It was kitch in the good way, I think!
Here I begin my reminiscence over the shows I took part in during university. It’s already been a year since I graduated, but since I had to shift focus on getting a job pretty much straight away, I guess I’m realising I didn’t give myself much of a chance to take it all in yet. This is all documentation – I don’t plan to post photos of my actual work on any social media sites so feel free to browse as if this was my portfolio.
Putting together the text in these posts alongside it all is really helping me sort out all of the memories I have tucked away in there and moving it to an alternative, more clarified space in my brain.
I’d attempted to write out summaries of what the shows were like in my previous website incarnations, but when I was to be concerned with saying the right things to supplement my CV, motivation never came.
My first year of university was grim with studios under heart-of-corona-times surveillance and control, and after the experience of my first DIY show, I’d looked forward to continuing that the most in anticipation for my time at university. The inability to go out there and be active with that was really disheartening.
Technically, the first show I joined wasn’t the one in the title. It was called ‘Some Exhibition’.
During this tragedy of our first year, we tried to do the best we could, putting on an online exhibition in the form of a website. (There was all this talk about how suddenly digital everything had become and I felt like I was understanding what they must’ve talked about during the ‘.net art’ era.)
But, I won’t go into much detail on it here, as all of us clutching onto the wonderful idea in one go meant the end result was a bit overwhelming and lost with too many different kinds of works bunched together; unsupported with no real overall psyche. Besides, I can’t find the damn site anymore because I lost the link! Does it even exist anymore? I don’t know. I managed to find the youtube channel though, so the video works are still alive. I’ll have to try and archive it all because who knows when YouTube will be gone.
I’ll only embed my own work here, but out of the other ones on the channel I liked ‘The Naked Mole Rat Dream‘ and ‘Becoming prehistoric – performed in my garden to no one in particular‘, in particular… (By the way, I’ll start to mention other people’s works like this and post photos of what I’ve documented so if anyone with their work on my website wants their stuff taken down or properly credited, please do get in touch.)
I tried to make something that was conscious of the medium/location(?) that was the internet, following the conversations described above, which was a lo-fi styled video collage. It started with making the soundtrack first, which I wanted to sound like a minimal performance of a national anthem of an imagined, lo-fi country. My main source of interest at the time was the sudden rise in casual nationalistic propaganda on social media which was very popular during the corona times, especially in the Japanese side of things. It was rattling me quite a lot because I was holed in and glued to what the media was telling me. So, I suppose that was where the imagery was coming from as well.
In concept, I think the website exhibition was a really nice action with a heart of initiative that I continually respect in the group that led it. (As far as I can see the same people are doing pretty cool things.) Ultimately people were just still too nice to try and ‘curate’ anything which would inevitably mean letting some people in and others shut out.
One good thing that came out of the pandemic was the collective need to have hope. It wasn’t a desire, it was a need.
We are human – when we all need something, we work together.
It’s sad that we only tend to be motivated by the lack of something and not to elevate, though.
And now it sounds like we just came out of wartime, doesn’t it…
Getting back to the main topic, I guess this show in the title had that added post-covid implication to me, too – A year later and people were allowed to be bunched up together in these two small rooms. One was dedicated more for music and the other for artworks.
Seeing a show come alive is super fun. In fact I think that feeling being in the middle of it is even slightly better than when all the people start coming in.
I didn’t really know any of the people who were showing with me, either. I’d been invited after the organizing artist apparently saw my work on the walls in the studio.
That felt obviously validating (even if it might’ve simply been because they needed more people to join!) and warm – we were there together simply because we all liked making stuff. That was the most important thing.
I also saw one of the artists perform her songs, and I remember really liking it. It was energized. This layer of performance put all the small pieces in the room together and I loved that alchemy of creativity.
Up until that point I hadn’t thought about acknowledging music as a real part of my creative practice and deemed it as separate to my ‘serious stuff’. It was just something I did to have fun and ease my stress. The soundtrack I made for the video above was intentionally ‘minimal’ because that seemed to be the only music allowed in the contemporary art scene. The music I made outside of my ‘serious stuff’ for the sake of it being music- with relatively clear melodies and no particular sociopolitical reason to exist beyond my own life, implies something ‘pop’. And that’s somehow always been a no-no in my mind unless it’s clearly backed up by something more dire.
That’s equally why me admitting that I’d wanted to be a manga writer as a kid in the previous post had been a no-no in my brain.
Even if the tutors and the few artists you personally get to know strongly encourage you to do whatever you’d like, if you were to be serious about being ‘an artist’ you’d hear that messaging loud and clear.
I still hadn’t (and maybe I still haven’t) gotten over being swayed by expectations.
My work here called ‘Pick n Mix’ is a collection of acetate prints with a bunch of digital illustrations of fictional moths. I’d read about how fast moths were evolving in nature, in line with how fast we were changing nature itself through our contemporary measures. I was interested by how comical some of these variants looked – one struck me as it looked like a 60s sci-fi illustration of a space jet. I also like that they were ‘moths’ and not ‘butterflies’… pests, who were trying very hard to survive, some species having to make themselves as menacing as possible to us humans.
