SLMpickings - an arts and culture blog
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Arts & entertainment

Art for instagram's sake?

8/9/2016

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A while back I read an article on The Atlantic titled ‘Art for Instagram’s Sake’ by Katherine Schweb, which questioned whether immersive exhibitions were changing the nature of the gallery experience. Undoubtedly visitors are spending more time looking at the art through their phone, ‘meticulously choosing filters to best highlight the vibrant colours and textures of the art before them’, or using the exhibition backdrop for the ‘ultimate selfie’. As she rightly comments, the phenomenon brings art to the masses in a way that hasn’t been achieved before, making people more curious and perhaps more likely to visit galleries themselves. Like her, I disagree that it’s nobody’s place – art critic, art institution, or cultural elite – to say what ways art should or shouldn’t be experienced by an individual, and this is precisely why I found the recent Yoyoi Kusama’s exhibition at London’s Victoria Miro gallery to be a disappointment.

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Art : A force for unification?

7/12/2016

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Since I last posted over a month ago, Britain has made the momentous decision to leave the EU, David Cameron has resigned, the Labour party is in disarray, hate crime has increased, the country will now have its second female conservative PM, and Nigel Farage has - and I quote – ‘got his life back.’ Meanwhile the USA continues to wave around its Trump card and behave like Black Lives don’t Matter.

It’s safe to say the world is going through increasingly uncertain times, but in the midst of the madness art remains. Both in the capital and my hometown of Kingston Upon Hull exciting things have been taking place, providing a welcome break from news otherwise dominated by all the signs of a fractured society.
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21 years of the chelsea art fair

4/22/2016

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The Chelsea Art Fair has been a key date in the International Art Fair calendar for 21 years.

This year, 30 leading UK and International galleries have once again come together in the elegant Chelsea Old Town Hall for four days, from Thursday 21 April until Sunday 24 April. 


SLMpickings headed to the VIP Birthday preview on Wednesday evening to check out the beautiful art on display this year. ​

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The beautiful interaction:  teamLab

4/19/2016

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Founded in 2001, teamLab is an artistic collaboration with over 400 members, bringing together professionals from various fields of practice in the information age. The interdisciplinary group work to produce completely immersive environments using digital technology.
 
They weren’t immediately well received in the art world, but since 2011 they have exploded onto the international scene, exhibiting in Japan, the USA, France, Australia, Turkey and just last year, the UK.

​I speak to Takashi Kudo about digital technology's important role in promoting positive relations between people.

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The City Garden: Rebecca Louise Law

4/4/2016

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Imagine rows of blooming flowers and central London is unlikely to be the first place that springs to mind, but floral artist Rebecca Louise Law had other ideas for the city last week. Rebecca brought a five-day spectacle from 16-21 March to St Christopher’s Place, suspending 1,200 fresh flowers above the popular shopping and dining spot, located just off Oxford Street. 

Flowers are known to represent life passing, love blossoming, and more aptly in this case, spring starting. An artist renowned for using nature as the medium of her works, Rebecca has been working with flowers for over 15 years, after experimenting with flowers during her BA Hons Fine Art studies at Newcastle University, where she graduated from in 2004. Having grown up in the Cambridgeshire countryside, and spending numerous family holidays in the remote British countryside, experiencing nature was a fundamental part of Rebecca’s childhood. Furthermore, her father’s vocation as Head Gardener of a National Trust property played a role in inspiring her work; nature was almost destined to become her sole inspiration. Rebecca’s work tries to recreate the immersion in nature experienced in the countryside, using it as a buffer from the daily city grind.

The ephemeral quality of flowers provide challenges for Rebecca that 2D oil painting couldn’t, and the transition from vibrant, fresh smelling blooms to skeletal twigs is something Rebecca hopes to capture. She embraces the process of change, and is keen to preserve nature - it is important to her that the flowers used in her works are not wasted. 

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The bizarre cocktail ‘Champagne Life’... and the more poignant REVELATIONS

2/7/2016

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The Saatchi Gallery is toasting it’s 30th Birthday with ‘Champagne Life’, its first all-female exhibition. It was the gender-specific promise which inspired me to visit; Saatchi and his crew successfully made enough of a point about it to fool me into thinking it would in some way inform what was on show. Critics have thus far collectively noted that the show had no real theme or curatorial arrangement, and that the all-female element was nothing more than ‘tokenism’...and on the whole I’d have to agree. Very little information was to hand to suggest reasoning behind the chosen artists or work, leaving nothing but the knowledge of shared gender to guide you through the show.

