Exhibitions and some war news.

After painfully taking down the installation at the Bankley Gallery last weekend (photos here) I borrowed the Gallery's comments book and scanned in all the pages - the response was entirely positive but then people are often polite and generous on the surface (either that or I am actually totally amazing). 

Here they are:

It was very hard work putting it up and even harder to take down but the overall effect and impact of the work both on people and was certainly worth it.  The photos will definitely look good in my portfolio and I'll be able to submit ideas for similarly large scale projects to other galleries.  It's funny but I didn't really realise how well I'd achieved what I'd set out to do until about half an hour before I had to take it all down... then I got all teary eyed and nostalgic and wished I'd wandered about it a little more... this didn't last though because as soon as I started taking it down I realised how annoying it was going to be - so then I was thrown back into yet another evening of frustration. 

At the same time as this exhibition I have had some work in another exhibition running (which is still on now - until the 5th August) on 50 Beech Road in Chorlton at The Everyman Gallery which has two of my framed pieces for sale.  Feel free to drop by and have a look at everyone's work.

It's been good to have these two exhibitions because one was conceptual experiment widening my scope and creative ability and the other is more of a commercial venture where I can leave the business side of things in the hands of my lovely art dealer.  I wonder if in a few years this will all develop in some brilliant direction where I'll have enough reputation and money to actually not have to work in my day job anymore.  That's always been the dream, to make existence that little bit nicer and to be able to do what I like to do and put myself in a position where I don't have to do anything else.  I have some interesting ideas in my mind for future projects - smaller and larger scale, for a while I think I'm going to work on smaller scale ideas and explore narrative and bring something of myself into the abstraction because so far I've not really been saying anything except that there's nothing at all to be said and that under the surface the world is some kind of big, swirling, non-stop, chaotic and inescapable pool of everything.

When I focus on myself I know that I'm finite and that if I dig deep into the centre of myself to the very beginning there's actually nothing in there any more- like the foundations have all rotted away and they need replacing with steel supports so that I can put something beautiful inside - or maybe unearth something beautiful that's been buried under so many years of thick and constantly developing defence barriers.  Everything has been pooling outward trying to attain some sort of gainful permanent growth and building strategies to fight against the howling enemy.  My efforts for most of my adult life have been directed towards some kind of war against a faceless and bodiless enemy - who is still out there, and I'm not surrendering just yet - it's just that I have hidden resources and places to explore, nobody understands them yet, I need to understand them myself first.

Distorted Interior Barriers - Exhibition Photographs

Here are some photos of the now completed exhibition at the Bankley Gallery - this first set are of the entire room (from various angles) in order to demonstrate the overall effect:

Secondly some close ups of the walls:

And finally this is a sidewards panoramic shot of the entire shot looping towards the doorway (i you tilt your monitor on it's side and scroll through this it's like your taking a very fast and improbable spin):

 

For anybody who was unable to attend the preview the show will be open on the weekend on the dates of 9th, 10th, 16th, 17th of July between 10am and 5pm.  It would be lovely to see you there as these photos are only a very slight and weak representation of the overall effect of the work.  I will actually be in the gallery over these weekends at these times and I'm going to use the time on my own without the  to start writing a story - it's not actually going to be a proper story or narrative but likely an element of a future project (writing has always been of interest and finding some way of fusing word into imagery seamlessly would be great - in a way that people would want to read and look at a picture at the same time, so it's something inbetween the two - the words likely operating on some visual and narrative level creating something immersive, textural and literary all at the same time - like a graphic novel - but without any characters).  So anyway the door is open over the next two weekends so hopefully see you then.

First evening of exhibition preperations

Interesting evening doing my exhibition preparations at the Bankley Gallery last night - here are a few photos:

This first one was actually taken on Sunday after I moved all my materials over by taxi (except for the materials I forgot which is very typical of me) the framed images aren't going to be part of the main concept but just put along the side - as I may be able to actually make some money from this if they are about...  One hundred or so squares of collaged photocopies are on the floor with the exception of the one I staple gunned to the wall - as a little bit of test to see how it would look. Yesterday evening I did the same with but with about thirty squares, using them to cover the upper perimeter of the gallery walls - then I cut shapes out of the squares and staple gunned those do underneath - which had the resulting effect:

So it's a case of creating this contrast between white and densely interlaced infrequently repeating patterns and the whiteness of the gallery's walls - the next decided step was to staple gun more squares in places so the patterns could reach the bottom of the wall:


Then repeat the previous movement of cutting shapes out of the squares and moving these further downwards too - some of which to stretch across the floor and right into the middle of the room:

And there you have it - a very simplistic summary of an entire 12 hours work - didn't include all the stuff about bruising my hand, breaking a mug, breaking my staple gun and making a very lazy and quite dull introduction and quick removal of some very day glo colours - I'll get colour in this eventually, I think.... the next step will be to place some white paper in selective places underneath all the pattern tendrils on the floor - this will hopefully make the white from the wall appear to see into the floor in a similar fashion as the photocopies do.

