The Institute for Imagined Futures and Unknown Lands...

Fern Thomas - When the Moon Fell Out of Orbit

The current exhibition at Mission Gallery in Swansea is When the Moon Fell Out of Orbit by Fern Thomas. Following her recent MA studies at Oxford Brookes University in Social Sculpture, Fern has established the Institute for Imagined Futures and Unknown Lands. Through her research she is exploring intuitive thoughts and visions brought through dreams, imaginative ideas and images to ask questions of our current condition in the world and what our future might hold. The artworks use texts, objects, structures, performances and actions to set a kind of transformative process into being through which she and her audience engage in an ongoing exploration of the resulting imagined material.

There has been a series of weekly performances during the show in which Fern relates a series of dreamed/imagined narratives full of poetic and symbolic triggers, through repeating these sequences she hopes to come to a greater understanding of their significance, these are active interventions into the collective imagination which is manifested through and around the exhibition.

The works are also beautifully imagined within the gallery space and make direct reference to the history of the architecture of Mission Gallery. 

The exhibition runs until 15 July 2012.

Second Star to the Right and Straight on Until Morning

Ben Rowe - Second Star to the Right and Straight on Until Morning

I finally got to see Ben Rowe's solo show, Second Star to the Right and Straight on Until Morning at Mission Gallery in Swansea this weekend, it closes on 24 July  so there is only a week left to catch it. 

The craftsmanship involved in the making of his MDF recreations of futuristic machines from iconic 1980's films is incredibly impressive. There is an obsessive focus involved in his working process, it can take him many months to create one of his sculptures in all its minute detail. 

The blandness of the material is unsettling, Rowe uses it to speak about the futility of escapism - the fictional machines he references often involve some kind of travel, but the uniformity of their construction in his hands and their ultimate uselessness denies the fantasy. The effect is somewhat dystopic, it does not bode well somehow for our society. Ultimately we have to stand face-to-face with the existential reality of ourselves in our world with all the frustrations and yearnings that involves but with little control over its mechanics.

Perhaps this is the purest kind of gesture an artist can make (and perhaps it is only artists that CAN make such a gesture) in confrontation with this unbearable futility of being.

Ben Rowe at Mission Gallery

Ben Rowe - Installing at Mission Gallery - Seen here

I'm really excited to see the new exhibition at Mission Gallery in Swansea Second Star from the Right and Straight on Until Morning, I'll miss the opening on 3 June, but will definitely make a point of seeing the show. I don't know much about the artist Ben Rowe, but I have seen images of past work and found them really intriguing - reading his biography I find that he completed his Foundation studies in Carmarthen. In the image above, Rowe is involved in creating his new work in situ in the gallery.

Ben Rowe - This is it, Don't get scared now - seen here

His work is concerned with the safety and freedom of being a child and in contrast the heavy burden of adult responsibilities. He meticulously creates works which are replicas of film props from iconic 1980's films, modelled from MDF in close detail. The residual dust created from the process of making is collected and often made into a sandcastle in his Temporary Monument series.

Ben Rowe - Temporary Monument XII - seen here

The exhibition runs from 4 June to 24 July 2011.

Jonathan Anderson - Dark Star

Jonathan Anderson - Dark Star - seen here

There's a colossus inhabiting the Mission Gallery in Swansea...I dropped in today to see Jonathan Anderson's first solo exhibition, Dark Star.

Anderson works with coal dust - along with a few other materials such as soil, concrete and sand; but coal dust has become a trademark material. This sculpture is huge, it fills the main space in the gallery from floor to ceiling and the coal-dust coated arms of the structure allow you just enough room to circle it. This is a brave departure from the works he has been engaged with, which are typically small and simply made drawings and sculptures.

Visually, the exhibition catalogue, with an essay by artist Anthony Shapland (g39), is a document about process and materials, the business of making. The concepts of the work involve a kind of Taoist balance between the material and the profound. Anderson proposes that his works operate like a kind of mandala, a meditative device. The essay suggests that Dark Star represents a departure from the consideration of the matter of the earth to the contemplation of things of the stars and space. The primal role of carbon in the universe, the multifarious ideas that carbon symbolises for us.

Infact, I found the experience of the exhibition is quite psychologically charged and physically palpable. The structure is arguably quite aggressive, it dominates this gallery-that-was-a-chapel with its physical presence. It is quite sinister, malevolent even - and the chapel interior is necessarily implicated in the reading of the piece. My immediate awareness was with the spikes of the work encroaching into my space, it could be construed as 'menacing', except we (the viewers) have chosen to approach the work in its confinement; so perhaps, in that respect, it becomes defended, like a spiny creature. Sculpturally, I was reminded a little of Louise Bourgeois' giant spiders - the way in which they inhabit and occupy space, but this work is resolutely masculine, the gesture is much more direct.

The apse of the chapel space is left empty - just one glittery limb extending a little across the threshold. But Anderson has chosen to concrete over the windows. It increases the claustrophobia and adds to the theatre of the piece - but it is a statement in itself. It talks about shutting off, making still, stepping out of sequential time, death. It is also a purposefully wilful and almost perverse thing to do to church windows. 

Anderson is a contrary artist and his work is marked by duality. Dark Star is both sardonically dark and touchingly vulnerable, theatrical and pragmatic. 

The Mission Gallery, Swansea

The exhibition continues until 6 November.

Mission Gallery Photography Open 2010

Emma Rylance - Bye Bye B - seen here

The Mission Gallery in Swansea is currently showing the selected work from their 2010 Photography Open. It is a good show, the space seems to really work for photography - something about the light in the gallery I think. The winners this year were Tina Carr and Annemarie Schöne with an image from the show Once We Were Birds about Roma communities in Hungary, which was shown with us at Oriel Myrddin Gallery in 2009. Second prize went to Swansea artist Gemma Copp for an image from a documented set of performances around the theme 'Autonomy'.

I particularly liked the work of Emma Rylance - a triptych of images of bras, Bye Bye B hung centrally in the chapel end of the gallery. I liked the humour and the witty curation!