Exeter Contemporary Open 2019
After a year out the Exeter Contemporary Open is back in the refurbished Exeter Phoenix galleries. There is always a certain template of what to expect for this open competition, plaster on chicken wire, crude bold acrylic paintings, things painted using factory issue colours & a few video works (usually being the surprise highlight). This year the show holds true to some of this formula but for me, the highlights were things i’ve never seen before in this competition. So here they are…
Molly Thompson’s 2 works Shoulder to Shoulder & Some Kind of Stubbornness piqued my attention due to their simplicity & honesty. If I can ever see the exposed edges of a painted wall based work, usually a canvas I immediately inspect them. For me the sides of a work reveal a lot about the process of making. Sometimes there are the drips & splashes of the paint on the sides of the canvas, other times there are pristine edges that have either been left blank or painted over to cover up any traces that have escaped the front facing surface & occasionally the edges are incorporated into the painting. Each variation gives something away & if its on show it will be looked at.
With that in mind consider the edges of Molly’s work where we see the construction of the pieces from the edges. The rings from the wood are exposed as are carved out joints, there is filler & layers of colour are shown giving the viewers a really detailed narrative of the materials, their assembly & how they were treated. This has been done in a beautifully gentle way. In Some Kind of Stubbornness, the outward facing surface is black & yellow. At the edges of the black section there are layers of Orange, Green Blue & White paint visible, detailing the action that has come before this final vision.
Similarly with Shoulder to Shoulder, the pale Blue/Grey panel gently darkens at bottom edge before the slight lip along the lowest point shows a light blue highlight which looks like running paint has been caught. This suggestion of painterly movement is all we get to hint at the application of colour in this work. The rest is seemingly exposed by reduction, potentially telling us of a sanding process on the edges. Molly’s interest in resistance & limitations is in the artists statement & these are clearly explored in this work to the enjoyment of the audience.
The aesthetic of Molly’s work seems to be carried on through other work in the show & of the 2 works by another selected artist, Alia Hamaoui, the work Fringed was a delight to see near by in the gallery. In my notes from the show, ‘Tiles torn from a space. Something functional given ornate features’ is all I wrote. It made me think about abandoned places that are left to decay but produce beautiful patterns & combinations of materials, forming as they rot. This work could have been taken from such a place, an abandoned bathroom perhaps, then re-configured by the artist with the addition of the Fringing. A decorative element serving no function or purpose but instead highlighting an edge. This small detail then leads us to think about the forming of the tiles & the mould like patterns that bleed across the surface. There is a considerable amount of work that has gone into making this piece but all in order to make it look effortlessly recovered from some place. Alia is influenced by craft based techniques such as tiling & textiles, with this work both have been brought together in an interesting way. Normally we wouldn’t see them used practically together although they both relate strongly to a domestic or working place. This merging of materials can lead us to another interest of the artist in exploring relationships to memory & how objects & images shape our collective & personal memories.
In an interesting twist artist Jack Bodimeade has used LCD computer monitors, Oil paint & video to make his work, Lchtyosaur. This video work is a video sequence playing on an LCD screen that has a section cut out on the inside & in that section is a painting. Although it is possible to see all of the elements that make up this work it is really difficult to understand how it actually happening & as a viewer I found myself flickering between trying to figure out how it works & the beauty of the content. The work holds us in some underwater scene with organic shapes & ocean blue colours. Adding to that the innovative cut out in the LCD screen creates a translucency in the video that emulates water in some way. Both the video on the screen & the painting in the cut out section (but also on the screen surface) merge together in a way that give this piece contrasting effects of mutability & stasis. I really hope Jack is able to continue this method of work & take it to new levels because the potential is fascinating.
There are plenty more artists to see in this show with amazing work but these are my top picks.