Jubilee
7-30 July 2022
‘Jubilee’, 2022, installation view. Photo: Colin Davison
Bobby Benjamin, Catherine Bertola, Alfons Bytautas, Hannah Campion, Veronique Chance, Rachael Clewlow, Feliks Culpa, Gordon Dalton, Graham Dolphin, Kerstin Drechsel, Kirsty Harris, William Heard, Joseph Hillier, Mani Kambo, Simon Le Ruez, Jock Mooney, Janie Nicoll, Stephen Palmer, David Reynolds, Morten Schelde, Paul Stone, Matilda Sutton, Roman Vaughan-Williams, Flora Whiteley, Chris Yeats
Vane is pleased to present ‘Jubilee’, a celebration of 25 years of its history featuring 25 artists. Featured artists span the entire 25 years from Vane’s first exhibition in July 1997 through to the exhibition immediately preceding ‘Jubilee’. Many of the artists who featured at Vane early in their careers have proceeded to establish national and international profiles for their work. Some artists Vane has continued to work with across the years, others are making their return to the fold to help celebrate this landmark anniversary.
Vane has worked with over 1,000 artists during its history and it would be impossible to compile a ‘best of’ from across the years, especially one consisting of only 25 artists. Therefore, ‘Jubilee’ should be seen more as a snapshot, just one of potentially many possible representations of both what Vane is now and has achieved in the past as well as providing a space to consider where things may go next. The exhibition title is not inspired by a certain other recent jubilee and is more a slightly tongue-in-cheek reference to Derek Jarman’s 1977 cult punk movie of the same name, a reference to Vane’s do-it-yourself ethos that was behind its founding by artists and continues to this day.
Bobby Benjamin, Garden of Cleveland, 2022, glass, concrete, nail varnish
A found object, removed from the artist’s own yard wall and glazed with nail varnish. The work explores themes of class fetishization and place, exploring the pressure and tension in the reality of everyday urban life.
Catherine Bertola, Fixed Transience (The Chapel), 2021, found postcard, salt and nail varnish
Delicate salt crystals cling to the surface of old postcards of the exteriors and interiors of historic houses in this ongoing series of works. The images depicted in these mementos become obscured, in a failed attempt at further preserving them.
Alfons Bytautas, Athanor, 2022, monotype and collage on paper
The athanor was a slow-burning furnace used in alchemy. By chance, the colours and textures in this work are predominately industrial steely blues and rust reds, which made Bytautas think of the smelting of ore to extract base metals – a process as mysterious and powerful as any alchemical experiment.
Hannah Campion, Painting XVIII, 2022, holographic vinyl, highlighter pen, acrylic paint, acrylic ink, emulsion paint, pencil, canvas
Fluorescent water floods surfaces, sculpted objects are carved from colourful paintings and work hovers from ceilings. Snapshots of sediment, brushed and sprayed, make picture planes shimmer and shift. The synthetic pop of a Bermuda shorts palette diffused with Santa Monica sunsets and brushstrokes dripping in rainbows.
‘Jubilee’, 2022, installation view. Photo: Colin Davison
Veronique Chance, Thames Run: Source to Sea. 14 days. 239 miles. 31 May-13 June 2021, 2021, video
Begun when emerging from the Covid-19 lockdown, the live artwork and durational run, follows the trajectory of the River Thames from its source in Kemble, Gloucestershire, to the sea at the Isle of Grain in Kent. Part of an ongoing inquiry into the performative nature of human physical activity.
Rachael Clewlow, Colour Register No.4, 2021, acrylic paint and silverpoint on gesso board
One of a series of works produced in response to the life of English inventor Joseph Swan. Clewlow retraced and recorded journeys Swan would have taken in the North East. Photographs documented the process and colour swatches were taken from each one. Colour Register No.4 is documentation of 800 of these colour swatches.
Feliks Culpa, Jumping Jack Flash, 2020, North Sea crude oil on paper
The work revels in temporal, transient morality, the volatility of materiality and the market. Drawn with crude oil and part of the ‘Volatile Stock’ series, the work surveys the price of everything and the value of nothing, creating a decaying portrait of unsustainable industries and endangered species including actors, activists, politicians, oil barons and oligarchs.
