NewcastleGateshead Art Fair, Gateshead
11-14 September 2008
Vane presents Paul Becker, EC Davies, Kerstin Drechsel, Jorn Ebner, Pat Flynn, Nadia Hebson, Simon Le Ruez, Dodda Maggý, Andrew McDonald, Jock Mooney, Stephen Palmer, Morten Schelde, Matthew Smith, Alison Unsworth, Barbara Walker, Miranda Whall and Flora Whiteley, at NewcastleGateshead Art Fair, Gateshead.
Paul Becker makes paintings and drawings exploring the extremities of basic human feelings. The scenarios he creates flit between the conscious and unconscious, a feeling that is emphasised by Becker’s stubborn and involved painting process of daubing, scraping and repeated re-working of images.
EC Davies uses scientific exploratory processes to make visible and audible the enigmatic elements of organic and manmade materials taken from their microscopic environments to a macroscopic context in her video presentations and prints.
Kerstin Drechsel is concerned with the capturing of intimate personal moments, of how an individual or group expresses or identifies themselves through their rituals or the environments they create around them. She depicts everyday lives in all their oppressive reality, underlying dreams of escape, and obsessions.
Jorn Ebner creates internet-based, photographic, print and sculptural works that reveal ordinary spaces and locations to be punctured through by inconsistencies, tensions and contradictions, using personal ritual and excessive gesture in order to defamiliarise the everyday.
Pat Flynn produces computer-made films with no beginning or end. He makes loops: lottery balls spin and fall constantly, a mobile of the Ptolemaic universe keeps on rotating, a snake weaves endlessly through the toe of the shoe.
Nadia Hebson makes melancholic portraits, marine-scapes and flower studies coalesced from a proliferation of collective art historical imagery. Her miscellany of jumbled imagery thwarts a logical narrative interpretation but its elemental nature suggests a psychological intent.
Simon Le Ruez makes sculptures, installations and drawings which reflect on notions of escape, longing, desire and possible places sought in order to seek relief. Working with materials as varied as leather, pearls, copper, wax and artificial trees Le Ruez’s recent work conjures a sense of imagined yet dislocated landscapes that seemingly oscillate somewhere between utopian and uncertain identities.
Dodda Maggý creates a series of female characters based on personal experiences, which are then enacted in front of a video camera, accompanied by piano music composed and played by herself, sometimes re-worked using a simple recording technique, building layers as if sculpting.
Andrew McDonald makes digital prints and videos that are first drawn on a computer. Veering between a playful absurdity and a sinister desolation, on closer inspection, empty rooms reveal themselves as potential sites of some misdemeanour; landscapes and natural forms such as plants are not objects of beauty for our admiration, but instead become inhospitable things that threaten to entrap us.
Morten Schelde samples childhood memories, depicting the intersection of physical and imaginary spaces, exploring the gap between romance and melancholy, belief and skepticism, mirroring and obstructing, he involves himself in the recycling and re-invention of images.
Jock Mooney explores the cultural outpourings of the human mind, whether his own or that of the world at large. His tiny models are meticulously crafted by himself. With their exaggerated and distorted physical characteristics, they appear offered in a kind of appeasement to an unknown deity, an alarming appeal for release from some unspeakable affliction.
Stephen Palmer makes paintings that catalogue a collection of free, found and received objects such as matchboxes, pens, sugar, salt and sauce sachets collected as mementos of trips to, and along the way to, places far and wide.
Matthew Smith works across media in sculpture, drawing and video, but his projects share a concern with fictionalised and idealised representations of nature and of place. He takes as subject matter the utopian pastoral scenes of food packaging, where the artificial pictorial world of the supermarket becomes the motif for traditional landscape watercolours.
Alison Unsworth works both in the public realm and the gallery. Her recent work has concentrated on the generic and ‘placeless’ elements of the urban landscape, creating work that looks at sameness and generality, becoming almost the opposite of a site-specific piece of work.
Barbara Walker addresses the personal, social and political factors that impact on the formation of the identity of the UK’s African-Caribbean community. Living in Birmingham, she has witnessed at first hand a curious and potent collision of several different factors that together contribute to the forming of this identity in British society today.
Miranda Whall makes drawings, photographs, videos and, most recently, animations that are self-portraits. Whall explores her own identity in an attempt to recognise herself in relation to both the accessible and inaccessible, natural and man-made world around her.
Flora Whiteley is involved in the collecting and collating of images and a study of the techniques of mark making, composition, colour and layering of paint. Her approach to painting is very experimental (in quite a scientific sense) and is assisted by close observation of other painters’ techniques. This manipulation of paint is often expressive, sometimes referential.
The Sage Gateshead
St Mary's Square
Gateshead Quays
Gateshead
NE8 2JR
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