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?

Wrecks

I was going to use my Sunday afternoon in the same way I used my Sunday morning.  Sat with the curtains closed in my bedroom under electric light sticking little bits of paper onto other little bits of paper - I would have continued doing this until all the paper that needed to be stuck to paper had been stuck to paper.  It was quite sunny outside though so by about 3 o'clock I decided to don my straw hat and sunglasses and have a brief walk in Chorlton Waterpark - find some shade, phone my mum for a bit, do a little bit of design work for my exhibition.  I realised in the early stretches of the Water Park that it would be difficult to avoid large groups of people, so I scampered up a little steep hill and sat up there and proceeded with my tasks.  It was an unpopulated and ignored area of the park with no discernible pathways and no people, just lots of plants.

So it got to a point I'd done all I needed to do - which didn't take long - I considered going on a familiar walk down the usual paths but when heading in that direction I was instantly bored and nearly stepped on a few wandering dogs - too much hustle and bustle for a clumsy type like me, I think boredom can enhance my clumsiness so I headed back homeward but got slightly bored on my way back down such a dull familiar path - so I scrambled back up the steep hill and ventured into the dense vegetation.  It took me back to my early teens, when I went into Edlington Woods on my lunch break as it was the perfect place to talk to oneself and think, also the best place to avoid the melting pot of children, all learning social survival instincts and pack mentality.  It was also a good place to develop a split personality, so the thoughts in your head would actually become like a different individual perched on a throne in your cerebral cortex screaming to get out and making petty sarcastic remarks - like discovering a secret imprisoned soul that's been smothered for the past decade but it's reawakening ready to become real and as a consequence making you as a person more real..... well.... depending on your perspective this new presence may make you seem less real - but then at the time I wasn't so much aware of everyone else's subjective viewpoints, my own viewpoint was like a rollercoaster swooshing past all the sights and sounds of real life so therefore not being able to take part.  Boo hoo.

Anyway I completely digress.... as I made my way through the thistles and thorns I was thinking about how much I like exploring ignored areas of woodland, and how it would be unlikely to find any burnt out cars hidden in Chorlton Waterpark like the ones I used to see all the time in Edlington Woods - because Edlington is well dodgy and Chorlton is well nice.

I carried on with my rambling ramble stepped over dead trees and branches grabbing a useful stick on my way and within a minute, perhaps two (who's counting?) I came across a burnt out car.  It wasn't just burnt out either - it was also crashed into a tree.  Result.

I was pretty surprised because this place is such a fun family orientated area - but then I suppose at night time it's not about that anymore - it's about dogging and burning stolen cars for insurance claims.  I used to know a man in Scarborough who used to take up missions of pretending to steal a car, burning it and then sharing a cut of the insurance money with the owner - he didn't spend the money on anything useful though, within 24 hours all the money would be spent on his fruit machine addiction because he couldn't "resist the bright lights".  Anyway I took a few photos of this car here:

And whilst I was playing detective I also found the empty container of gasoline used to burn the car - presumably after crashing it into a tree.  Because cars don't always explode when you crash them. 

I saw another burnt out car just a few feet away on on my way towards having a look I randomly found:

An old, rusty and mangled kitchen sink!  I really didn't see that coming.

I continued my detective game at the next car and found out the gangs name:

I deduced through my complex sleuth skills - reading - that the gang, group or organisation that destroyed these machines and threw in everything including the kitchen sink (just for good measure) is known as M21 - which is the post code of Chorlton - so it's good to know that even in the slightly more idyllic left wing and slightly posher areas of suburbia there are people who burn cars and mangle sinks.  It makes me feel much more at home knowing for a fact that this sort of thing is going on.  I like that they named themselves after a postcode, it reminds me of E17.  

You may have noticed that I gave the cars a good lookaround.  This isn't because I have any massive interest in cars, I actually don't like them at all, it's more because I was looking to see if there were bodies inside.  Not because I'm some sort of ghoul just because it's probably the sort of things you should check for.  I didn't actually get into the cars but maybe I would if I were wearing protective gloves and clothes which weren't so lovely.  Here are the rest of the photos of the second car:

I took my leave of the wreckages knowing that there would be unlikely anything more interesting to find and rambled through the woods until I found the exit to the park - very near to which I found something else unusual for the area:

Two very large and very nearly geometrically placed perfectly square sponges.  This one, I think, is surely the work of the government or some secret cabal or society.  Or maybe a homeless person put it together as a rudimentary bed.

Well I'm back home now about to start sticking bits of paper onto other bits of paper again in preparation for sticking the stuck on bits of paper to even bigger bits of paper.  I'm good at sticking bits of paper to bits of paper but perhaps I'd make a better living as an adventurer - knight errant or errant fool?  There is an interesting world out there though, and things that I can make the effort to find that no one else would normally come across, or even find interesting.  I should probably take to the road one day with some sort of quest.

