural elements, similar to the ones exhibited. Mounted onto shaped aluminium composite panels, they are made in response to the Howick Place site. Black designs on white paper formed from chevron blocks, reminiscent of fonts and arranged according to chance, appear as contact prints of the sculptures, their different shades add dimension and depth. Different configurations of the ‘Composites’ will be explored during the course of the exhibition.
‘Composites’ was at 5 Howick Place from June to December 2017.
‘Everything Is Connected’, Alice Anderson
HS Projects presented ‘Everything Is Connected’, an exhibition of Alice Anderson’s recent sculptural works made after performances.
Alice Anderson’s practice is an exploration of memory in the digital world, she ‘records’ objects with copper thread through her sculptures and performances. For the last ten years, Anderson has explored the physical and physiological mutations that transform our world. The artist has her own way of memorising objects and architecture through movement, contrasting the ‘outsourcing’ of memory by digital processes.
Anderson transforms virtual data into tactile forms to re-create a new physical relationship with objects and spaces through ritual performances. It is an act of ‘memorising’ and a means of understanding the world around her, keeping hold of the physicality of objects, as more and more of our life becomes subsumed by digital technology. As the artist says, ‘I always worry to break or lose an object, therefore I have established rules: when one of the objects around me is likely to become obsolete or is lost in the stream of our lives, I ‘memorise’ it with thread before it happens.’
It is Anderson’s own method of ‘memorising’ objects and architectural elements in 3D. ‘Lift’, 2015, ‘Ladders’, 2014 and ‘Door Frame’, 2011 have all gone through this process of entwining an object, mummifying it, recording it for posterity. By measuring an object, obtaining its data and ‘marking’ it into copper wire, Anderson presents us with a ‘recorded’ lift, a ‘recorded’ door frame and ‘recorded’ fire ladders.
Anderson appears to record ‘the physical and material world’ whilst digitisation takes over. ‘I started ‘recording’ objects and architecture in 2010. I believe that this action is one of the instinctive consequences of memory going digital. There isn’t any nostalgia in this approach. It is simply a physical interaction with the present: the digital world gives more freedom, information and creativity, but how are we meant to cope with it? This revolution is just beginning and it’s already affecting the whole of society and all its current models – economic, social and ideological. Our everyday life already sources a lot of its basic reflexes from automated information or service-sharing, through Google, Wikipedia, Uber and so on, so I have to find my own methods of slowing down, of keeping a sort of intimacy with the world surrounding me, of understanding, learning and memorising differently. It’s a paradox, but the more my everyday existence fills up with digital data about the things around me, the greater my need to get to grips with their material, physical data’.
Those actions typically combine primitive and modern, strong and vulnerable, one-off chance and ritual repetition. We might call the result Post-Digital. Certainly it is informed – indeed, troubled – by knowledge of the digital alternative, and goes beyond it to seek new haptic relationships between people and the physical world. Anderson’s post-digital rituals give us a directness of engagement, which a photo in a file cannot. Yet her practice might also be seen, taken as a whole, to be mourning the loss of the pre-digital world, to yearn for the times when rituals were charged with maximum power and objects were restricted to their original selves.
‘Everything Is Connected’ was at Howick Place from May 2013 – March 2014.
‘Tilted’ , Tania Kovats
HS Projects presented a group of works by acclaimed British artist Tania Kovats. Kovats is renowned for producing sculptures, large scale installations and temporal works which explore our experience and understanding of landscape, and finds in the natural world both her subject and material. She approaches the natural environment both in terms of identifiable places – sites that can be mapped, named, inhabited and scrutinised – and as matter with properties that can be subjected to external forces and potential transformations.
Kovats’ barnacle-encrusted ‘Colony’, 2009 developed from her 2009 residency in the Galapagos Islands. Fascinated by barnacles as creatures that dwell – both literally and figuratively – in the spaces between sea and land, rock and animal, and liquid and solid, the artist also discovered, within their capacity to self-generate and form colonies, a metaphor for the rapid social, urban, and ecological developments occurring on Galapagos.
Kovats’ ‘Tilted’, 2002 exposes the artist’s keen interest in the rugged drama of coastal landscapes. Contained within the exposed rock cliff faces, are turbulent geological forces, which cut a stark line between light and dark, interior and exterior. By embedding the cliff within the architecture of a modernist plinth, Kovats uses an element of the landscape to attack the solidity of the white cube, subjecting it to the forces by which it was created. This ‘tilted’ cliff, as a boundary between land and sea, alludes to Kovats’ interest in oceans, a topic that comes to preoccupy much of her later work.
In her series of ‘Schist’, 2001 sculptures, Kovats’ use of wax, a material that is both responsive and malleable, allows for works that ooze and sweat, stretching in ways that result in physical abnormalities. Exhibited at a height at which they can be closely studied, Kovats encourages the eye to follow the layers of wax as they ripple and undulate, as well as the flakes of glitter which intersperse the coloured folds. On viewing these metamorphic sculptures, one becomes aware of Kovats’ exploration of both the artificial and the organic. To make these works, Kovats used ‘Mountain’, 2001, the design of which she based on a machine invented around 1900. Kovats poured colours of molten wax into the machine, allowing it to cool and set into sedimentary layers. She subsequently placed lead shot on top of the strata to act like a gravitational force to contain the layers, so that when she turned the mechanism’s handle, the piston, moving forward with a force like a tectonic plate, compressed the wax into hulking folds and ripples.
‘Tilted’ was at 5 Howick Place from March to October 2015.