3D printers, Studio Views and the Slavonian Biennial

This year feels like it’s gone incredibly fast. It’s now November, nearly the end of 2020, and I’m in two places about how far my practice has progressed during this time. I think I’ve just applied to so many more things than I have done in the past and have spent the majority of my time alone inside my flat, pushing me into a space of thinking that I haven’t really done anything. I have had exhibitions, opportunities and everything else, but the things I have applied for, the larger, more exciting things, have been mostly unsuccessful. Perhaps I wasn’t as used to rejection as I thought, or maybe I was just doing a lot more than I am at the moment; going out to work, seeing friends, going to dinners, the cinema, etc. I guess at this point we all know that the ongoing pandemic is having negative impacts on our collective mental health.

Anyway, over the past month I’ve been working a lot on isthisit? and the upcoming projects on the site, as well as continuing to apply to various jobs and art opportunities. I’m still continuing to make work, although with a fairly small income at the moment it’s hard to spend any money on actual artwork production. I’ve spent the past 7 or 8 months during this lockdown period applying to lots of things and thinking a lot about new work, but for the moment they’re only ideas and not finalised, physical artworks.

The biggest thing to look forward to is an upcoming solo show in Brno, which I did talk about briefly in the last blog post. I haven’t really started making work for it, as I’ve only really heard that my application was successful, and don’t know when the show will be, or if there will be a decent fee involved. In the coming months I’d really like to invest in a 3D printer so that I could start to properly experiment with creating physical the sculptures that I proposed for the exhibition. I’ve wanted one for a while and think this is probably the perfect opportunity to invest.

An image from my recent video Outbreak was selected to be in a new publication that’s being printed by the Baltic in Gateshead called S.P.A.M. Spreads, which is fun. It’s always nice to have my work printed in publications.

A new piece in the trophy hunter series was also selected to be a part of the 27th Slavonian Biennial at the Gallery of Fine Arts in Osijek, Croatia, which is exciting. Out of 182 applicants, 35 works were selected. I made the new piece, Mark’s Sixteenth, especially for the show and am really happy with it. They also have a couple of awards, one of which is a solo show at the gallery, which would be super exciting.

I was also invited to show a previous, fairly old video work of mine from 2017,  Zo on VRAL, a new online space created by Matteo Bittanti and Gemma Fantacci, interviewing artists about their video game inspired practices. If you’ve been following me and my blog for a while you might know that back in 2016, when I was at the end of my first year at university, Matteo was one of the first curators to invite me to exhibit my work in a group exhibition. He contacted me quite randomly, inviting me to show a video work of mine in the cellars of a castle like space in Italy. It was a great experience, and to this day I still follow Matteo’s blog all about video game art (https://www.gamescenes.org/) and also have his book, so am always happy to be a part of these things. The online space will feature the work for two weeks, alongside an extensive interview.

I’ve been working on the 6 months of isthisit? shows, and the first exhibition in the series opened a few weeks ago on the 31^st October, titled Data Fatigue and featuring work from Morehshin Allahyari, Corey Hayman, Kumbirai Makumbe, Jonathan Monaghan and Richard Whitby. It’s an exhibition exploring concepts of representation and capitalisation, within online and offline worlds, the media and daily life. The works on show consider ideas of identity and the commodification and colonisation of objects, people and places, alongside the hyper-consumerism of the present. I think it’s a good show, although yet again one can never tell with these things. The link is here - https://www.isthisitisthisit.com/data-fatigue

I’m also almost finished planning the next in the series, and have invited people for the upcoming ones too. It is odd, as I assumed that, now that I’m operating these shows with a budget (not a huge budget but a budget nonetheless), artists would be more inclined to be a part of the shows. Sadly, this doesn’t seem to be the case, with lots of people not getting back to me. I dunno, maybe I’m just being too ambitious with the artists I’m inviting. Either way, I have learned a lot from this project already. The next show will open in the middle of December, and will include work by 4 artists, more details soon.

I recently received some photographs from John Garcia of my work Jeff’s First installed in the mountains of Los Angeles. John contacted me over Instagram and had recently started inviting artists to show their work in this bunker like space he had discovered near his home in LA. I think it’s a really cool, fun project, that I’d love to see more of. However, I’d love it to be treated as a proper exhibition, rather than simply an artistic project. That would give it more weight, although maybe that’s not what John wants. Currently it’s a fun, simple thing to do, and maybe that’s enough. It kind of makes me think about what I would do, for example, if I left London and went to live at my parents house in the countryside, or left London to live in the countryside where I could afford to have a garden. I would probably just buy a shed and create an exhibition space within it. It would be small, but kind of nice, allowing me to work with artists to put on small shows, something that would afford me the time and space to experiment with curating. It’s a small thought for the future, perhaps. Anyway, below are some pics from the bunker.

