Exciting new artists & designers

On Wednesday before going to the FRF dinner I spent a fascinating afternoon negotiating the labyrinthine corridors of the Chelsea College of Art & Design, opposite Tate Britain.

The Chelsea had billed their Degree Show 2007 as an “opportunity to see work of some of the most exciting new artists and designers.” They weren't wrong as there was some excellent work on show including much that showed a real fascination with philosophical and religious questions. These were the Show's highlights for me:

• Karl-Oskar Olsson located a film, in which a suited male spoke of his guilt at his middle-class privileged student existence, behind walls that can only be climbed, one at a time, by ladders. Is this not what many of us do with the feelings of guilt that nag away at our privileged Western existence?
• Jessica Paz Zamora-Turner’s installation sought to provide an opportunity for action by creating a distribution centre for unwanted goods and offering visitors the opportunity to distribute goods as they chose.
  Paul Day’s titles – Tomorrow belongs to no one; How meaningless is your life; and I came from nowhere, and you should go there, among others – seemed to sum up the general sense of existential angst.
• One of the most effective existential pieces was also the simplest. Umut Yalim used a marker pen on flipchart paper to create a series of works that questioned our perceptions of the work and the world by continually changing aspects of a repeating annotated diagram.
• Michael Cassidy’s Painting in Green (Green Dimension) was technically complex using painting on two walls plus a camera to create an on screen illusion by which viewers were able to walk into and onto the art.
• Emma Dalby’s CFO6 attempted to record the changing nature of reality through multiple photos of groups of people at an Archway Bus Shelter taken between 8 and 9 am every weekday over a six month period.
• Rose Jenner toyed with the existentialism of the black painting but on her canvases, depending on your viewing angle, eerie landscapes of standing stones and forests emerged in dark tones.
  Martin Earle’s video artwork, West of Shannon, featured lovingly shot, meditative black and white images of sea/skyscapes and still lifes set to a soundtrack composed by Fr. Dominic White O.P. Ordinary views and objects made beautiful through sustained attention.
• Tsuin So focussed on children's faces in her beautiful paintings which are evocative and atmospheric.
• Amy ONeill structured whitewashed cartons into a descending cityscape with unpainted words picked out on each carton to form a statement about the nature of a work of art: “… our natural and artificial environment is cultivated both by the way we ultize material and by each decision we make in our daily practice …”
• Helen J. Davison hung 84 sheets of white A4 paper in a regular rectangle using two pins per sheet to create What a Mistkae. Each sheet contained a short piece of typed text raising the question of how to read the work; was it a fragmented or linear narrative? On reflection, it seemed to be like a series of cancelled beginnings; a comment on the difficulty of beginning a work from a blank sheet of paper.

Degree Show 2007, Chelsea College of Art & Design, 16 – 21 June 2007