REVIEW: [Thinking with the Body] by Wayne McGregor @ The Wellcome Collection

Thinking with the Body by Wayne McGregor
The Wellcome Collection
19 September - 27 October 2013

This is my recent review I wrote for the online publishing site: http://intuition-online.co.uk/article.php?id=3416

A study of mind, movement and dance, 'Thinking with the body' was the most recent exhibition presented by the Wellcome Collection in the increasing emergence of collaborative art and science practice. In recent years, artists have become ever more interdisciplinary and multi-faceted practitioners in their own right; engaging with an array of experts, scientists and consultants alike to fuel the research invested in their artworks. In this exhibition Wayne McGregor investigates aspects of perception, sensation and physical movement in relation to cognitive and social sciences, demonstrated through the art of dance itself.

The exhibition certainly addressed some really intriguing ideas around the body as a tool and vessel of physical expression. Using dance as a case study, this spontaneous and inexplicable expressive form of behaviour allows the dancer to use their body as their chosen medium. In fact using the body as an artistic medium is not purely restricted to just dancers, performance artists have been doing the same thing for years. Whilst watching the interchange between both the dancers and choreographers, you feel very much like a voyeur; looking in on a unique form of language by those who possess an obvious enriched understanding and utility of the body as an instrument. It goes beyond ordinary gesture, its flexible, sometimes exaggerated, sometimes amazingly subtle, as if they own a completely different embedded vocabulary of movements they are able to appropriate at will. Just like any other type of artist, dancing explores the endless possibilities of the chosen medium and in this respect, the limits to which the body can be used to express both emotion and narrative. Dance is certainly not just a visually spectacular practice but an innate form of expression drawn from the emotive core. As with many art forms; what appears on the surface  is only half the story, the rather more interesting art lies in the cognitive and psychological intentions driving the resulting physical catharsis.

INDUSTRY: Art Internships

Since starting my fine art degree, I have been on three different art internships. All of these internships have varied from each other, not only in the tasks and roles I have been involved in but also in the nature of the actual organisations themselves.

The Cutting Room, Nottingham Playhouse, Nottingham

(3+ months)

The Cutting Room comprises two graduates from the NTU fine art degree course: Jennifer Ross and Clare Harris. One of the best ways of seeking out opportunities is to utilise the contacts and networks that already exist on your course and at your university. As recent graduates still based in Nottingham, they were offering internships to students particularly on our course. Not only did I benefit from being an intern in a working art organisation but I also gained valuable advice and mentorship from people who had already done what I had.

I did a huge variety of jobs whilst I was there but some of the highlights were looking through exhibition submissions and choosing artists for forthcoming exhibitions, filming and recording interviews for a private view showreel and designing the marketing material that eventually went to print.

The Way Forward (2012) Exhibition Flyer, designed by Vivienne Du

http://internship-thecuttingroom.blogspot.co.uk/

REVIEW: [Dalston House] by Leandro Erlich @ Barbican Centre, London

Dalston House by Leandro Erlich
Barbican Centre
26 June - 4 August 2013

I've always been a fan of interactive and participatory artworks, and London's latest instalment Dalston House was just the type of work I love going to see. Having read about Leandro Erlich's work before, I was intrigued to experience his manipulation of visual and spatial dimensions in the flesh.

What struck me immediately was its nonchalant and honest simplicity. The first thing you see is the huge and imposing mirror, and in effect that is all there is to this illusion: the mirror. However I found myself drawn to the metal scaffolding holding the mirror up. Erlich has purposely allowed the viewer to be able to see the exposed mechanism behind the illusion. Nothing is concealed, there are no smoke and mirrors to the work's production. Every person participating in this work knows more or less how it works, how the illusion transpires ─and still...the magic and curiosity is still very much there. If anything, the pleasure received from the work is even more so somehow when you realise how straightforward it is in its construction.

People are always fascinated by their reflections. Even now when you see someone walk down the street and they catch their reflection in a mirror unexpectedly, they look intrigued or surprised as if seeing themselves for the first time. Seeing one's self allows an unusual, out of body semblance; an awareness of one's body and its ordinary constructs and restrictions in real time and space. Dalston House enables the impossible ─but not in actual physicality, just in the reflected image. Yet this is enough to reverse our rational understanding of our bodies and its capabilities. Participants became acrobats, superheroes, people with gravity defying abilities and contortions. Ironically enough, most viewers were adamantly trying to recreate a realistic portrayal of gravity, dangling upside down for example was popular, or sitting a window ledge from a seeming twenty or so feet off the ground. People were trying to create fantastical scenarios but within the realms of believable physics, as if this makes the illusion even more seductively deceptive. Creating a sub-real reality from the unreal. You get how it works, you see how it works, but you still find yourself staring at your own reflection thinking "I'm dangling upside down from a window ledge." You may know you're lying on the ground but this feels irrelevant when your body becomes the best full scale puppet you've ever had to play with.

PRACTICE: Tactile in Texture

How do you define space?

Often I find this relentlessly perplexing. Space, to me is free, moving and fluctuating around us, it never holds any true form or dimension. I often experiment with the way in which space can be 'divided', how in which our perception of space can be manipulated through creating 'walls' within space.

What is a 'wall' and how can this represent solidness and physicality?

Because of this, I find myself drawn to materials that exist in a uncertain medium between opaqueness and transparency. There is always ambiguity, and I feel that my work should be an enquiry, a tool in which to allow people to question space in the same way. These tactile, moving, sensuous materials often allow me to play with this idea of the divide, of the barrier. Nothing is definite, nothing if finite or as simple as what you physically see. Is there such a thing as a barrier when space is constantly flowing around us. Is this actually a case of a somewhat mental barrier instead?

Reverse of Volume (2012) by Yasuaki Onishi

The Garden Document (2010) by Edith Maybin

Hero (2002) directed by Zhang YiMou