Press	Archive
Persona Non Grata Alia Pathan, Interface, a-n The Artists Information Company
Curated by photographer and video artist Ben Judd, Persona Non Grata presents a range of film and video works from 1970 to 2007. The term Persona Non Grata translates as an unwelcome person. In addition to its use in legal matters, especially related to those of diplomacy, it is also a 2003 American documentary film by Oliver Stone exploring the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. And so with the underlying notions of two, or many opposing sides in disagreement, we encounter this exhibition. In John Smith's Museum Piece (2004) the artist takes us on a journey exploring his German hotel at night. The contemplative camera eye and diary-like voiceover make it unclear whether he is talking to us or himself. Using his location as a starting point, he compares its history with current world events. Subtitles stream along the bottom of the screen reminiscent of television news updates, while we hear the potent voiceover of the place's dark history. Smith begins to draw parallels in revealing that a company who sells spray to remove graffiti from Holocaust memorials today, was the same company which manufactured gas for the concentration camps during the Second World War. He assumes links between paying to go to a Jewish museum, and funding the Israeli Government, but then dismisses it as an absurd connection. I left this piece wondering whether the artist had assumed a role to be disillusioning and authoritative. Had he used the medium as a soap box, or was this stream of consciousness a narrative of the archetypal lonely man in a foreign hotel? An earlier Smith film, ‘Girl Chewing Gum' (1975) is projected onto the back wall of the basement and greets us on entry. As the largest projection in the room it retains its impact as the backdrop for Gillian Wearing's ‘Homage to the woman with the bandaged face who I saw walking yesterday down Walworth Road' (1995) which is displayed at the front of the exhibition. Spanning nearly forty years the works compete to be noticed. Compared to many moving image exhibitions where the sound bleed of looped works induces a cacophonic and uncomfortable viewing, here it was reduced with the addition of headphones or short periods of black after each video was played. This allowed a pause in monologues or music and made way for adjacent screens to flicker on. While maintaining the presence of such eccentric personas, each one struggling and vying for personal attention, it was now possible for quieter works to be heard. With this change in dynamics I came across several quieter pieces, two of which were videos by Alan Currall. The one which held my attention the most was the video performance ‘Message to My Best Friend' (2000). The monitor playing this work was placed on top of an old, out of order monitor acting as its plinth. Here the artist speaks directly to his audience. His subtle tone, hesitative speech and solemn expression appear honest while still straddling the fence between cathartic confession and theatre. Another more subdued work was Ben Judd's ‘I Love' (2003) displayed on the smallest screen in the room. I doubt this was an act of modesty from the curator himself; instead this small frame acts as an eyelet offering an unnerving glance into today's amateur pornographic industry. The slowed down footage pulls the viewer in to observe closely. The video's low, possibly hand held angle suggests secret filming of the subjects, who are in turn photographing their own subjects. The viewer becomes a voyeur in the triple-layered work and the tension builds, posing the question who is watching who? Do they know I am watching? Through headphones we hear the protagonist/stalker's voiceover, a narration that bears likeness to Smith's film, where the artist describes what is happening like a director's commentary. Judd takes the gritty reality of something we usually see stylized and perfected for our enjoyment and presents it back to us in an even darker form, exposing those as they exploit others. Initially the resonance of mingled voices in conversation allures us down the stairs of the gallery, but it is not until we are immersed in this exhibition that we find ourselves caught amid a crowd of competing personas. Hidden underground the viewer is greeted by an array of glowing television screens and projections in a dimly lit, white space. Presented at irregular heights and at different angles, works either confront the viewer or shy away from them. This arrangement encourages the viewer's movement within, between and around the works. Some works are displayed on monitors on top of what look like trestle tables, and several other works are projected onto the walls persuading the viewer into the centre of the space. The ‘pic n mix' of sounds and images that build up the exhibition fuse, tangle and repel, seducing the viewer away from one work to a neighboring one where contrasting opinions and confessions are revealed. Old televisions are switched off and appear broken or functionless, but are used as plinths for working monitors. This inventive approach to presentation employs the medium as a symbol of permanency. It demonstrates the progression of moving image over time through the comparison of old with new. The frame may break, or become redundant but the medium itself will continue to develop and give rise to new ideas. In conveying a lineage of moving image works from the past 40 years it is possible for the viewer to gain a kind of ‘brief history of film and video'. This brings to light how the concepts used by the pioneers of the medium still resonate now. From Smith directing the world to move in ‘Girl Chewing Gum' to Wearing adopting a mask in ‘Homage...' we encounter each artist assuming the role of a protagonist; a vehicle through which they can vicariously deliver a narrative or confession, whether real or fictional. In this sense, Persona Non Grata may be a catharsis or expulsion of the artists' alter egos. The exorcised thoughts or feelings load the gallery space in their battle for consideration. The truth as to what we are witnessing - an artist's confession or the guise of a fictional character - fluctuates between the works, but is ultimately at the discretion of the viewer and relies on us to fill in the gaps.