To be honest with you there’s not much of a reason why they’re on the hangers other than 1. my fascination with flowing objects (similar to how paper is used in a lot of shinto or asian shamanic rituals to signify something divine) and 2. I was looking for a way to hang these prints so that they could in a similar way ‘flow’ in the air but without just simply using string to hold them up. They’re not just regular old hangers by the way. They’re baby-sized. That was important.
I also wanted the digital illustrations I drew to be shown in a way where light could pass through them because, when I was drawing these things, they were being shone into my eyes from the large light box that is the screen, and I always found it lacking when I simply printed the illustrations onto paper or canvas – It didn’t feel like it came out the way it was when I was making it, and not in a good way. There’s something about making something that our brains recognise as ‘things’ on the screen, controlling light pixel by pixel. It’s different to how it feels drawing with ink or paint, something that feels more substantial and physical.
(Seeing the photo of it up close I am pretty disappointed by how low quality of an execution this is – It sort of looked better in my memory. But I hope you can see where it could have gone if I took the time to change all the DIY plastic parts into metal clasps or something… That level of detailed care makes all the difference. Something I didn’t know yet. )
I had a friend I made around New Cross who at this point was a working artist have a look at my work, and they seemed to get the whole “evolution” thing as well as the faint comic/sci-fi vibes straight away, and so did my academic tutors and peers. It was quite interesting how differently people reacted to the idea of “evolution”. Some people (I think this is also an effect of the homo sapiens book that was pretty trendy) had this immediate negative reaction towards it, and some people seemed a little embarrassed to start talking about how amazing nature really is. I liked that contrast. I imagine the first reaction might also come from the fact that evolution has a lot of abusive implications beneath it, which is fair enough. But I noted on how nobody felt that free to be a child again and talk about how interesting this all was. I also didn’t really feel like I could come out and say “…hey, so, I just found the evolution of moths really cool, which is why I made this!” – I really wasn’t trying to say something absolutely groundbreaking with my work, ever, but there is this air in the fine art rooms that there needs to be something new about your work. Something that gives the work meaning, something that puts you apart from “arts & crafts”. Writing this now, I find it pretty poetic, that I was seeing that behaviour in action with work that was concerned with the competition for survival.
What would be groundbreaking is if artists could just be pure in their energy of love and intrigue, and bring back that child in all of us. I truly believe that is what art needs to do, even despite all of the academic learnings I did on how contemporary art has evolved from the hippie eras. (Now is the time to say, I do have a solid first in my degree and I did do all the difficult philosophisation involved, okay!) I don’t dislike academia and its findings, but I don’t like the system of academia disrupting artistic inspiration. I don’t like the system of academia contributing to society’s perception of serious art = misguided wandering. And, equally, as much as I am educated on politics, I still think the only thing artists can do is to be a beacon for people not to forget that we as humans are capable of working together. I like activism, but I don’t really think activism is art. Why? Because activism comes from a place of need, and not from a place of abundance, that is the love we could have for others. Art should be art to show people what could be achieved after the activism.
Now I’ll end this post with the photo above, which is an aluminium sheet with another digital illustration of mine printed onto it. I scraped into the sheet and creating this embossed linework on top of the print. The work involved for this was pretty physical, and it was tiresome grinding knives into the metal. It was quite fitting to the pained image I was depicting. It’s so obvious to me now that this was my subconscious admitting defeat to Freud again, with a body looking like its in agony in the shape of a vagina. I was making feminist art here, but I wasn’t aware of it. This is probably the better work of mine that was shown in the exhibition, because it’s genuine raw emotion that I’m depicting here – I was really going through it on a personal level exploring my sex and gender identity. I think the execution of this is pretty good as well, because once again, I didn’t even try to come up with this idea. It just sort of happened as it should, and I knew exactly what I needed to do to express this specific part of my psyche even if I didn’t realise the exact cause of it yet.
That’s great, but I hate this work. Probably because it’s just a manifestation of the hate I was feeling towards my own sex. I don’t think art should be like this. I think that the art that should be created is one that depicts the love I feel for my sex instead. And for me to get there, I’d first need to live that life.
A lot of people will tell BA students that they shouldn’t really expect much from their BA works, and not to take it too seriously as they would a masters for example. Of course, this has commercial reasonings too, in that most curators/gallerists would only take MA graduates seriously, but it’s more than that. I would slightly disagree with this general opinion and say that it’s best to take it as seriously as possible, because you’ll get to see and feel for yourself that there’s a dead end to it, and where exactly that dead end is for you as an individual. Put simply, there is usually not enough substance in the average BA student’s life to seep through into their work. For me, I think this lack is in the love that I am talking about. Most of us are still barely coming out of the egoistic self and so the work is equally incredibly self conscious and awkwardly egotistical.
What is it in the world that you love, when everything is telling you to be fearful and distrustful? That’s the question that I feel I need to keep asking myself from now on.