‘You’re Reading Into It’ at Vane Gallery

‘You’re Reading Into It’ brings together bodies of work by seven emerging LGBTQ+ artists, curated by artist Oliver Doe. The work focuses on queer readings of Minimalist art and portrayals of LGBTQ+ experience through a minimal abstract lens. Seeking to challenge the machismo often associated with Minimalist art and reclaim a queerness in that visual language, ‘You’re Reading Into It’ highlights the importance of queer and radical feminist issues in the development of contemporary art.



Rachel Ara’s work makes direct references to High Minimalism’s sexism and the movement’s ignorance of women artists such as Ana Mendieta, as well as gendered pricing structures in art and the tragedy of the HIV/AIDS crisis to which she lost several friends. Charlotte Cullen seeks to reinsert the individual into Minimalist formalism’s abstract removal of the artist’s hand by employing a feminist sense of craft. This contrasts the ‘masculine’ industrial fibreglass insulation and aluminium used in the sculptures in order to question binaries of gender and sex. Garth Gratrix also utilises materials often associated with Minimalism – household paints, concrete, and metal – but turns this machismo on its head by playfully examining their ‘queer’ properties through language, innuendo and slang.



Oliver Doe’s paintings question queer visibility in visual culture, employing opaque gloss paint over translucent, skin-like nylon grounds. Abstracting figures into confused, amorphous and sometimes invisible bodily forms, Doe critiques formalist hard-edge painting through an inquisitive queer lens. These are well complemented by Singaporean artist Daniel Chong’s intimate mirrored sculptures, Safe Spaces, which critique his country’s criminalisation of homosexuality. These laser-cut works present the abstracted spaces between embracing figures, removing the bodies and their associations from sight, whilst reflecting the figure of the viewer within.



Tessa Hawkes’ practice plays with object-hood, materiality and narratives, working across a diverse range of media to explore closeness, balance and unalike objects. Her choices of ‘things’ are purposefully colourful and fun; working from collections of images and objects informed by industrial spaces and queer culture, playing with her own queerness and aesthetic views while working through formal methods. Liam Fallon’s sculptural work plays with similar visual codes, deeply invested in the objects’ properties and their relationships with queer coding. Using a diverse and colourful range of materials, Fallon explores and makes reference to subtle forms of queerness and sexual subcultures within pop culture.

http://vane.org.uk/exhibitions/youre-reading-into-it-queering-contemporary-minimalism

Just below the bang bang - Mark Joshua Epstein - Vane, Newcastle

"Mark Joshua Epstein explores a sense of the baroque through the lens of exuberant abstraction. Inherent in the paintings is a kind of dandy-aesthetic, as Epstein investigates modes for thinking about sexuality, uncoupled from its traditional association with corporeal desire. These works play with obfuscation and revealing, while teetering on the edge of taste. Colours are amped up, patterns delivered through the imperfect marks of the artist’s hand.

The title refers to a remark by British-Iranian journalist Christiane Amanpour on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. While discussing her work as a war correspondent, she explains that to survive, one must inhabit the space “just below the bang bang” – or, just below the gunfire. Within this idea Epstein sees a metaphor for the formal decisions in his own work, lurking just below the threat of disaster, nearly falling apart at a moment's notice. The forms in these works are piled, butted up against, leaning on – structures always on the verge of toppling over.

The metaphor grows with the current American political situation, in which the margin has rapidly become a more dangerous place to dwell. Suddenly questions arise about what kinds of lives will need to be lived in the shadows as threats to minority groups like the LGBTQ community escalate. 

There is gayness lurking in Epstein’s recent abstract compositions. Unlike say, the hanky code, where a single colour denotes a particular sexual proclivity, his works are meant to be looked at for their combinations of colours – for their discordant colour stories, to borrow a phrase from fashion. He is far less interested in hues or patterns in isolation than he is in these elements forced together – layered, interrupted, obfuscated and otherwise occupying the same spaces. The work says to the viewer, take these elements together, or not at all.

The things Epstein makes are inspired by the revered and the crass – by the titans of geometric abstraction and by the cheap plastic tablecloths sold by the yard at dollar stores. In his studio practice there is no distinction between capital ‘A’ art, with its authoritarian stamp, and mass-produced (and mass-consumed) design, with its anonymous creators never getting to claim credit. The work celebrates all of it."

http://vane.org.uk/exhibitions/just-below-the-bang-bang

'Hold Tight' - Mark Joshua Epstein and Stina Puotinen at Vane

"In ‘Hold Tight’, Mark Joshua Epstein and Stina Puotinen invite the viewer in for a shared experience in response to recent political events in the US and UK. 

The installation they have created references both the physical space of the waiting room and the often anxious sensation of waiting. A world away from the neutral colours and decor we associate with institutional waiting rooms, Puotinen and Epstein have instead created a visually dynamic space, where the familiar is rendered unfamiliar. 