Dan Perfect at Chisenhale Nicola Harvey, Frieze, 26 February 2008
There is apparently a new drug-resistant superbug burrowing its way into a minority of the San Francisco population. It’s been named USA300 and by all accounts it could cause havoc on a mammoth scale. Under a microscope though, enlarged to titan proportions, this noxious bacteria is a visual splendour. Phosphorescent greens and an inky teal, usually reserved for the depths of the ocean, delicately encircle the pink nucleus. Such abstract precision reminds me that manmade attempts at luminosity are so often belittled by the boldness of nature’s own. The recent paintings of British artist Dan Perfect attempt to evoke a similar spectacle, but (aptly) succeed in revealing a Petri dish-type imagined universe defined by garish colours, morphed organic or architectural forms, and floating fragments of comic characters. It is a world in which even Ren and Stimpy would struggle to be heard. Dominating the cavernous gallery space of Chisenhale are seven large paintings in oils and acrylics, each battling with the other for attention. At first glance the paintings could, reductively, be described as slightly manic abstractions. There is an obvious predilection for vivid mark-making, yet Perfect is engaged with neither the tactility nor limitations of the medium itself. There is a contrived deliberateness in each stroke that alludes to the possibility of every element of the work being representative. Aleph (2007) first appears to be a mash-up of earthy tones and harrowed scribbles, cemented to the canvas by a spraypainted blue dot. In contrast, Easter (2007) is a fragile network of spring tones, tightly controlled, it appears, by the remnants of stencil templates or silk screens. Any traces of the free-association drawings we are told inform the large paintings remain secondary to a well-devised design. But Easter in particular negates the artist’s concerted efforts to control the representation of his vast painted universe. Dominating the left side of the work is an unmarked landscape of raw linen from which the painted festivities seem to recoil – revealing a surreal, barren wasteland. It is a successful counter to the graphic abundance evident in the majority of the work. The micro-details are only a part of the overwhelming nature of this show. Perfect seems to enjoy playing with the scope of the canvas and succeeds in evoking a different, almost antithetical reaction to each piece based on the viewer’s proximity to the canvas. Aleph, for example, becomes suggestively architectural when viewed from a distance. Grey and unrelenting, it is an environmental meditation, a gut reaction to the grimy landscape of East London on a wet winter’s day (which makes the accompanying press release’s comparison to the St Ives School painters Patrick Heron and Peter Lanyon unsurprising). At a distance, away from the microscope, Easter offers an insight into the mindscape of a gaming-obsessed youngster who dreams in technicolour and whose vision is punctuated by cropped manga characters, barren deserts and lollipops. Mutated cartoon forms feature prominently in both Perfect’s past work and the current exhibition, demonstrating not just a visual awareness of and interest in the work of illustrators like Steve Ditko and John Kricfalusi, but an appropriation of the ideas that govern the Marvel Comics universe. Although American comic books often reference the sociopolitical, their alternate worlds are oases in which characters can bend the rules of human nature and societal strictures. They posit a system of polarities: good versus evil; sickness versus healing; death versus life; abstraction versus representation. Perfect’s is a similarly conflicted world. His paintings leave the viewer feeling either repelled or harmonious. One is not quite sure just how vile the subject matter really is; appropriate reflections of inner turmoil or not, there is simply no order or abstraction in Dan Perfect’s world.
