| Unframed
16
April – 15 May 2004
Jo Bruton, Rebecca Fortnum, Rachel Garfield, Beth Harland, Jane Harris,
Susan Hiller, Lubaina Himid, Rosa Lee, Partou, Katie Pratt, Pam Skelton,
Suzy Treister, Sam Taylor-Wood
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| Unframed
examines contemporary painting. Rather than viewing paintings as discrete
commodities, it proposes painting as process, actively seeking its audience's
engagement. The show includes a range of practices that use paint and
also those using other media but which
evolve from painting's history and debates
The exhibition marked the publication of a collection of essays
by artists and theoreticians from the UK, USA, Australia and Canada.
The exhibition's aim was to extend the debate 'beyond the pages'.
The book,
Unframed, was commissioned and edited by Rosemary Betterton and published
by IB Taurus.
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For Rebecca Fortnum, 'the spectator is the site where the work happens.'
In her complex account of the viewer's engagement with the paintings
of Jane Harris and video and photographic works of Sam Taylor-Wood,
she explains how 'looking...is a serial activity' that unfolds over
time and is 'materially situated.'
She
also raises the question of the ethical and political relations between
the artist, the work and her audience. What is the ethical responsibility
of the audience in the viewing process? To whom is the artist responsible?
(herself or others?) Fortnum implies that such dichotomies are false,
the 'personal' need not be the 'confessional'; 'self expression' can
allow room for others to enter the argument.
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The 'choreography' inherent in viewing, alluded to by Rebecca Fortnum,
is echoed by Rosa Lee in her investigations of the limits of vision
in the processes of making. It is important to remember that the maker
is no less a 'spectator' in that process.
She
proposes the concept of mimesis, not as imitation, but as the tracing
of bodies in the world. This, she suggests, could be the model for a
painting practice that seeks 'compassionate involvement' with, rather
than an abstraction from, its context.
For Lee, painting is a means of engagement with the
supposed minutiae of life, where our limited definitions of 'vision'
are challenged. Both in her own work, and that of the painters she discusses,
Jo Bruton, Beth Harland, Nicky May and Katie Pratt, Lee identifies characteristics
that exceed the purely visual and relate far more to other somatic senses,
and the concomitant role of memory.
Pam Skelton discusses how, in her own work and that of Suzanne Treister
and Rachel Garfield, the pressure to reveal undisclosed or suppressed
histories actually breaks through old barriers between still and moving
images. In different ways, Treister, Garfield and Skelton's painted,
video and digital works exorcise their personal ghosts, but also move
beyond these to create new figurations of humanity that can travel across
boundaries of time, race and identity.
They
negotiate the troubled histories of holocaust and diaspora, in order
to renegotiate relations between the past and the present in a struggle,
as Skelton puts it, 'between remembering and forgetting.'
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