Here4 at Cavallerizza Irreale

May 2019. The debut showing of “Monument to the EU”, selected as part of the Here4 festival at Cavallerizza Irreale in Torino. The space allows for the full implementation of the project as I originally saw it. The sculpture is accompanied by photographs and technical drawings that make up the 2026 competition entry from LAS Architects Associates. Conceptually speaking, the piece draws from the current political fragility across Europe that has allowed for the rise of nationalism. The threat of EU breakup is very real and this work is prophetic in its intention. More information on the work itself can be read in the blog entry “Predicable Monumentalism”. The banality of the competition entry ‘visualisations’ highlights how the passage of time affects public spaces and monuments of this type.

The Cavallerizza Irreale is a community of multi-disciplined artists that occupy and maintain the premises of the old royal stables in Turin, Italy. The building was left abandoned for many years but now hosts a variety of exhibitions, performances and screenings. Here4 is the fourth edition of the festival and this years theme is ‘temporary cities’.

Paratissima/Crafters & Makers

Paratissima 14 ‘Feeling Different’ was a big success. Great turn out and a great team of people. Some shots of the floor plan construction and the Crafters & Makers section. Special thanks to Azahara, Marina and Raul!

https://paratissima.it/paratissima-14-feeling-different/ h

Paratissima venue and designs

This years Paratissima “Feeling Different” opens on October 31st, Caserma Alessandro La Marmora, Via Asti, Torino. I’m working on this one as part of the install team. Here are some pre-build interior shots and some working signage drawings. I will be in at the Crafters and Makers section until November 5th. Come on down

http://paratissima.it/paratissima-14-feeling-different/

From beginning to end

Whenever you watch the news, a newsreader hands over to some sort of correspondent. Invariably, that correspondent is twinned with a map of where they happen to be reporting from. Given the rolling nature of news these days, it came to my attention that certain geographic shapes have become loaded with certain connotations. You see North Korea… what’s he up to now? Afghanistan…when will this end?? Myanmar…how many forced out today? You can begin to predict the story before the reporter opens their mouth. In terms of the Western media, each disaster zone has one pressing matter and it comes and goes as time progresses.

“States of Affairs” is about how these said places fall in and out of ‘newsworthy consciousness’ but are in many ways, interconnected.

The gallery refers to the moment I thought of it (when the Russian annexation of Crimea was mentioned again) to the finished piece. I thought that it would be interesting to show the evidence of progression, given that this piece is essentially about time.

Masking failure?

I gave up on this piece about two years ago. For reasons that I can’t remember, the initial promise over these two images soon disappeared. After recently going though the archive of older work, I came across it again and then thought of an experiment. The original intention of images can so often be mistaken these days, constant recycling and the porous online world allows for essageration to appear on a daily basis. Another thing was that I have always been told to avoid describing your work at all costs, but the current trend is to do just that, using thirty hashtags or less most of the time. What if I were to utilise these common practices with something that (in reality) failed, then see how it compared with a legitimate piece of work...?

Would a higher number of tags, likes, new followers, comments etc, with relation to this image, subvert the purpose of a work or what is actually means.

I posted this failed image about a week ago and explained the experiment. Usual posts after this amount time reach around thirty likes and result in five or six new followers. This one after a week ‘outperformed’ most of my actual work by about twenty percent across all categories…

Is this purely down to publicity? Timing?? Probably, but it makes you think about the perception of any given image, even if it’s rubbish in the first place