Nicholas Johnson

Emergent Modes of Seeing and Display: Helen Marten & Camille Henrot

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* Nicholas Johnson *

How does an artist make something now that compels us to look longer than our modernised attention spans are accustomed to looking? The piling up, ease of access to, and relentless mutation of cultural information occasioned by the internet has so drastically altered the way we look and process images that it’s nearing impossible to remember a time when it was any different. Two artists: Camille Henrot and Helen Marten, present two new methods of dealing with this increasingly dense accrual of objects and information.

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Colony: An artist-led takeover in London’s Fitzrovia

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* Nicholas Johnson *

Last December Anarch gallery of London commissioned the artist Andrew T Cross to build a sculpture designed to function as a platform for a series of artists to ‘colonise’ the space. For two weeks Warren St. in London’s Fitzrovia district was host to a frenetic schedule of day long residencies, exhibitions, performances, meals and parties. In the spirit of artist Gordon Matta Clark this temporary community assembled in a vacant lighting show room to propose new ideas about making art.

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Innercity Pilgrim

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* Nicholas Johnson *

Marianne and I meet over drinks, at a wooden table, well trod floorboards, wooden panelling on the walls, a low plaster ceiling, paving stones and graffiti through the window on the street below as dusk settles, lavender, royal blue, black. We’re here intending to talk about images that aren’t in front of us. Images of urban landscapes at night, underpasses, tunnels, back rooms. Innercity Pilgrim is a film by the artist Marianne Walker. She lives in London.

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Psychedelic Revision: An Exhibition on Psychedelia @ Raven Row, London

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* Nicholas Johnson *

It is probably not entirely inaccurate to say that artists have always been interested in methods of altering our perceptions of reality and along similar lines that artists have often sought methods of altering their own in search of new methods of representation. With art work ranging from 1959 to 2013, Reflections From a Damaged Life: An Exhibition on Psychedelia at Raven Row in London, is an attempt by curator Lars Bang Larsen to reframe psychedelia as a mode of art making that is more critical in its approach than the institution shunning, free-love and poster paint aesthetics of a bygone hippie counter-culture.

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Black Square

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* Nicholas Johnson * That I cannot remember the first time I saw Gillian Carnegie’s Black Square is a testament to its creeping, subtle complexity. It is a simple painting to describe: a monochrome black square of canvas just under two meters. Hidden in the black is a landscape delineated only by variations in brushwork, which means it is an extremely difficult painting to photograph. The first time I saw Black Square was in a photograph, a jpeg on the internet, and it wasn’t until this past summer that I was able to see it on a wall, in the flesh, at the Tate in London during their ‘Looking at the View’ exhibition (2013).

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Future Dreaming: Mariko Mori Rebirth at the Royal Academy

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by Nicholas Johnson

Mariko Mori’s multifaceted body of work stems from a yet more expansive imagination. Mori strives to show us a glimpse of a world that could have been transmitted from a distant future. Mori showed in London, 14 years ago and her vision aligned with video games, escapist manga culture and the digital aesthetic of an emerging generation. Today her work imagines a world where science and spirituality fuse with biology and technology. We get a rickety draft of future possibilities from an iridescent, alien world.

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The Speed of Nature: Ben Rivers’ Two Years at Sea

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by Nicholas Johnson

Ben Rivers’ Two Years at Sea is a portrait of Jake, a man who lives a lone subsistence lifestyle in the wilds of Scotland. Rivers’ film is a silent plotless meditation on life at a different pace and begs of the cinema goer a different kind of attention. A piece of contemporary romanticism, filmed on old equipment, removed from society, almost anthropological in its depiction of a human who moves at the speed of nature.

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History as Art: Luke Fowler’s All Divided Selves

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by Nicholas Johnson

Things are merging. New ideas and new art forms are arising out of the combination of elements. Video, sound, the past the present, documentary, biography, history, truth, opinion … In a time when so much more happens than one can possibly keep up with, an increasing number of artists are obsessed with looking back for something that we missed, records and documents of formative events that we missed out on.

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Digital Artifacts

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by Nicholas Johnson

Can you remember a time before the internet? bubblebyte.org is a London “based” online only gallery for a generation of artists who probably cannot. The work on display ranges from animated gifs and flash animations to creative use of html coding and embedded video. These artworks engage with the digital space and explore the possibilities of the internet as an artistic medium.

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