A space where the organic is synthetic, where innocuous patterns are in fact drawn from the security industry, and where a nostalgic feel-good poster has been updated for this era. 

As the title implies, the artists aim to expose and highlight this act of waiting, a sense that this time of collectively held breath thrust upon us by forces outside of our control doesn’t have to be borne in isolation. Puotinen and Epstein implore the viewer: hold tight to yourself, hold tight to your beliefs and hold tight to each other."

For more information visit 

http://vane.org.uk/exhibitions/hold-tight

Amie Rangel: Dwelling at Vane

As I stood in the gallery surrounded by Amie Rangel's beautiful work, I was consumed by them and filled with a sense of calm and peacefulness, despite it being a busy preview event.

"Amie Rangel’s exhibition, ‘Dwelling’, consists of large-scale charcoal drawings on linen, mixed media drawings on paper, and stone lithographs. This new body of work represents her ongoing investigation of the organisation of spatial constructs within modern society. Rangel’s work builds on an observation-based practice that is rooted in traditional methods, which translates moments and nuances of existing and occupied structures through perceptive and expressive drawings.

‘Dwelling’ embodies a glimpse into the subtle structural and superficial changes of an apartment complex located in New Mexico over a three-year period. Rangel’s faithful renderings selectively capture inconsequential moments that often go unnoticed. Indications of occupants arriving and departing are evident in changing window coverings, basic upgrades such as exterior utility infrastructure or doors replaced or removed, and graffiti scrawled on walls – painted over – then re-graffitied. Rangel’s practice dwells upon bringing awareness to these subtleties while referencing the existing sources her drawings are inspired by."

The muted tones and delicate lines gave a softness, and the light wood framing was simple. A few of the window cutout pieces were made in a way I had never seen before. Thick, good quality printmaking or cartridge paper had been stretched over a wooden frame and folded around the edges in the same way that a canvas is stretched over a frame. The paper was completely flat and even the thin strips of paper that remained after parts of the image had been removed, were incredibly strong and taught.

It was a pure delight to see such stunningly honest, unpretentious, multi-layered and emotive drawing in a contemporary art gallery.

http://drawingne.org.uk/whats-on/dwelling-amie-rangel/

http://www.matthewrangelstudio.com

http://vane.org.uk

Visiting Artist Lecture - Stephen Hurrell

This week's Visiting Artists Lecture was given by Glasgow-based artist, Stephen Hurrel.

http://www.hurrelvisualarts.com

Erratic Landscapes by Matthew Smith at Vane

For his second solo exhibition at Vane, Matthew Smith has conceived a multi-layered landscape of works, a hybrid of the manmade and natural environment that examines the intersections between these two polarities.




The series of Corporate Landscape drawings, shown here together for the first time, are made up of various actual corporate logos that depict snow-capped mountains. These images are regularly deployed in advertising to connote ruggedness, nature and immovable permanence, in order to sell us all manner of products from financial services to chocolate. The drawings link together individual logos to create a graphic mountain range, a horizon line, a synthetic topography that rises and falls creating its own peaks, valleys and ravines. Reminiscent of a graph plotting the financial progress of a business or the stock market, they become a metaphor of the corporate world.



The ‘Erratic Landscape’ sculptures are placed as if randomly scattered throughout the gallery, a series of boulder-like objects constructed from bits and pieces of chipboard. The faceted forms created are reminiscent of the abstracted rock shapes that might be seen in one’s peripheral vision in a computer game. A rough, pixilated abstraction, convenient shorthand to denote terrain, they never pretend to be anything but abstracted approximations, hollow copies. Each surface of the sculptures is a different shade of grey, thus the forms are not easily resolved from a single viewpoint; the viewer pieces them together by moving around them. In geology ‘erratic’ is a term for a stone transported by a glacier and deposited far from its point of origin: an object profoundly out of place. In a similar way these erratic forms are deposited within the space of the gallery, a counterfeit sculptural landscape for the viewer to negotiate.




In the series of Cloud drawings Smith again uses corporate logos, this time depicting cartoon-like fluffy clouds. These logos represent various companies – mainly in the field of computer technology – mostly offering to store information in ‘clouds’. Through the simple use of the word ‘cloud’ in conjunction with the image, we are encouraged to think of our information and documents as ethereal, not having any physical presence. However, this information is physically supported on servers housed in large warehouses consuming enormous amounts of energy to the detriment of the environment.




Made using hundreds of different cloud logos that are repeatedly traced in graphite, the faint lines overlapping and gradually building up a looming cloud of information, Smith’s drawings are not immediately recognisable as simple archetypal trademark images. This makes the finished drawings much more akin to a real cloud: an amorphous form in a constant state of flux.




Smith carefully layers together these bodies of work, immersing the viewer in a landscape of representation, a terrain to be negotiated both physically and conceptually.

http://vane.org.uk/erratic-landscapes