Dan Perfect Chisenhale Gallery, London Cherry Smith, Art Review, Issue 20, p.15
You’re skeltering down a fire escape, chewing Bazooka Joes, listening to Glen Gould on your iPod, teetering at times on high heels, half macho, half meek, reading a Penguin Classic and answering your mobile phone, and it all works, this intellectual and physical multitasking, a mayhem that only makes sense temporarily while you’re inside it, before you lose it, trip, choke, go back and say what? This is the sense Dan Perfect’s paintings give you, with their layered, giddy abstraction that seems to balance on the edge of caffinated calamity. Here is Abstract Expressionism reined in, compressed, printed over, lasered and digitised, painting that exudes a noisy lyricism, an effervescent musicality that wipes the insouciance off the current graffitti-meets-graphic-designer cool. These are urban microfictions, all distant but interlinked, tangential narratives hopping between different time frames like a videogame. There’s something decidedly English about Perfect’s dour-weather browns and greens, and then eclectic in their visual references, from Karen Appel to Charles Rennie Mackintosh. God knows how Perfect holds it all together, but he does, making the old formulae of applied craziness or controlled chaos seem irrelevant. The paintings swing between a studied mask-face or patch of spray-paint smoothness and improvised stretches of palette-knifed thick, pure colour. There are some snakes and ladders to play with – bridges, waldways, tower blocks and crooked skulls that belong to Perfect’s own comic shorthand. Then he draws you into quieter swathes of raw canvas and delicate patterning that would look right on 1950’s curtains. This is an adult, with the energy of a kid, having fun with ‘ the drunkeness of things being various’. The blothes, blots and blocks of what’s beneath create a mind map that seems to try to ask, ‘How can we manage to speak to one another in the midst of this mess/mass?’ But the artist clearly believes we can, and his vitality and purity of purpose are infectious. His gorgeous accrual of alphabets and sketches of joy in paint sings. It feels like fragmented dynamism of frenzied Intenet-surfing that answers your questions – and more – and leaves you with a satisfied saturation. Village (all work 2007) is the most ‘peopled’, animated by characters on imagines might be called Bubble and Squeak, and it strives for a nursery innocence that seems unsure of itself. Better the darker pieces – the microscopic cells and biological pipework suggested in Sandman, or when he lets the proliferation of marks do the emoting for you, as In Uproar and Aleph, which signal the misshapen, haphazard architecture of Hackney and the sudden colour burst from a window box in a grisly, exhausted estate.
Satoru Aoyama Helen Sumpter, Time Out; No;1913; April 18 - 24 2007
The debate on the dividing line between craft and fine art is largely a redundant one. If one uses craft-based skills to subvery or transcend the medium, as grayson Perry does in ceramics and textiles, then it rightly functions as art, but used to create a purely decorative or functional object then it's still craft. Aoyama's detailed machine embroideries doesn't quite manage either feat. Rendered in such intricate stithing that from a short distance they appear to be paintings, their success or failure as artworks rests on the subject matter. Aoyama choses everyday objects - a bunch of artificial roses, a fake gold chain, a small figurine. The fact that these objects, which have been invested with so much labour in their representation, are themselves imitations, asks the question of what gives an object value; authenticity, beauty, monetary worth, or sentimental attachment. Less ambiguous and, as a consequence, less interesting are the two embroidered coffee stains. Not beautiful enough as objects in their own right, these works don't quite overcome their origins as presumably unwanted accident. It's all too easy to be seduced by technique, but if the immediate response is to ponder on the complexity of the process and how long it must have taken to prduce one of these works (between one and two months) then perhaps the answer to which end of the craft - art spectrum Aoyama belongs is the former. Maybe this uncertainty is intentional but with only seven works, perhaps there's also not quite enough here to judge.
Robert McNally Skye Sherwin, Art Review; Issue 9 March 2007 Future Greats; 25 artists you need to know.
