Joshua Uvieghara
Goberlization: Movement in Iconoclash
Saturday–Sunday 3–4 October 2009 11am–5pm
As part of Open at Phoenix Brighton Joshua Uvieghara will be converting his studio, into an installation of paintings; and objects
which take on new meaning through the act of painting.
Studio 453b
Phoenix Brighton
10-14 Waterloo Place
Brighton BN2 9NB UK
www.josh-uvie.co.uk
Joshua Uvieghara
Goberlization: Movement in Iconoclash
As part of Open at Phoenix Brighton Joshua Uvieghara will be converting his studio, into an installation of paintings; and objects which take on new meaning through the act of painting.
The pouring element of the painting is, in a way, seminal to subsequent, or simultaneous elements of my painting strategy.
In pouring/spreading the paint, through using gravity, the movement in the first instance spreads until it has reached a level of perception I am satisfied with, yet once static an impression of movement still somehow remains, though at different speeds this relationship helps in touching on an important dynamic concerning my work.
The layers and displacements that are formed in this particular process and the way various combinations of objects, that these processes imbue with new meaning- draw parallels with the alchemy of making cocktails.
Seductive concoctions come about through exploration and investigation.
I am interested in as many processes involved in painting as the impressions one gets from the visual flood we see around us. The use of everyday and familiar imagery- as a means of introducing dissonant and mysterious subtleties, is a way of making cultural portraits.
Painting is a way of pushing my thoughts around the picture plane to distil something real from these impressions. Exploring how these ideas spill off the periphery from the flatness of the picture plane into installation based work offers a parallel means of exploration from time to time.
Untitled (Panoptic Figure),2009, Oil and household paint on board.
installation view
from left to right:
1 Balkanized a mere expression of my brother.,2009, Oil and household paint on board.
2 Out of the River, 2009, Oil and household paint on board.
3 Sozopol, 2009, Oil and household paint on board.
installation view
The December/January 2002 issue of Art Review has an article ‘Let’s Get To Work’ about the artist let activity, influentially defined by the ‘Freeze’ show in the Docklands (Hirst, YBAs), that led to the proliferation of independent projects by artist also acting in the capacity of curator in the face of commercial and established institutions. The rest is history. How this has happened in the formal educational context is another matter given the propensity of institutions needing to measure and prescribe what an art education should be quite restrictively. There are interesting models that address this issue in art education. 
Crosskick explores a number of exploratory projects with a number of educational institutions across europe in order to shape a format linking art education and curatorial practice. A format that serves as ‘experimental stages and protective spaces for art which exists in the space between two poles: art no longer produced in an educational context, but not yet established in exhibition spaces.’ This touches on the necessity to keep reshaping the conditions for the autonomy the artists practice within the restrictive structures that can be imposed in educational institutions.
Some students drawing the outline of each others bodies, 2008.
Curatorial aspects are inherent in the way an event is set up in a particular order so it considers the psychological aspects concerning the way the viewer receives the work. I explored this with a group of Fine Art students on the Foundation course at Northbrook college, we needed to respond to the immediate environment, so we tried to appropriate what they had in the classroom/studio space into a context that worked, since they are working towards their final project and need (have needed) to start thinking along these lines. This is some work from some of the students:
The follwing are some accounts, thoughts, relevant text and reviews cued from a visit to the Tate Triennial in march, with some MA printmaking students from the University of Brighton. 
Bob and Roberta Smith, Installation, Altermodern, Tate.
Bob and Roberta smith does a different installation each week based on discussions with curator Nicolas Bourriaud. Smiths makes painted signs and constructed assemblages that play on subversive humor and political sloganeering one piece relates a dialogue where he asked curator what he was listening to on his ipod, it was:
Nigeria Special CD.
March 24, Private view: Wish You were here MA printmaking students from the University of Brighton.
Peter Mosely, Wrapped Figure
Ros Morely, The Blue Mosque.
