Goldsmiths: MFA 2007 Survey
New York, NY.- Cottelston Advisors is pleased to present Goldsmiths: MFA 2007 Survey - a project celebrating the impact of Goldsmiths College and the London art scene. Curated by Jennifer Thatcher, the exhibition is a survey of the MFA class of 2007. The show will be held from August 29 th through September 16 th at White Box, 525 West 26 th Street. Major support for the exhibition is being provided by Somerset Partners, LLC.
"We are very excited about the project. Given the market's focus on youth, it seemed natural to bring together Goldsmiths and the New York art world. We are looking forward to seeing these talented, young artists present fresh views. Additionally, it has been an honor to work with such a venerable institution as Goldsmiths." Michael Sellinger, art advisor with Cottelston Advisors.
Goldsmiths has one of the most competitive Visual Arts programs in the world; numerous past graduates have won the illustrious Turner Prize. The artists in the show include Jeanine Woollard, winner of the Beck's Futures 2006 Student Bursary award, Ryan O'Connor, co-founder of the artist collective Madagascar Institute, and Gudni Gunnarsson, who exhibited at the Pompidou Centre in Paris as a member of the artist collective Poni. Additional participants include: Emanuel Almborg, Richard Clements, Erin Crowe, Sarah Gilder, Robb Jamieson, Yuko Kamei, Maria-Brigita Karantzi, Sonia Morange, Christopher Paquet and Raymond Taudin-Chabot.
The show is being curated by Jennifer Thatcher, a London-based independent curator and critic, and will include works by 13 artists from the first year class working in painting, sculpture, photography, installation, and video. An essay by Jennifer Thatcher will accompany the exhibition, exploring some of the themes of the show that range from the myth of British chivalry to existentialist studies of businessmen and why rock music might be better than contemporary art.
In addition to Somerset Partners, LLC, sponsors include: Altoids, Budwei ser, Christiania Vodka and flavorpill.net.
Cottelston Advisors is a full service art advisory firm. In addition to producing art events, Cottelston advises collectors and assists corporations in integrating their brands with the visual arts. www.cottelston.com
For additional information, please contact:
Michael Sellinger
Cottelston Advisors
917.514.7007
msellinger@cottelston.com
Thatcher Essay
Goldsmiths College is the most notorious art school in Britain. Famously the birthplace of the Young British Artists in the late 1980s, Goldsmiths invented the very idea of the celebrity art school for a celebrity-obsessed era. Lazy art critics, curators, and collectors were suddenly motivated to venture into deepest south London for Goldsmiths degree shows. Quick: get down there before Charles Saatchi snaps everything up! Quick: find the art stars of tomorrow - then drop them just as soon as the next year graduates!
Not much has changed. If the ever-growing warren of artist-run spaces and young gallerists in London's trendy East End has provided another arena in which to see young artists' work, art colleges are still the most convenient means by which critics and curators can take the temperature of the current contemporary art scene. And Goldsmiths still reigns supreme: its degree shows are bigger, bolder, and more exhausting than any other in Britain. Saatchi still sniffs about.
Yet if the excitement and laboratory atmosphere still prevail at Goldsmiths, the insecurity that until recently accompanied the here-today-gone-tomorrow London art scene is thankfully dissipating. Today's new crop of Goldsmiths artists can look forward to a postgraduate future where there are endless spaces in which to exhibit, an expanding cluster of art fairs to seduce collectors, and a general public less hostile to contemporary art; a culture that is more interested in nurturing young artists than continually replacing them. Moreover, now that its infrastructure is fully established, the new London art scene can afford to be more international in its outlook, in direct contrast to the insularity of the YBAs. This new openness, maturity, and confidence are everywhere evident in the work of this year's best Goldsmiths MFA students, whose nationalities include Greek, Icelandic, American, Japanese, and German.
While a do-it-yourself aesthetic has for the past couple of decades been the hallmark of British sculpture, the new sculpture boasts the skills of the expert welder or joiner, the result of days laboring in the foundry. Richard Clements and Ryan O'Connor make heavy, robust sculptures that both revel in a seemingly old-fashioned notion of masculinity and question the starkness of the Modernist macho aesthetic. A hybrid of classic 20 th -century furniture design and surrealist sculpture, an O'Connor chair, for example, might answer the Modernist quest to balance form and function, did it not appear to be growing branches. Clements works rather in the mid-point between the urban and the rural; he examines our relationship to the natural and what forms these interactions create. His wrought iron sculpture Fountain and its companion piece Decoy , an elegant swan-shaped garden ornament, celebrate the non-institutionalized freedom of rural aesthetics.
If Modernism was obsessed with the idea of a sleek technotopia, Sonia Morange prefers the behind-the-scenes messiness of our gadget-obsessed society; she paints electrical wires. With her expressionistic style and jewel-colored palette she brings a nostalgic, sometimes even erotic, whimsy to her still lives of tangled bundles of wires and the untidy backs of computer monitors. Christopher Paquet , on the other hand, mixes high Modernism with folkloric allegory in his imposing diptych The Power of the Majesty , in which a stag rises proudly from a fairytale woodland scene. Curtained on either side by heavy black brushstrokes, the scene hovers precariously between utopian and dystopian.
