Making Beauty & The Third Paradise

Last year I saw Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva's 'Fragility' for Fabrica Gallery, Brighton. This installation forms the breathtaking entrance to her first major UK show at the Djanogly Gallery Nottingham. The exhibition entitled Making Beauty also includes the first UK showing of ‘Haruspex’ commissioned by the Vatican for the Venice Biennale, 2015.

Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva is a site-specific installation artist working across the varied media of sculpture, installation, video and sound, photography and architectural interventions. Her materials range from the unusual to the ordinary, from the ephemeral to the precious; they include organic materials, foodstuffs and precious metals.

Making Beauty is a new body of work made in collaboration with academics in medical departments of the universities of Nottingham, East Anglia and London, introducing highly regarded medical research activity to a wider public. Her work has been informed by their work on nutrition, healthy diet, our gut, and the development of highly specialised - invisible to the eye - manufactured parts providing solutions to medical problems. The sculptures reveal the fragility of our bodies and reflect the delicate nature of these medical components. The work has been supported by a research grant from the Wellcome Trust.

For summer 2016, Fabrica is presenting a work by internationally-renowned Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto, a leading light of the Arte Povera movement of the 1960s. The work features a labyrinth constructed from cardboard which leads to a mirror with a symbol laid out in coins.

The symbol, the infinity sign altered to add a central loop represents The Third Paradise. According to Pistoletto’s manifesto written in 2003, The Third Paradise seeks to reconcile the conflict between the first and second paradises of nature and human artifice. This conflict is leading toward global destruction but the third paradise offers a solution, a resolution that will save the planet and humanity.

The Third Paradise is the new myth that leads everyone to take personal responsibility at this momentous juncture. The idea of the Third Paradise is to lead artifice—that is, science, technology, art, culture and political life—back to the Earth, while engaging in the reestablishment of common principles and ethical behaviour.

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Moby - Everything That Rises / The Last Day (Poordream Remix).

States of Mind: Tracing the edges of consciousness

I enjoyed visiting the Wellcome Collection today to see 'States of Mind: Tracing the edges of consciousness'. This exhibition examines perspectives from artists, psychologists, philosophers and neuroscientists to interrogate our understanding of the conscious experience.

Exploring phenomena such as somnambulism, synaesthesia, and disorders of memory and consciousness, the exhibition examines ideas around the nature of consciousness, and in particular what can happen when our typical conscious experience is interrupted, damaged or undermined.

The States of Mind exhibition enables visitors to explore some of the ideas about the nature of consciousness and, in particular, what happens at the ‘edges of consciousness’, when our typical conscious, or unconscious, experience is disrupted or damaged. The exhibition is organised into four areas, each of which explores a different theme related to consciousness: Science & Soul, Sleep & Awake, Language & Memory, Being & Not Being. Each area features objects, artworks and films, exploring the ideas and work of artists, philosophers, psychologists and neuroscientists.

'States of Mind: Tracing the edges of consciousness' has featured a series of changing installations. The final one is 'Time Present' by Shona Ilingsworth, from 19 July until 16 October. This powerful installation considers the impact of amnesia and the erasure of individual and cultural memory.

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Sons of Maxwell - The Lighthouse.

Appropriate public thanksgiving?

The exhibition of Mexican miracle paintings at the Wellcome Collection (Infinitas Gracias) got me reflecting on the differences between Latin Catholic expressions of faith and those of Western Protestantism.
Usually commissioned from local artists by the petitioner, votive paintings tell immediate and intensely personal stories, from domestic dramas to revolutionary violence, through which a markedly human history of communities and their culture can be read. The votives are intimate records of the tumultuous dramas of everyday life - lightning strikes, gunfights, motor accidents, ill-health and false imprisonment - in which saintly intervention was believed to have led to survival and reprieve.

Votives are gestures of thanksgiving, examples of public gratitude for survival, something that we don't do well in the Western Church where public memorials are either reserved for the wealthy or are controversial when they reflect popular culture. Thousands of these small paintings line the walls of Mexican churches. This, again, would seem to be something that we value in other cultures but which consider as anathema in our own Western churches where minimalism rules and the naïve is undervalued.

The regulations governing churchyards and churches (including the otherwise excellent new guidelines from the Church Buildings Council) would seem to specifically exclude from our churches any local expression of the type of art which is being celebrated through Infinitas Gracias. It may be worth the CBC, DACs and other bodies concerned with the upkeep of churchyards and churches to consider how they would respond to requests for naïve or folk art should these arise.

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Bob Dylan - Senor (Tales Of Yankee Power).

Exhibitions: Tate Modern and Wellcome Collection

Today I've seen Tacita Dean's photogenic FILM in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern together with the Gerhard Richter retrospective before going to the Wellcome Collection for their Miracles and Charms exhibitions.

"FILM is an eleven-minute silent 35mm looped film projected onto a monolith standing 13 metres tall at the end of a darkened Turbine Hall ... FILM ... takes the appearance of a filmstrip with sprocket holes exposed onto the emulsion. The layering of imagery also conjures the transparency of a strip of celluloid, giving the appearance of being able to see through the screen itself to the wall of the Turbine Hall behind it. Playing with the distinctive architectural character of the east wall, FILM has the rhythm and metre of a visual poem. Images, some familiar from Dean’s previous works, such as lightning, trees and seascapes, juxtapose with panels of colour and interact with the grid structure of the wall. The resulting piece is a montage of black and white, colour and hand tinted images, including allusions to surrealist art, a Mondrian painting, and the mountains of René Daumal’s novel Mount Analogue and the Paramount Studio logo."

"Gerhard Richter: Panorama is a major retrospective exhibition that groups together significant moments of his remarkable career. Since the 1960s, Gerhard Richter has immersed himself in a rich and varied exploration of painting. Gerhard Richter: Panorama highlights the full extent of the artist's work, which has encompassed a diverse range of techniques and ideas. It includes realist paintings based on photographs, colourful gestural abstractions such as the squeegee paintings, portraits, subtle landscapes and history paintings."

"Wellcome Collection's autumn exhibition programme explores the extraordinary in the everyday with two shows: Infinitas Gracias: Mexican miracle paintings, the first major display of Mexican votive paintings outside Mexico; and Felicity Powell: Charmed Life, an exhibition of unseen London amulets from Henry Wellcome's collection, selected and arranged by the artist Felicity Powell. Drawing lines between faith, mortality and healing, Miracles and Charms offers a poignant insight into the tribulations of daily life and human responses to chance and suffering."

"Infinitas Gracias features over 100 votive paintings drawn from five collections held by museums in and around Mexico City and two sanctuaries located in mining communities in the Bajío region to the north: the city of Guanajuato and the distant mountain town of Real de Catorce. Together with images, news reports, photographs, devotional artefacts, film and interviews, the exhibition illustrates the depth of the votive tradition in Mexico."

"Charmed Life features some 400 amulets, selected by Felicity Powell from Henry Wellcome's vast collection, which will be exhibited encircled by ten works by the artist. The amulets, ranging from simple coins to meticulously carved shells and from dead animals to elaborately fashioned notes, are from a collection within a collection, amassed by the banker and obsessive folklorist Edward Lovett."

"Felicity Powell works in white wax in low relief on the backs of mirrors. Her figurative imagery is full of subtle and macabre humour. The heads she has modelled are always in the process of change, each is infused with metamorphic potential: growing antlers, extruding tentacles or coiffed with spaghetti; as though the known phyla have been infiltrated by subversive and impish genes. The images have the wonder and strangeness of exhibits from a cabinet of curiosities."

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Robert Plant & The Band Of Joy - Silver Rider.