If you haven't already confirmed whether or not your attending the event via Facebook feel free to do so now just here if only to make me look really, really popular.  Speaking of which I have another preview event two weeks after this one on Beech Road in Chorlton somewhere - completely different kettle of fish as it's all framed work and with other artists but it's good all the same, two exhibitions in one month and then possibly not another one for the rest of my life - who knows?

Promotional Postcard Design

The idea of my exhibition is to distort the gallery walls and floor through the application of collage, coloured paper, and some objects too - perhaps some furniture (anything big and broken so feel free to donate anything to me).  All those things will change the perspective of the room and work against the hum drum method visual art is usually presented:  rectangular panels separated by long expanses of white wall.  You know the type - there's no avoiding this when I usually exhibit in galleries because it is the done thing, so I would play the game and just put a few pictures up alongside everyone else.  Now that I have a solo exhibition I have no excuse to not exhibit my work in a way which is more suitable to what I've always been wanting to do with my work.  Which is to cover the walls in wide expanses of crazy texture and confound the viewer with an overwhelming depth of static, nonsense and contrarily busy void.

One of the problems with this approach is how to promote it - I haven't put this picture together yet, I have all the ingredients prepared but I don't have a photo of what it's going to look like.  So the best I can do is create an artistic impression of a 3D space - annoyingly this artistic impression will be confined to the size of a postcard - a rectangular space.

Anyway I started work on this trying to create 3D spaces just using copies of my texture but this didn't really go very far - it looked too much like it was made on a computer - which it was.  So I readjusted my method and took some photos of corners and corridors and then worked over the top of them with colours and textures.  The results are just below, showing how they were layered step by step:

Now these are okay but they are not really getting across what it is that's going to be happening (even if what is happening ends up becoming a non happening) - they still look quite computery, a bit first year graphic design, even worse, these look a bit psychedelic.

Anyway in the next few images I put these images inside one another and try to make look a little more complex.  I wanted to create something that looked like an interior of a room - but then not too much like a room either - more like a distorted room.... as I'm all about distorting rooms.

So I looped designs into one another over and over again making them more complicated and perhaps less relevant:

 

As you can see by the bottom image I found something quite relevant... still arguably a little psychedelic though - but at least it gets across some view of a skewed and bizarre interior.   On the back I'll write a little blurb explaining the exhibition - something along the lines of "through massive areas of texture and collage Garth Simmons creates an immersive environment of skewed perspectives and illusive scenery - visually distorting the gallery space and conjuring an atmosphere of colourful and dislocated chaos".  I promise I'll do a lot better than that - though I'm getting pretty good at writing this sort of definition - I think blogging has had the desired effect on my self definition skills.

The title of my exhibition may be a simple one.  I'm thinking it should be called "Dimensional distortions of a room".  I was going to go for something wordy - like the title of my Blog, but then decided against it - people never seem to understand what I mean by my wordy titles.  It's fairly simple to understand - if you are me.  They are also very hard to explain - if you are me.

(One day after posting this I designed the back of my promotional postcard:

It took all evening but I had to get it done so I could take advantage of a special offer at Vistaprint which ran out today - I rather like it though.... many thanks to my house mates for checking whether it was actually good or not, and also in improving my sentence structures.)

Colour Textures

Continuing the permutations of old bad quality photographs of my work from last year (detailed here:

http://garth-simmons.blogspot.com/2011/04/always-condensing-my-drifting-elements.html) I have ultimately put together about 60 A4 sheets of colourful texture - which isn't as big a task as it sounds, it didn't require much thought at all - as I've said it was just a use of patience and numbskull autonomy - the mind sleeps as the hands move and it nicely makes me forget where I am.  

Anyway I've pieced together several different mixtures of these textures together just below, they get more integrated and enlarged as they go along:

I'm not at all sure what I'm going to use these patterns for - I have some ideas but nothing conclusive.  My work generally goes through different phases - this is not a compositional phase, it's a more like a production line spewing out pattern and texture.  These come in handy later on - all I need to find is a cheap printer shop and I can reproduce copies of these images over and over again and splice them into one another and also into my other textures.  Then you get another texture which is a mixture of two textures but different from both.  

So the above has no deep metaphysical meaning it's just a lot of humming static waiting to be merged with lots of other humming static.  My work is actually, when I come to define it - a big static ball of humming static - it's quite empty but also entirely full all at the same time.  I'd say it's hard to judge what's in it because it's still embryonic and developing - smelting and changing into some melting smelching mulch until eventually it'll hopefully take the form of everything lacking in everywhere and everyone.  Which is quite a tall order wouldn't you say?