I’ve also finally started to work on the paintings of my studio views. These are very early experiments, utilising photoshopped imagery that I have previously posted to Instagram with the hashtag studio views. The ongoing online performance project is furthering my persona of a painter and considers what it means to be both an artist and person who works with and for the social media platform. The one below is a very small work, 20 x 20 cm. I really like this scale, it’s both humorous and subtle, although I would like to make larger ones in the future, and maybe experiment with pure prints? I’d really like to exhibit a bunch of these, and maybe make a book at some point, of both the original images and their physical predecessors, alongside a commissioned essay or something similar. Who knows what will happen in the future at this point.

I’ve been applying to a ton of things, although with mostly previous work/ideas that I’ve mentioned before. Lots of residency proposals, group exhibitions and publication submissions. I have applied to so many things at this point, and been rejected, that when I actually get something I am quite surprised. This was a proposal for a space in China.

What else? I have a few exciting things happening at the moment which are yet to be properly finalised and am unable to talk about. We’ll see what happens. I guess I’m just looking forward to Christmas, and to escape London for a little while. The longer this pandemic continues, the more pointless the whole living in London thing seems to be. I’ve been learning Finnish for the past 3 or 4 months and have been ruminating about how nice it would be to go and live elsewhere, whether that’s out of London or the UK in general. Again, we’ll see how it goes. I’m continuing to work on my game project, although it’s very much taken a back seat. I’d like to produce a new video piece, perhaps. I’ve had the Amazon idea for ages now, but haven’t had the money to fund its production, so perhaps I should keep that idea for later, and make something else in the meantime, something different. Who knows?

Anyway, let’s move on to entertainment. As we’re now in a new lockdown here in the UK I haven’t been to any new shows. It’s kind of sad really, it took me so long to start going to exhibitions again after the initial lockdown that I kind of missed my chance at going to exhibitions. There are several exhibitions that I really want to go to but have definitely missed at this point; Trevor Paglen at Pace, Alan Warburton at arebyte, Trulee Hall at Zabludowicz, Alex de Corte at Sadie Coles, Frieze Sculpture Park, and many, many more. In light of that, I’ll be jumping straight into TV, films and video games. The first show I watched, as everyone was talking about it, was Emily in Paris. It’s a painful show about a young woman from America who moves to Paris. All the French stereotypes come up, as well as a very Netflix-y like drama occurring throughout. Yes, meaningless trash, an extremely light comedy drama.

I played Last Day of June, a video game about an elderly man reliving one day over and over again in order to save his wife from dying in a car crash. At first, it’s quite sweet, although it quickly becomes incredibly painful and excessively repetitive. Literally, you will play the same level over and over again, and not because you’ve done anything wrong but because that’s the way the game has been designed. You basically have to play this same day, over and over again, slowly unlocking new characters and areas of the map. At the end of each day there’s an extremely painful and annoying cut scene which can’t be skipped. It’s exactly the same every time, and you have to watch it at least 5/6 times. I wanted to like this game, it’s very sweet and supposedly made a lot of players cry, but by the end I was so annoyed and angry by this game that I couldn’t even fathom how anyone would feel any other emotion other than rage. Seriously, it is the worst.

After watching Below Deck the other month, II swiftly devoured Below Deck Mediterranean, the same premise of the original show (a reality tv show about people who work on super yachts) but, you guessed it, in the Mediterranean. Once again it’s total trash, and highly recommended, although it does feature a fantastic female captain, which does improve the show.

I’ve been wanting to watch Away, an animated film by Gints Zilbalodis, for some time now. It’s a beautiful, silent film, concerning a boy and his journey to the other end of the island. However, due to it being a silent film with a lovely, calming soundtrack and a severe lack of anything really happening during the film, I did fall asleep multiple times, with my partner falling asleep entirely. The animation style is great, but a little too slow and melodic for me overall.

A great documentary, Hail Satan?, looked at The Satanic Temple, a religious group created to criticise the relationship between church and state in America. One of the main points of contention in the film is questioning why a large stone sculpture of the ten commandments is being erected at a state courthouse, when religion has nothing to do with the government. So, The Satanic Temple propose to erect a life size bronze sculpture of the devil beside the stone statue. Obviously it doesn’t go down well, and there’s a lot of humour involved in the religion and project, but in reality it’s questioning an incredibly serious and problematic part of how the American government functions. I’d highly recommend taking a look.