A pagoda nestles on top of a precarious stack of giant biscuits. Its base of KitKats, shortbread and bourbns forms an inverted pyramid, onto a double row of milkbiscuits, balanced house-of-cards style. Or maybe it's the apgoda that's miniaturised, with its walls of cardboard and iced Party Ring mobiles, shrunk down to size by an imagination with scant reguard for gravity, and realised in a hyperreal, pencil-on-paper draghtsmanship. So How Was It? (2006) goes the deadpan title, perhaps the greeting emanating from the little figure peeking out from the building's dark door, or the artist's jaunty comeback to anyone contemplating his fiendishly intricate witch's house of cake. The work is outstamding for both its technical sophistication and exceptional confidence with visual metaphor, using imagery that is controlled yet boldly open-ended. This is but one of the fantastical environments, conjured into being over many months by the Gateshead-based twenty-four-year-old artist Robert McNally. An earlier work, Gonzo (2005), a crazed mix of cacti and fly agaric mushrooms that dwarf Doric columns, Victorian railway arches and motorways, reveals an affinity with Terry Gilliam's surreal Monty Python artwork combined with a penchant for the tripped out, Hunter S. Thompson-style wierdness. McNally's obsessive involvement with the act of drawing, coupled with a boyish love of iconic transgressors, locate him somewhere near Paul Noble's pencil worls of shit and sex. But while Noble has created his dystopian Sodom across years' worth of drawings, McNally's work sparks a big bang and a new univerise with each undertaking. McNally say the drawings begin with his need to translate an idea or a feeling that can't be expressed in words. So How Was It?, for example, was inspired by a recent trip to Japan, where freeways, skyscrapers, traditional buildings and the precisely made yet fragile cardboard dwellings of the homeless all jostle one another in cities built on earthquake fault-lines. Of his forthcoming first solo show , at London's One in the Other gallery, McNally reflects that having to produce eight new works in the time frame he might previously have spent on only one has enabled him to stretch his technical prowess even further. Unsuprisingly, spending 16 hours a day drawing, McNally says he has a strong right arm, but before you think it, he also points out that he has excellant eyesight.
Art: LUKE CAULFIELD Thomas Viney, Dazed and Confused no.142, October 2006 (p.50)
Half of his meticulous and unsettling paintings are created by his twisted alter-ego - will the real Luke Caulfield please step forward? Caulfield's dark and brooding images, gleaned from the aesthetics of heavy metal and horror films, stare out from roughly constructed wooden cages. Imposing in their scale alone, the black and white paintings are so deftly rendered that they have left many viewers questioning whether what they are looking at are in fact paintings at all, and not photographs. Caulfield himself is shy, but meticulous in explaining his work, which could, on first look seem juvenile or blunt. The paintings are, in fact, the creations of an elaborate hoax the artist plays on himself, and are not, he explains, formed entirely in his own mind. Half of the series of works which make up his latest show are created by his alter-ego "Hurm Must", a construct who allows him to explore a darker and more psychologically fraught area. Caulfield's real opus is his much bolder, precise black and white paintings of bleak corridors and gloomy elevators, mimicking Hurm Must's more colourful and confrontational creations. It is hard to align two such disparate areas until he explains the theme of duplication. Once more revealed, it is latent everywhere you look - Hurm Must seems to be inspired by images from the world of heavy metal t-shirts; t-shirt designers in turn lift imagery from medieval devotional paintings; while Luke Caulfield, in his role as the documenter, re-appropriates Hurm Must creations. "My work needs to constantly divide and resurrect itself in order to survive, it's a bit like a bacteria in that respect." Hurm Must's independence, the idea that he exists and makes independent choices, is one of the most seductive aspects of Caulfield's work. "I never know what he's going to do," Caulfield explains. "The imagery just comes out as it comes out. It is a completely different way of making a painting. Of course, there are some allusions to horror films but they are all to do with duplication, which, again, happens a lot in horror films - reanimated zombies, body snatchers, vampires." According to his six-year-old daughter, "one of the paintings is reality, and the other is unreality." Taking wisdom from the mouths of babes is always advisable, but seeing the works in the flesh will nonetheless leave you wondering which is which.