Gordon Dalton, It’s not like there’s going to be nothing left, is it?, 2022, acrylic on canvas
Dalton is trying to make the viewer look longer and harder, to have a one-on-one relationship with landscape painting, to make them curious and find some joy. The places depicted are partly an invention, they combine memories and motifs of places Dalton has lived or longingly imagined, an idea of a place and the melancholy of longing and wanting to belong. An unfashionable romanticism grounded in the act of painting.
Graham Dolphin, Bowie Guardian, 2022, gouache on newspaper
The Guardian newspaper cover, 12 January 2016, reporting David Bowie’s death has been used as a surface on which to paint, in small, undulating text, lyrics from Bowie’s catalogue. This new work continues Dolphin’s re-posting of everyday objects into art through a laborious handmade process which aims to question notions of cultural and economic values in a secular age.
Kerstin Drechsel, #1.4, from the ‘FACES’ series, 2022, watercolour and stamp colour on paper
The ‘FACES’ series deals with pareidolia, the phenomenon of perceiving faces in random inanimate objects, clouds, even bodies. The tendency of the mind to impose meaningful interpretation on these visual stimuli is believed by psychologists to be an important part of the mind’s ability to interpret our environment and the emotional state of those around us.
Kirsty Harris, Grapple, 2021, chalk and pencil on board
Harris’ chalk and pencil drawings aim for a quiet sense of unease, to harness the beauty and fragility of the chosen medium, almost like a specimen, she captures fleeting moments of history in a consuming and meticulous manner. She is drawn to the decisive moment of the atom bomb: the disruption of the landscape, the dust, the glow, the force of the explosion. She deliberates the split second that represents our race to self-destruction.
William Heard, Dead Tree juggling Politician’s bullshit, 2022, oil on board
‘The Return of the Dead Tree’ series is based on a dead and decaying tree on the edge of Ashington, Heard’s hometown. A tree that walked off a conventional landscape painting into a world of its own. “I felt it was time to return to this series and make some new work! I feel we are living in a time of excessive corruption, cronyism, political lies and bullshit!”
Joseph Hillier, Bear, 2018, bronze
Working with three dimensional digital processes and lost-wax bronze, Hillier has created the ‘Petite Mort’ series, investigating moving figures and in particular actors and performers the artist has collaborated with. The work employs animation software and motion capture footage to examine the body in motion in detail and edit it down to distinct gestures.
Mani Kambo, Serpent’s Lair, 2022, cotton thread on cotton twill
Kambo’s textile and printmaking are rooted in her family history within the Indian subcontinent caste system. The repetitive motion of sewing links to meditative processes. She explores the inner spirit by drawing on her personal totemic symbols, focusing on objects, routines and rituals distilled both from the everyday and mythology.
Simon Le Ruez, Siestas (Paris), 2021, mixed media
Through a honed and rich material enquiry the series, ‘Siestas’, imparts a sense of place. Allusions to fragmented architecture, escape and wistful memory reside, with each individual sculpture distilling a visceral evocation of a city.
Jock Mooney, Woo, 2022, aluminium-copper sheet with enamel paint
Inspired by Mexican ‘milagros’ (charms used for protection, and as a source of good luck) and Greek votive offerings, two ghosts, one ‘alive’, one ‘dead’ it would seem, are from a universe that is part Moomin, part video nasty, part sleepover.
Janie Nicoll, Dangleberries – laughing at you, not with you, 2020, collaged newspaper on Fabriano paper
Nicoll uses found imagery and text of newspapers, to rework the image of our current illustrious leader, crossed with an image of the Declaration of Arbroath, the treaty signed in 1320 asking for recognition of Scotland’s right to independence.
Stephen Palmer, Much is wronger, 2022, acrylic on panel
Palmer’s recent paintings start from a paper model made from a sheet of A4 that has been defaced through a series of actions. Started before the pandemic, much was changed in the period between conception and completion, and as hopes for a more equitable age based on all that we learned during that time have faded, the new normal sadly feels much like the old normal, only somehow ‘wronger’.