Marcus Irwin, Untitled
The zone of interpretation
If, as Barthes, Eco, Dickie, Rorty, Danto, Gadamer and many others would argue, the audience/observer is fundamentally implicated in the making of meaning in art, if the artwork is both the material event or object and the unfolding of interpretations that accompany it, then we are all participants in the making of the work. John Danvers networks 1 article
Bob and Roberta Smith, Floating studio performance, Brighton 2007.
Bob and Roberta Smith, Floating studio installation, Grey Area Gallery, Brighton.
20 April, went to’ The Print in 3D’ Symposium at the V&A. Richard Woods gave a presentation of his work. I was interested in the way he constructs installations based on basic mono-prints.
Richard Woods, Installation, Gallery space at Paul Smith in Shibuya.
How Collage Became Assemblage, Roger Shattuck
…………When Peter Selz arrived from the West Coast in 1958 as Curator at the Modern, he brought with him the idea of a show on “Collage and the Object.” Apparently Seitz had been thinking along similar lines and was assigned the project which opened in October 1961. After considerable in-house wrangling, Seitz had changed the title to “The Art of Assemblage” in order to avoid the primarily painterly term collage.
In the Foreword, of the show catalogue Seitz states that he wishes to survey “the metaphysics of assemblage rather than its history.” On the same page he provides his first definition of works that “incorporate reality … without imitating it.”
Save for a few calculated examples, the physical characteristics that these collages, objects, and constructions have in common can be stated simply:
1. They are predominantly assembled rather than painted, drawn, modeled, or
carved.
2. Entirely or in part, their constituent elements are preformed natural or manufac- tured materials, objects, or fragments not intended as art materials.’
In elaborating a theory of assemblage, Seitz appropriated (wth full acknowledgment) many elements of “the mode of juxtaposition” discussed at length in the closing pages of The Banquet Years (1958), writing: “The method of assemblage, which is post-cubist is that of juxtaposition: ‘setting one thing beside the other without connective.”
“I’m an artist: I drip paint,” says Lambie.
24 March, went to Jim Lambie ‘Televison’ private view at Sadie Coles. Jim Lambie is a good one for using the concept of collage in his work.
Jim Lambie, Sonic Reducer.
Joshua Uvieghara, BrainBrain Hemorrhage, 2008, Rock, coaxial cable, neon, steel wire, household paint. One Night Stand, The gallery at Wimbledon.
Distinguishing Art Theory and Aesthetics
We may now speak of ‘mapping’ ideas onto to ‘physical relations’
Against Integration: Distinguishing Art Theory and Aesthetics, Gary Peters
Untitled (Mental Map: Incredible terrible, beautiful), 2002, Aquarell, pencil on paper 70x100cm.
Franz Akermans Paintings are derived from drawings made while travelling the globe. Images of foreign places are rendered amongst what seems like a carnage of motifs, and an array of abstract murals, and colour; an exploration of cartographic imagery which seems to form a grid of interconnected, intrinsic resonance that are indexes of places visited by the artist.
Guy Debord, Guide Psychogeographique, Paris.
Franz Akerman, Altermodern, Tate.
The curatorial aspects of Ackermans work are inherent in the way the event is set up in a particular order so it considers the psychological aspects concerning the way the viewer receives the work.
I explored this with a group of Fine Art students on the Foundation course at Northbrook college, there wasn’t much in the way of resources, so we tried to appropriate what they had in the classroom/studio space into a context that worked, scince they are working towards thier final project and need (have needed) to start thinking along these lines. This is some work from one of the students:
Student temporary installation, Curating project (Northbrook College).
Urban Myth
Joshua Uvieghara, Research, Thamesmead Council estate, London.
I visited my mother this Easter break. My mother used to be an art teacher, though she decided to be a district nurse, she nurtured my artistic activity when I was young. She lives at the edge of Thamesmead, the estate that I grew up on. I decided to take some photographs around the estate to base some new work on. I was interested in the architecture and the juxtaposition of greenery that seems to be leaking out everywhere. They were talking about the nature of the surface of 2D work at the V&A symposium. It reminded me of what someone told me about the trees. Apparently all the life exists on the surface of a tree, just beneath the bark. The wood or the trunk is essentially dead. But it caries the memory of the tree. I thought this was a good analogy for the estate I grew up on, but in reverse. The concrete signifies an external trunk that carries memories for me when I walk through the estate, but all the life is inside the concrete skeleton of my old estate.