A fun short, Once Upon a Snowman, told the story of Olaf (the snowman from Frozen) and how he came into being. It’s very sweet and well worth a watch.

One of the bigger shows I watched over the past month was Battlestar Galactica. I remember watching the first season about 7 or 8 years ago, and then re-watching that first season once or twice since in an attempt to get back into this show which is highly revered. Well, I finally got back into it, and watched the entire series in a matter of weeks. Overall, I enjoyed the experience, and thought that the characters were really special and well crafted. I think I do prefer those early seasons, where you’re unsure about what’s happening and everything is in chaos, and was a bit sceptical about the ending, but overall it was a fun and exciting series that I definitely enjoyed.

Great Pretender, an anime on Netflix, was fine, all about a con man from Japan who then travels around the world, conning various people. It’s fun but not that great.

Next up was Blown Away, a fantastic reality show about glass blowers competing for a prize. It’s interesting, watching the show from an artist’s perspective. Some of the artists seem to be people who make glass cups and plates, whilst others are full on professional artists. It’s definitely more of a craft, and an incredibly visceral craft, and I guess that’s what makes the show so enjoyable. Compare this to Work of Art: Next Great Artist, which is a terrible show full of muddy conceptual work and ‘art’ people. This on the other hand, is well produced and more focused on the craft. I kind of like that, in a weird way.

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm was fun, although I much prefer his tv series Who Is America?, that was far more cutting and painful to watch. This felt a little tame with what it exposed in a way.

Into Eternity was a documentary about Finland safely storing its nuclear waste for 100,000 years. It’s a really interesting and important issue to look into, the digging of this huge hole, although sadly the director Michael Madsen is also an artist, and his at focused fingerprints are all over this film, transforming it from an interesting documentary to a repetitive and slightly boring artwork. It’s an incredibly important question that’s posed; what we do with nuclear waste, but this film failed to properly answer.

Assassination Classroom was a thoroughly enjoyable anime about an odd being with a spherical head. He’s basically all powerful, and at the start of the series says that he’ll destroy earth in a year, unless his students (he’s the teacher to a bunch of ‘misfit’ kids) can assassinate him. So begins a great show about teaching children how to assassinate and be better human beings.

I also really enjoyed Mob Psycho 100, another anime about a psychic middle schooler who just wants to live a normal life, even if he’s the most powerful person on the planet and doesn’t quite realise it. It’s fantastically hilarious, and from the creator of One Punch Man, one of my favourite anime.

A kind of fun film was On the Rocks, about a young mother and her father working together to spy on her husband, who she suspects is cheating on her. It’s fun, but nothing more.

Now, I’m sure I have watched this in the past, but I had a fun time with The Princess Diaries. Who doesn’t want to be a princess?

I found The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run, to be fine, no way as good as the tv show, and the 3D was a bit jarring, but I did have fun. Yeah, enjoyable enough.

I finally finished Beyond: Two Souls, an okay video game. David Cage continues to think a bit too highly of himself.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Queen’s Gambit, a fantastic tv show that transforms chess into a serious sport like experience. The show focuses on a young girl, who looses her parents and becomes addicted to pills at an early age, and how incredibly intelligent and amazing at chess she is. It was a very enjoyable, dramatic series.

I liked Rebecca, the Ben Wheatley version, a film looking at the relationship between a wealthy man and his deceased wife. It was incredibly suspenseful throughout, with Kristin Scott Thomas being fantastically creepy, although it kind of petered out towards the end when the mysteries were revealed.

I enjoyed Freaks (2018), a sci-fi drama in kind of the same vein as 10 Cloverfield Lane, although that film really had you guessing until the last minute. In Freaks you’re introduced to a normal looking 7-year-old girl whose being kept in a rundown house by her father. He warns her about the dangerous world outside the house, the house that she’s never left before. You’re not sure whether there really is an apocalyptic like scenario outside, or if the child is simply being kept against her will by a crazed lunatic. It was worth a watch, although 10 Cloverfield Lane is far superior.

The last piece of entertainment on my list is Dorohedoro, an anime about two worlds, one for humans and the other for sorcerers. Sorcerers enter into the human world to experiment on them with their magic, with one human having had his head turned into a lizard head. The show revolves around Caiman, the lizard headed man, trying to recuperate his memories and find the sorcerer who experimented on him. It was a very enjoyable series, and I can’t wait for season 2.

So, I think that’s it for now. Who knows what’ll be happening in the next month, but I hope to work on my ongoing project with isthisit?, continue applying to many art and job opportunities as well as indulging in more anime, tv shows and films.