David Reynolds, Future Queer Sex Technology, 2022, neon; Deactivation of Orpheus, 2022, aluminium print
Reynolds takes influence from English novelist JG Ballard’s infamous quote: “Sex times technology equals the future” and German philosopher and political theorist Herbert Marcuse’s 1955 text Eros and Civilisation. He projects a rejection of normative behaviour into a science fiction future populated by queer heroes to ask questions about what constitutes a queer aesthetic.
Morten Schelde, House at Dawn, 2022, pencil and ink on paper
Schelde’s drawings show an intersection between real and imaginary spaces. There’s a slow unravelling of emotion, a brooding tension projected onto the places and objects he draws. The meaning of his work is elusive, the only certainty is the strokes of the pencil on the paper, markers of process.
Paul Stone, Lamb, 2022, ink pen on paper, 30x21cm
Stone often returns to everyday objects in his work, such as old photographs, advertising images, toys and, in this case, one of his personal collection of ceramic animals, both found and inherited. He sees these figurines as more than merely ornamental, acting as benign familiars, their ‘dumb’ exteriors concealing repositories of human emotions of love and affection, desire and fantasy, the past, present and death.
Matilda Sutton, Herb Garden, 2021, acrylic on paper
Sutton uses drawing and painting, cloth, clay and paper sculpture to investigate how and why we define ourselves as human, and not animal. Collapsing the faulty definition of the human is a way in to questioning other cultural binaries. The hairy women and their animal familiars are players and figures with whom we can explore the in-between places.
Roman Vaughan-Williams, Erotica (after Beardsley), 2022, wood, ceramic, brick, paper, linen, cotton, ink
Victorian English illustrator and author Aubrey Beardsley’s late erotic drawings are reimagined in the present and future. Taking Beardsley’s original iconoclastic conception, Vaughan-Williams depicts the open possibilities of sexual experimentation in a future transcending the limits of the human body.
Flora Whiteley, Untitled, 2020, graphite and gouache on card
One of several portraits of people (largely women) working in interior design, this is the likeness of Eileen Grey, modernist architect and furniture designer. Following a time of working mainly with depictions of interior space Whiteley began to want to come back to figures, or rather, characters. It seemed logical to draw the people whose work interested her.
Chris Yeats, Burnout, 2022, pencil on paper
One of an ongoing series of drawings exploring the liminal spaces and tensions between the human and natural world. A burned-out abandoned car rusts on a stark coastal cliff. As it is slowly reabsorbed into the landscape its identity as a human artifact blurs and slips away.
Thursday 7 July 5.30-7.30pm
Artist talk: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
25 years of artist-led practice in the UK
To accompany our new exhibition, ‘Jubilee’, exhibiting artists Gordon Dalton and Janie Nicoll give a personal perspective on the artist-led scene; the challenges and the rewards of self-organised activity. The talk starts at 6pm and the exhibition will be open for viewing from 5.30pm. Refreshments will be served.
Gordon Dalton is a Middlesbrough based artist who has worked for various organisations. He studied BA Fine Art at Cardiff College of Art, and MA Fine Art at Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne. He was co-Director of artist-led agency Mermaid & Monster; Project Manager at Plymouth Art Weekender; LOCWS International based in Swansea; Network Manager at Visual Arts South West and Director at Contemporary Visual Arts Network (CVAN). He was Producer at Creative Factory, Middlesbrough, which put artists front and centre of its aims.
Janie Nicoll is a Glasgow based artist, with a socially engaged as well as a studio-based practice. She trained at Edinburgh College of Art, and the Glasgow School of Art. She currently works across a range of media including installation, photography, digital imaging, collage, printmaking, and assemblage. She recently undertook ‘In Kind Project’ with artist Ailie Rutherford, that explored the in-kind economy of the visual arts using GI 2018 as a case study. Janie currently works part time at Scottish Artists Union; is a former President of the Scottish Artists Union (2014-17); and is a Trustee for Engage Scotland.
Gordon Dalton and Janie Nicoll exhibited in the Vane exhibition, ‘We Interrupt this Programme’, in 2000. Dalton co-curated the exhibition with Vane director Chris Yeats. A second iteration of the exhibition was held at The Changing Room in Stirling in 2002.
Take a video tour of the exhibition
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