If A Picture Paints A Press Release...

I've already mentioned the group exhibition in which I'll be participating later this month in a previous post.  The opening is just a week away now, so here's another reminder by way of the official press release.  A rather splendid accompanying booklet has also been produced including images and writings by the participating artists.  Physical copies will be available at the exhibition but you can also view it here.

PRESS RELEASE

Indigo Octagon Presents

If A Picture Paints A Thousand Words Then Why Can’t I Paint

The Works Gallery, Birmingham

Tuesday 13th November to Friday 23rd November 2012

‘If A Picture Paints A Thousand Words Then Why Can’t I Paint’ is the inaugural exhibition by Indigo Octagon, a loose collective of Birmingham based artists, designers and makers. The exhibition is eclectic, bringing together a diverse range of work by 5 Midlands artists. The show has a sense of a ‘mix tape’ aesthetic, ideas and themes presented in the work of one artist being taken on in the work of another.

In Hugh Marwood’s mixed media paintings for example, inspiration is taken from the layers of graffiti and writing to be found on urban surfaces, the walls and boarded-up windows and doors that the artist passes on his many walks as he considers the psychogeography of the city of Leicester. While a form of writing is collected and re-presented in Marwood’s works, it is, by contrast, obscured in the abstract paintings of Harvey Smoke, which take as their starting point the artist’s autobiographical writing painted onto the bare canvas. Smoke then paints, pours and builds up over time, a complex series of marks, colours and shapes that, in revealing themselves, bury the originally, now secret, text.

Craig Underhill’s sculptural ceramics reflect his interest in evoking the feeling of landscapes that he has travelled through. He is influenced by the visual effects created in these landscapes by human action, in particular the often overlooked physical marks, structures or patterns that are the traces of everyday life, and which are revealing, in various ways, of our relationship with the natural world. The direction and development of Underhill’s work is strongly affected by his interest in exploring materials and techniques. Like many ceramicists he is fascinated by the aesthetics and characteristics of materials, the ways they are

transformed by artistic, and other, processes.

A direct link with Craig Underhill’s slab-built vessels can be seen in the dark shapes of the cast concrete columns beneath the M5 motorway at night, as depicted in the atmospheric and psychologically-charged paintings of Shaun Morris. The sodium light that spills from the motorway above, cutting through the black void of night, reveals shards of the landscape below, and in so doing brings the English Romantic landscape hard up against the lessons of post Abstract painting. Images and the painting process battle it out, with the large areas of depthless black set against more representational elements that create a dynamic illusion

of space. Illusion is further explored in Andy Smith’s painted photographs. Patched-up, neglected buildings, a carelessly daubed steel bollard, painstakingly painted over by the artist, seamlessly blending the printed and painted surface. There is a playfulness in the seemingly banal non-subjects, the neglected detritus carefully rendered in paint.

A similar sense of care for the forgotten and overlooked can be seen in the illustrations of Chris Cowdrill. Weeds, wild flowers and plants intertwined around an ugly wire fence are beautifully drawn. A blackbird perched on bare winter branches evokes the atmosphere and texture of winter with great precision and clarity. Cowdrill’s illustrations invite us in to look more deeply at the nature that insistently, quietly, asserts itself around us.

Join Indigo Octagon at the Private View on Friday 16th November from 6-9pm. Refreshments will be available, you can meet the artists, and there will also be a musical performance by artists Andy Smith and Shaun Morris composed in response to the exhibition, as well as live music by local up and coming band, Box Of Knives.

Hope to see you there...