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I searched for meaning on these grounds, and found it to be lurking in the domesticity implied by Maha Malluh’s ‘Food For Thought’ pans, the mundane yet essential objects signifying the nurturing mother figure; the tenderness in Seung Ah Palik’s ‘Maitreya', bare flesh touching bare flesh; and Alice Anderson’s giant bobbin ‘Bound’, just waiting for a giant woman to pick it up and begin making and mending. This is, however, where it stopped.

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Such meanings were ascribed by myself as a way to make sense of the combination of works bundled together. Shellie Sojhanvari’s taxidermy horse ‘Moje Sabz’ and Mia Feuer’s ‘Jerusalem Donkey’ seemed at odds with the theme I was trying to build, serving instead as a sign to stop looking for something that really wasn’t there.
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lumiere london

1/17/2016

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Lumiere London
This evening marks the end of London's first major light festival, Lumiere London, which has seen the capital's iconic architecture transformed with 3D projections, installations and unique light works. The 4 day festival ran from Thursday 14 - Sunday 17 January, every evening from 6.30pm-10.30pm . Produced by Artichoke and supported by the Mayor of London, it has widely been hailed as a success, with works shown in central locations, from Kings Cross, Mayfair, Picadilly, Regent Street and St James's to Trafalgar Square and Westminster. 

My favourite works were Janet Echelman's 1.8 London at Oxford Circus and Patrice Warrener's The Light of the Spirit at Westminster Abbey. 
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In the moment: Viewer as Art

1/13/2016

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​As the final months of 2015 arrived and the year sped towards its final hour, I visited a flurry of participatory art exhibitions across London, all of which had something in common. In a city which constantly churns out exhibitions and events, it was, as ever the immersive shows which won my time and appreciation. The Old Masters never did appeal to me; a child of the times, it has always been Contemporary Art which strikes a chord. 
 
Viewing art is always fascinating on some level, but truly experiencing art is something altogether more memorable. With so much visual stimulation in today’s world, now more than ever it is not enough just to look, we want to get involved. Art which forces the viewer to in some way participate is not new. In the 1960s American artist Bruce Nauman’s ‘Performance Corridor’ forced his viewers to walk down a 20 inch wide corridor, and experience the constraints of space - not too dissimilarly to Höller’s opening corridor in his 2015 ‘Decision’ show, albeit with light rather than space being withheld. Such experiences place the viewer in situations which stimulate the senses and provoke a reaction; this is the artist’s intent.

When the viewer becomes a performer in the work, they are given a role to play in creating its meaning. It is the participation itself which completes this kind of work; unlike a painting which needs no viewer to add the finishing touch, without the viewer participatory art remains incomplete.
On your wavelength, SLMpickings
States of Mind, SLMpickings

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Sharing the cultural wealth: the poppies come to yorkshire

12/30/2015

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One of the reasons I love London is its amazing cultural offer. To my mind there’s nowhere else quite like it. During my time as an arts student in Yorkshire, many a Megabus journey was made to see blockbuster exhibitions at the Tate and such like over the years, and it was widely accepted that if you wanted to work in the arts, London was THE place to be. 

The exodus of artists seemingly leaving the capital is a sign that the times are perhaps a-changin'. Given that artists play a vital role in regeneration, it can only be a good thing to have a rising artistic presence in other UK towns and cities. That said, there’s little to celebrate about artistic talent being priced out of an area, and this is fast becoming one of London’s major failings. 

What I am pleased to see, however, is iconic art which has wowed the capital, and indeed world, making its way up the M1 to be enjoyed by the rest of the country. 
Wave Poppies, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, SLMpickings

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‘Straight’ Talking: Ai Weiwei

12/13/2015

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Ai WeiWei, Straight, SLMpickings
Today the Royal Academy closes its doors to Ai Weiwei’s first British survey show. An artist arguably more famed for his political activism than his works alone, Weiwei's blockbuster show was bound to be met with mixed reviews. Like most art, particularly that which comes with a political message, his is not to everyones taste.

He is renowned for creating works which speak of exploitation and injustice, particularly pertaining to the Chinese Government. Whilst I appreciate the concepts behind his work, not all of it resonates with me and whilst I wouldn’t go so far as to say it myself, I can see why some critics label it nothing more than a spectacle. That said, his enormous ‘Straight’ installation certainly wowed.

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