It’s been one of those days, all week.
The exhibition It’s been one of those days, all week is a group exhibition with work by Chris Clarke, Michael Lawton, Paul McCann and Ronan Tuite and features media-specific works focusing upon notions of nostalgia and temporality.
While the content of each of the artworks is reflective and displays an explicit fascination with temporality, the mixture of media in the exhibition can be perceived to mirror the protean nature of nostalgia.
The word nostalgia translates directly as "returning home”, an aspect echoed in Ronan Tuite’s work, a digital reworking of a maze (now long gone) from a shopping centre in his home town.
The work seems to exist as a memorial to a valued childhood location, while at the same time exploring the fictitious nature of memories. The digital construction using gaming technology seems to compound the sense of fantasy along with the constructed nature of the memory.
In a similar vein, Paul McCann’s audio work examines the malleable nature of memories and by extension reality in general. Through a series of digressions the narrator discusses a kind of futuristic occurrence from his adolescence. Veering from wholesome nostalgia to outlining the easily acquiescent nature of our sensory faculties, it questions the nature of how we experience the world around us and how we retrospectively attribute meaning.
In its entirety the work embodies an anachronistic sentiment in much the same way as an out-dated science fiction book and seems intent on examining the legitimacy of memory and perception, reality and delusion.
Chris Clarke’s work On or After 24.4.09 depicts a ‘clip frame’ from the original 1985 cinema release print of Back to The Future. The prints were folded and posted first class to friends and family on 23.04.09.
The moment featured is the moment of realisation where Marty McFly opens a newspaper and discovers he’s no longer in his own time. In this instance the newspaper operates as the temporal signifier, the component that triggers the realisation. On or After 24.4.09 expands upon this by itself being printed on newsprint reinforcing the tactile nature of experience and situating the viewer first hand in relation to the moment of realisation depicted.
When considering the relationship of nostalgia and art it seems to unremittingly lead back to painting. This romanticised process was once bluntly summarised by Victor Burgin as ‘the anachronistic daubing of woven fabrics with coloured mud’. If this statement is to be accepted then the process of painting and the material itself must be considered inherently nostalgic.
For this exhibition Michael Lawton was invited to reflect upon this and to produce an artwork with this consideration in mind. His work is a response to this assertion.
A discussion of the exhibition will take place on Thursday 28th July from 14.00 followed by a
Private view from 17.00 – 18.30.
The exhibition runs from 25th – 29th July 12.00 – 18.00 daily
at Wimbledon College of Art, Merton Hall Rd, LONDON SW19 3QA.
For further information please contact Paul McCann at infopmcc@gmail.com or Josh Y’Barbo at action.capsule@gmail.com