LONDON EXHIBITION - PECKHAM

 

This was a small exhibition set up by a group of artists from Westminster Uni at a café. They managed to talk to the man who owns the café & ask if they could present their work there. He said it would be a perfect way to bring people in to the café & to promote his poetry which he creates on the side. They had a room upstairs that had been cleared out for their work, whilst he provided drinks & poetry readings downstairs.

These were done by an artist called Erin inspired by Andy Warhol. These are screen printed photos of guys from her university, with them all doing the same pose. This is about repeated patterns, which I think shows the monotonous process of screen printing. She also said it was about masculinity, which is why they are all repeatedly doing the same action.

This piece is done by my friend, Abi Dimelow, who predominantly produces paintings of people & children, mixing imagery together to create odd compositions that evoke thought & questions. A lot of her recent work has been reflecting on narcissism within the art world & how a lot of art is pretentious & egotistical. She spoke to me a lot previously about her personal experiences when creating work in the University, & the way in which everything is heavily conceptual, meaning you cannot just create to create. On top of this, the way people brag about their work & themselves. Living in London is definitely different to previously being in the small town, Uttoxeter. She has however, grown to enjoy this side of the work, as conveying a meaning became more interesting to her than to create something 'beautiful'.

Alex's work is combining photos with bible references and quotes. He prints onto a thin transparent fabric, which could symbolise the transparencies of caring within religion, yet a lot of the time minorities become marginalised & pushed out or prevented from perusing  a place within the church. The text on the work in my opinion, plays into the irony of love & how people can be condemned if they do not love in the same way which they do (i.e. homosexuality).

Mary's work was a sublimation print where she took these images from a newspaper & experimented with a large lace sheet, which she then dipped in latex, allowed to set & then printed on it. This piece was more-so an experimentation piece to play with a new media, so there wasn't so much conceptual backing to it. She went on to produce another for her next exhibition which was more finalised & developed, with a message & meaning behind it. Although this doesn't have a conceptual backing, in my opinion it looks intriguing & I like the way the text shows through the other side where the light from the window hits the piece. 

It was really nice to meet & talk to different artists going through a similar process currently, through University. I definitely notice that London University works tend to be a lot larger & more abstract. I feel sometimes they are too much to absorb as they sometimes drift so far away from their meaning that it's hard to see one. For example, one piece was done using setting foam, & was quite literally two giant 3D blobs, painted green, with a set of teeth in them made out of clay. In my opinion, it looked crap & didn't appear to have much thought or care put into it, & I just couldn't think of a reasoning or meaning behind it. I also think the majority of work appears to be simplistic, but it is more adventurous when it comes to the process behind it. That is mostly down to the fact in Westminster Uni there are more things to experiment with, which are more accessible & the areas are more spacious due to the larger amount of students.

Once you talk to some artists though, hearing the way they confidently talk about their work in a deeper sense is really interesting, inspiring, & motivating to hear. I really enjoyed my trip to London to go & see something new. The people were lovely & some of the work was really well executed.