Maria-Brigita Karantzi 's and Gudni Gunnarsson 's installations use the technique of magic realism to lure the viewer into an Alice in Wonderland world of topsy-turvy scale and puzzling philosophical conundrums. Karantzi's miniature sculpture Impossible features two ladders over a dollop of blue paint; leaning against each other, the only route over the paint-mountain is to climb up one impossibly steep ladder, over the top and down the other. Her mischief continues in Shit! in which a tiny figurine stands next to an overflowing toilet; surrounded by a string of festive fairy lights, hers is a cruel shrine to the unfortunate man's bowel disorder. Both artists have a magpie's eye for the discarded and unloved gems - scraps of mirror, shiny bin bags - of our consumer society; Gunnarsson recycled an entire abandoned house in his native Reykjavik.
The fragile male ego is explored in the videos of Emanuel Almborg , Raymond Taudin-Chabot , and Robb Jamieson , and in the paintings of Erin Crowe . Taudin-Chabot creates meticulously choreographed existentialist tableaux of contemporary businessmen. His films study the almost imperceptible maneuvers that men perform to signal or attempt to improve on their position in the office pecking order. Moving as slowly and deliberately as a Bill Viola video, the men anxiously scrutinize their stress-worn reflections in the office bathroom mirror or studiously avoid each other's predatory gazes.
Erin Crowe paints portraits of those whose egos require constant affirmation; she preys mainly on businessmen and politicians. If on some occasions Crowe's adulation of male authority figures might suggest the psychopathology of a deluded fan, on others she plays the role of the official corporate portraitist. Her winsome charm and perfect timing have even made her a minor celebrity: she was invited to be the CNBC artist in residence when the news station was unable to interview the reclusive Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan on the day of his retirement. For this exhibition, Crowe turns her disarmingly flattering eye on Fidel Castro and the philanthropist Warren Buffet.
Emanuel Almborg and Robb Jamieson look rather to the insecurities of the young Western male. Part docudrama, part animation, Almborg's film Major takes the viewer on a labyrinthine trip through the fantasy world of a teenager, who, with his imaginary alter-ego, attempts to escape the stifling ennui of middle-class family life. As the film shifts perspective, however, we watch his parents battle with their own frustrations at the stubbornness and hostility of their son. Performed by actors, Major was in fact made in collaboration with a real family, who helped write the fictional script to try and tackle their very real issues.
One of Robb Jamieson's films asks us to believe that the artist is playing the guitar for the very first time. Strutting and strumming away in front of the camera with all the attitude of a seasoned lead guitarist, it takes a while to register that he really is playing badly. Many young male artists make punky films that express their teenage musical affiliations, but, in its earnestness, Jamieson's film is unexpectedly touching. In predetermining his failure to play well, moreover - the title of the film reveals that this is the first and last time he will play - Jamieson seeks once and for all to kill many an artist's secret dream of becoming a rock star. Music might be more appealing than contemporary art, Jamieson suggests, but it also takes a lot of hard work to become a musician, so better stick to what you're good at.
Jeanine Woollard , recently awarded the Beck's Futures Student Bursary, also tries an impatient hand at an activity that would more usually require several years of dedication to perfect: fencing. In one gallery performance, she enlists her father, whose working-class background sits at odds with the aristocratic heritage of this sport, into training a group of artists. A Charlie Chaplin-style soundtrack over the documentary footage underlines the slapstick potential of the sport, and the absurdity of its being played inside a white cube gallery with inadequately protective outfits made by Woollard herself. Another film, Kiss Fencing , aims to capture fencing's original context, the medieval courtly love tradition. Here, Woollard and her fencing partner substitute kisses for swords; trying to score pecks, the fight looks more like an elaborate bird mating ritual. Woollard is a post-feminist Romantic artist: she'd like a man to pick up her handkerchief after her, but if necessary she'll get her hands dirty too.
If Woollard's films resurrect an archaic British identity, in contrast to the Britpop cool of the YBAs, Yuko Kamei addresses the difficulty for a foreigner of establishing a British identity. Kitaika tells the story of a Chinese girl whose name, Aowen, is unpronounceable not only to her new English compatriots, but also, as an ancient Chinese name meaning the charming 'flying in literature', is equally problematic in her birth country. Finally settling on the name 'Kitaika' (Chinese girl), given her by her husband's Bulgarian grandmother, she graciously resigns herself to remaining a perpetual foreigner.
Finally, Sarah Gilder 's Baywatch satirizes another pervasive stereotype: the all-American ideal of the buxom blonde beauty. Her version of the cult soft-porn TV series swaps the golden sands of Santa Monica for the grey environs of an anonymous suburban street. Shivering slightly in her swimsuit on the wet street corner, Gilder's Baywatch babe readies herself for a rather different type of surf-wave, a drenching by a passing car.
Jennifer Thatcher