Condensing drifting elements again

I've been putting together some coloured collages made from some cheap colour prints of my work from last year.  I was going to hand these around bars and galleries as examples of my artwork for potential exhibitors and buyers but the quality was quite grainy and hardly representative of the actual work itself.  So they languished until earlier this week...  I put them to use by sticking them onto coloured paper and creating a colourful texture.  You'll see below examples of my results - some will be cut up and remixed together with others.  Some will remain the way they are due to me liking their composition and wishing to utilize that composition sometime later.  I'll let you work out which is which because I'm not sure myself yet, as if often the case with my numbskull autonomy.  Anyway, here they are:

The work above will become something different altogether very soon - something much bigger.  I have little clue as to what form it will take but it will be something very big - I am still in the process of using up the rest of last year's suddenly useful colour photocopies on last years suddenly useful coloured card so I'll probably end up producing about a hundred or so more of the above images.  It's often a case of repetition, permutation and coagulation.  And other impressive and not so impressive words.  Sometimes my methods actually just involve me sitting down in a world of my own and repeating the same task over and over for hours - this is probably why I'm quite good at Admin too.

This is part of the ongoing exhibition preparations as referred to in my previous entry here:

http://garth-simmons.blogspot.com/2011/03/bankley-gallery-exhibition-preparations.html

Bankley Gallery exhibition preparations

,I've finished putting together all the black and white squares (as detailed in this previous entry:  http://garth-simmons.blogspot.com/2011/02/scatterings.html) and still have quite a long way to go with my preparations for my exhibition in July at the Bankley Gallery in Levenshulme.

Preparations going very well - it's my first solo exhibition and I have an awful lot of space to cover and my ideas of how to cover that space develop more and more as the days and months move closer and closer to the date in question.  At first I was going to cover the walls and floor with this texture:

Which is hundreds of my photocopies of my collages stuck together.  Receding off into the distance.  So with 94 squares of black and white texture I can actually cover more than just a small area but also most of the room.

As the monotonous task of sticking massive squares of paper developed so did my ideas - I've also been putting together all my coloured paper - which can be interspersed into the mix to break up the monotony and to fill the gaps.  

So when I get to the place I can cut these big areas of texture and colour and intersperse them.  I'm not entirely sure how yet.  I was thinking that perhaps they should tell some form of story which would run incohesively, abstractly and non linear all over the walls and floors of the gallery intersecting into connective points and drawing themselves into subtle illustrations hidden in the overcomplicated mess.  That the visitors would be given a guidebook each that would explain what was going on - probably in a similar non linear, abstract and incohesive method.  

These are all ideas I have to develop.  I've been keeping a little notebook where I've been adding and developing ideas as they've come to me - it's been about for a few months now.... The best way to approach this massive project is not to design it completely (then it would be too perfect and I want it to have an element of autonomy) but to spend my five days before the exhibition working 9 to 5 putting up the prepared textures and colours into whatever compositional and narrative order feels right at the time. 

Below are some of the pages from my notebook which has a few "designs" or visualisations of my ideas for the space:

The preview of the exhibition will be on Friday 1 July 2011 in the evening (not sure of the time yet) and I'm planning this rather far in advance but then it's not as long away as you may think especially when there's so many things to prepare.  Also the great thing about preparing so many materials is that I they can be reused afterwards - and I do have a very good idea for afterwards too - which you may or may not be able to discern from the notebook drawings above.

As well as putting together more and more textures, stories and ideas to weave through this rather large scale piece I've a few other projects going on the next few months - I do need to do little small scale things too as I so hate not getting at least one creative act completely finished every month.  

(Next months creative act and a continuation of exhibition preparations can be found here:  http://garth-simmons.blogspot.com/2011/04/always-condensing-my-drifting-elements.html)

Quickly broken remains

 

 

Ornamental Bird Broaches and Turbary Woods

Ornamental Birds take on much more useful forms than just ornaments on your shelf.  My new obsession is bird broaches. 

These broaches are surely the central nexus of all the various shades, tones and colours surrounding them - actually making everything I wear all of the sudden make perfect sense - somehow my clothes feel more complete with the addition of bird ornaments.  This is a recent thing too of the past two or three weeks - I've realised that bird ornaments are what I want to be wearing.  The one one the left of this paragraph for instance.  She is a very sweet creature, playing fanciful and carefree on a sea of varied checkered patterns though staying content upon the thick texture of my long loved brown, red and beige blazer.  I haven't given her a name, it's not my place to give her a name, nor is it my place to give her a gender but to me she will always be a she.  Me and She-Swan like to fold my blazer lapel outside of my open overcoat because she just loves to dance glistening in the sun.  Open to new loves and experiences and dancing into strangers eyes - never looking "weird" or "quirky" but forever looking right.  Therefore making me look right.