Joshua Uvieghara, Research, Thamesmead Council estate, London.
Some of the memories for me relate to playing basketball to keep out of trouble. I used to venture off the estate with my like-minded friends to places where we could play. We got quite good and ended up playing for national league teams, but my fondest memories were from playing street basketball on estates around London, there was one particular place in Deptford where people would come to play and watch. It ended up being a place of sanctuary almost. Stories would drift down to the edge of the courts about all the trouble that went on in the estates over the past week, but while we were here playing everyone wanted to get on, it represented a bit of normality from the madness. Not all the stories were bad though. Basketball took me around America when I was younger, I visited a lot of places where you could play street ball. It was always the same, there was a whole culture surrounding the basketball court that represented disillusionment and hope.
It would be good to interpret these experiences now as an artist. It’s a way of telling a story and meaning from where I come from.
Peter Doig, The Heart of Old San Juan, 1999, Oil on canvas, 250 x 196cm
Mythologies 12 march-25 april
Mythologies explores the stories we tell about the world in order to understand it.
Mythologies: Haunch of Venison
Anthropology
“…Man is an animal suspended in a web of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of a law but an interpretative one in search of meaning.” c. Geertz, The Interpretation of cultures; Selected Essays
Daniele Buetti, (Mythologies, Haunch of Venison), Is my Soul Losing Control, 2006, Mixed Media (Lightbox), 165 x 400cm
Posted in Ramblings
This blog is based on experiences or occurrences that I have observed: in my studio practice as an artist, in experimental sessions that I have worked together on with students, and institutional or cultural events. Because I am a painter this site operates as part of my practice based research. The discourse in this blog is therefore centred on painting.
Although based on painting, the template or approach is based on the concept of collage and drawing. In this sense this project focuses on the convergent local where other disciplines come in to play from the starting point of painting.
It means, on the one hand, that the limits of painting can be explored, around its heritage. It also means that the exploration of painting can offer propositions for other lines on inquiry through appropriate media.
This comes from what has happened in my own studio practice and in sessions with students; the experimental, is the place where art happens.
This space serves as an evaluation/orienting point and reflects aspects of research as practice. The use of the term ‘kinetic’ in relation to ‘painting’ concerns the mobility of paintings heritage in its ability to withstand the currents of discourse that wants to herald its demise.
Kinetic painting relates to the ability of painting to acclimatise itself by embracing critical practices that seem to need to make painting redundant in order to promote a chosen medium.
I bought a book on video art recently and on the back is a statement by Nam June Paik:
‘just as collage has ousted oil painting, so the cathode ray tube will replace the canvas’
I thought about a painting that I did that considers this kind of idea. I painted onto a sheet of glass using household paint, a TFT screen was stuck on the back of the glass, showing a video loop through the painting. This represented a breakthrough in my practise from a formal point of view, and it represents a strand of work that I am continuing to investigate in my studio that is similar to my initiating this blog as a project.
Solarised Carbon (kinetic painting), 2007, glass , household paint, TFT screen, coaxial cable, DVD, 110 x 140cm
You don’t have to look far to see that there is a lot of jostling for position in current discourse concerning art, Bruno Latour might call it an Iconoclash, Its all about subverting other mediums to promote a preferred one. I find it far more interesting to reconcile the proliferation of media and approaches as they present themselves to us now, form the domain of a chosen discipline.
Rene Magrette preferred to be called a thinker who communicated by paint. There is plenty to still think about in the act of painting; in particular, through practice as research.
The experimental space is a place to find if you have exhausted your capacities in a chosen medium. To explore a different one in order to feedback into a preferred field, or as a point of departure. This blog doesn’t try to propose this space wholesale, but tries to identify it through a series of practices. It does, however propose, as a practice in of itself; a research space.
Posted in Kinetic painting
