This touring group exhibition in China features Fine Art Staff from the Glasgow School of Art. The participants were selected from an open call that emphasized a widening participation and understanding between two cultures as a signpost of the developing intercultural space which, increasingly, we share. The exhibition premise also pointed the way toward fresh possibilities in practice through exposure to one another’s cultures and ideas through mutual learning, the sharing of insights and the opportunities that each institution offers to the students and staff. By facilitating future student and staff dialogue and exchange, this exhibition sought institutional impact and outcomes that reflected the desires of both institutions in providing a research led/educational perspective to empower dialogue and cultural exchange.
Unlike other recent exhibitions I've participated in this ‘open call’ project allowed me to more fully explore the subjective relations to the screen by comparing and contrasting my painting practice with other artists/teachers of varying styles from the Glasgow School of Art and understanding how these varying styles would be interpreted in China. Equally, I as an outcome question, I would ask how critical agency through paint reflects digital representation in relation to a wide variety of artistic agendas, mediums and cultural similarities and differences that are provided by a contemporary art school.
As with all my other recent exhibitions I presented a number of paintings which examine how, through the act of making, contemporary abstract painting becomes a material activity that co-exists with and reflects digital representation. By encompassing embodied gesture, form, colour, line, chance, depth and opticality the disembodied digital is referenced by the absence of hand-gestured expression and combined with digitally sourced stencils and clip art. Decorating processes and materials (household paint and transparent coloured floor varnishes) are repeatedly poured and painted in combination with the stencils. The subsequent palimpsests reveal traces of earlier painted forms that mimic the layering of windows programmes etc. on the screen.
Artists include: Ross Birrell, Louise Hopkins, Craig Mulholland, Alistair Payne, Graham Ramsey, Amanda Thomson, Ross Sinclair, Smith/Stewart, Michael Stubbs.