Now this next one is a small bird called a "Great Tit" which some would argue that in species name alone is representative of me - what with me being a "Great Tit" (geddit?).
It's only a little broach but I've given it a little tool which makes it look like a telescope, or like the poor thing is screaming geometric abstraction filled with bits of pink.  He's a sweet thing, and one can't blame him for trying can they, and he makes a very cute and dashing stand against the world - fighting not with his fists and not with guns but with his words.  He represents a character with an enquiring mind - ready to take action against the nature of existence.  He is worrying - fretting - asking why? No answers until he finds out why only to find more questions - retreating backwards - becoming self absorbed - going through spats of mental anguish followed by bouts of hyper manic egomania - he's doing all of that so you or I don't have to.  He's also lucky enough to be doing it whilst living on my lapel and making me look ever so spiffing. 

I love my bird broaches and these are the only two that I've found so far so keep your eyes peeled in the charity shops as I can give these majestic attention seekers and/or crazy dark poets a happy home on my lapels.

Other bird news is that I went to an Owl Sanctuary at the weekend.  It was really really very good.  If you live in the Manchester area you should go along, you get to feed them and fly them and all for the price of £5 - I am such an advert, but honestly it was very very good.  A link is just below:

http://turbarywoods.co.uk/

DAY OFF WORK DAY - Thursday 6 October 2011

I've been having this brain wave on and off for quite some time now, it goes back and forth disapearing for a few months at a time and as this last year has been the year in which I've taken action and made progress I thought why not give this a go, whether it works or not it should be interesting.

The idea is DAY OFF WORK DAY 
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=192350904121044  .

I'm going to try to organise as many people to take a day off work as possible. The date is set for Thursday 6 October 2011 - which leaves me plenty of time to organise this, with any luck it won't require a great deal of organisation, I was hoping that once I got my first two or three hundred people the whole thing would grow organically and become it's own thing, because DAY OFF WORK DAY doesn't belong to me, it belongs to everyone, and every single person can get whatever they happen want out of it. I might actually just stay in bed and get lots of reading done, some will spend a bit of time with their friends and/or relatives, but everyone who wants this day off can do whatever they want to do individually and/or as a community.

There are all sorts of motives that could be attached to this and all sorts of philosophies but I'm not here to tell anyone why they would want to have this day off.  It could be an attack against authority whether it be politicians, the monarchy, the Gods, or your manager at work or it could be your opportunity to watch the Sopranos.

I think that the more people sign up to this the more it will be noticed and even if the day isn't allowed to happen it will serve as a threat which would perhaps force some sort of change, like all the tax money being paid towards the banks are given back to working people.  Something like that anyway.  It works as a threat as if you had thousands of people not wanting to go into work on one particular day, then the integral structure of our society would probably wibble enough to cause some sort of subtle damage.

I myself am not very politically minded.  I've been on a few protest marches when I was younger and found them very frustrating because a lot of effort was required, such as travel, banner making, trying to get psyched up enough to chant satirical songs but not manage it because I'm deep down not much of a shouter... and after all that nothing was changed, at all.  No matter how many people turned up and no matter how many rousing speeches were made... so I gave up on that and decided that I actually couldn't be bothered, they didn't need me to do that, they didn't need anyone, protest seemed quite ineffective, besides, governments come and go, chop and change, they all change faces and get new names but present day politics became rather uninteresting and small when looking at the bigger picture.

The bigger picture is horrifying, an infinity of unfathomable cell structures getting bigger and smaller around each other all bouncing around in pain and confusion - each of us different and each of us the same - caught up in our own bodies and personalities limiting our vision because deep at the centre of everything there's a mirrored self reflecting tunnel circling back on itself in a terrifying loop. Our role which is seemingly to carry out one task after another for no discernable reason other than to keep things working and to keep it all tidy implores me to set up my DAY OFF WORK DAY.  Which could potentially change a lot more than a protest march and nobody would even have to do anything at all - except maybe read a book, go to the park or whatever it was they felt like doing.

It's strange but these days I am actually incredibly happy compared to what I have been in the past but that doesn't mean that I can stand around all smug in my own achievement and happiness, I'm setting up DAY OFF WORK DAY in the interest of everyone's happiness. I myself don't have a political motive, more personal or existencial - for lack of a better word (though there are likely plenty of better words).  What really motiviates me most is fun, freedom and happiness, and to be allowed to just be ourselves for one day, together, and not be defined by what we do.  Of course this is likely not going to work as well as I would wish and there are obvious drawbacks to the idea.  I've set up my Facebook event and so far it's about half of the people invited have decided not to take part - which is likely a good thing - as we might need half of the world to be at work otherwise planes would be dropping out of the sky.  Some people like their jobs, some love their jobs, I wouldn't want to impose the idea that my way is the only way of seeing things.  That would be quite odious. 

So anyway the event on Facebook is here (again in case you missed it) http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=192350904121044 feel free to add your ideas and input and also feel free to put whatever motivation you like onto it, if you want to use it as a springboard to say anything feel free to do that too.  Thursday 6th October 2011 is the day when you can be free to do what you like - as long is it's not going to hurt other people, that wouldn't be very nice.  Also don't forget to invite everybody you know to this event, it could be great.  Who knows?