Visual Arts Group Wales (VAGW): Regional Conversations 11-12-13 May 2021

What do we need for a vibrant visual arts sector and how will it support your work, artistic practice and interests?
Calling all independent artists / makers / technicians / practitioners / curators / producers / arts workers / hobbyists / early career / community groups, or anyone with an interest in visual arts. What do you need a visual arts network to do for you? Join the conversation!
In May 2021, Visual Arts Group Wales (VAGW) is hosting three conversations exploring the conditions for a thriving and supportive visual arts network for Wales. We will focus on priorities highlighted by VAGW’s 2020 survey ‘COVID-19 and visual arts in Wales’ and seek a deeper understanding of your current challenges, successes and issues.
More info and to book a place:
http://www.vagroupwales.org/en/2021/04/02/regional-conversations-an-opportunity-to-discuss-the-visual-arts-landscape-with-visual-arts-group-wales/
New publications from MOSTYN: Richard Wathen and Nick Hornby


New Eyes very Time
Rooted in the historical canon of painting, Richard Wathen’s (b. London, 1971; lives and works in Suffolk, United Kingdom) work focuses largely on portraiture, portraying figures in states of hesitation and contemplation: listening at walls, pretending to sleep, moon bathing, or engaging in other apparent states of uncertainty. Wathen’s works depict the tumultuous and complex array of negative human emotions, from anxiety and sorrow to despair, brought on by the socioeconomic pressures of contemporary living. The intensity created through the use of small details is powerful and emotional as an expressive gesture. His works subvert the genre of figurative painting through a bold play between representation and abstraction, between the solid density of the matte surface and the fragility of the figures represented.
The catalogue presents a selection of the large- and medium-format works that can be read as an investigation of the human condition in an age when an image is considered a stand-in for a sentient being. With essays by Alfredo Cramerotti, Juan Bolivar and Rebecca Geldard.
Link here
Zygotes and Confessions
A a new publication devoted to the work of London-based artist Nick Hornby, and has been produced to accompany his first solo exhibition in a public gallery. The exhibition, which shares its title with the publication, is presented at MOSTYN, Wales, UK, from November 2020 to April 2021.
Hornby is known for his monumental site-specific works that combine digital software with traditional materials such as bronze, steel, granite and marble. In this publication he presents a substantial new body of smaller, more intimate work comprising three discrete yet interrelated series of works inspired by the history of sculptural busts, modernist abstractions and mantelpiece ceramic dogs. United by glossy photographic surfaces created by means of an industrial process in which his marble and resin composite sculptures are dipped into liquid photographs, these new works explore themes of portraiture, the body, identity, sexuality and intimacy in the digital era. A number of the works have been made in collaboration with fashion photographer Louie Banks.
Along with a foreword by Helen Boyd, Head of Marketing and Publisher Relations at the Casemate Group, the publication features a text by MOSTYN director Alfredo Cramerotti and an essay by London-based publisher, editor and writer Matt Price. Price writes: ‘With one eye on the sculpture of the past and the other on that of tomorrow, technology is at the heart of London-based Nick Hornby’s practice and is central to the production of his often imposing, mind-bending and futuristic-looking sculptures. Using materials such as bronze and marble, his work points back towards the Renaissance or the nineteenth century, yet his use of resin and digital technology positions him very much in the present, exploring languages both figurative and abstract, often simultaneously.’
The texts are presented in both English and Welsh. Newly commissioned studio photography of the works by Ben Westoby, along with installation views of the exhibition commissioned by MOSTYN from Mark Blower, illustrate the publication, which has been designed by Joe Gilmore / Qubik. The publication is co-published by MOSTYN, Llandudno, and Anomie Publishing, London, and distributed internationally by Casemate Art, a division of the Casemate Group.
Link here
“Conflict Reporting” on Third Text, Volume 35, Issue 2 (2021)

Conflict Reporting
Aestheticising Objectivity
By Alfredo Cramerotti & Lauren Mele
Pages 248-262 | Published online: 29 Jan 2021 | Published in print: February 2021
Abstract
In 2001, artists Broomberg and Chanarin documented a day in the Iraq war. The result was a visual yet non-descript narrative, achieved with light and presence; a physical documentation of their journey titled The Day Nobody Died. In 1968 photojournalist Eddie Adams captured Saigon Execution in Vietnam, also a war-time image but with the lens of reportage. The former is a rendition of their experience, not bound by the constraints and facets of aestheticising fact. The latter was presented as news and was the receiver of outrage and scrutiny as such. This article explores how representations of humanitarian crises and wartime are complicit in their perpetuation, and how art demonstrates an attempt at representing such events as futile. We seek to establish a link between what is viewed and what is reported; what is seen and what remains outside the picture; an attempt to unravel what the difference is between viewing and witnessing.
Abstract available at https://doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2021.1873003
MOSTYN: WE ARE RECRUITING
Learning and Engagement Curatorial Fellow
Would you like to work alongside our team at MOSTYN?
MOSTYN is seeking a Learning and Engagement Curatorial Fellow to work alongside the team. We are seeking someone with the experience and skills to bring cultural and societal issues to life through the arts, introducing as wide an audience as possible to the benefits and opportunities of contemporary art. The postholder will research and formulate plans for ambitious and experimental approaches to reaching new audiences and widening engagement with our communities. Download the full job description and application process here The closing date for applications is noon, Sunday 28 February 2021. Interviews are expected to take place w/c 8 March 2021.
https://www.mostyn.org/news/we-are-recruiting-learning-and-engagement-curatorial-fellow
Sarah Entwistle at Museo Nivola: “You should remember to do those things done before that have to be done again”, curated by Alfredo Cramerotti
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Museo Nivola is pleased to present the first institutional solo exhibition in Italy of Sarah Entwistle, comprising of an entirely new body of work that includes tapestries, objects and 2D works. The exhibition, You should remember to do those things done before that have to be done again, curated by Alfredo Cramerotti, borrows its title from a love letter written in the mid 1960’s by Sarah Entwistle’s grandfather and fellow architect, Clive Entwistle (1916-1976), a contemporary of Costantino Nivola. For the artist, a daily ‘remembering’ has been the practice of calibrating time and place through the collection of discarded objects and material fragments. In recent years this ritual has started to glitch into the historicity of her grandfather’s archive around which her work orientates. Approaching its contents as mutable allows the artist to continually revise and reconstruct new narrative lines. Objects are exchanged into it, and pieces extracted out. In this often-confronting process of merging biographies Entwistle feels a continual tussle for proprietorship as the boundary of a lived history being ruptured. For this exhibition at Museo Nivola, the artist creates a large-scale sculptural arrangement of objects that record the movement of a year, and her first visit to Orani. Presenting an aggregation of objects that have formal associations with a ‘historical-present’, she draws arcs and tangents between the works of Nivola, the artist’s grandfather (both European emigrants to New York) and her own life and practice. Many of the elements displayed where gathered on her first over-land travel to Orani from her home in Berlin. Further pieces have been accumulated in the year since from London, Berlin, Morocco, Athens and Sicily. Found and hand-made elements that collectively create an archeology of shapes, materials, tones and textures. Arranged in the gallery, three monolithic stone and marble plinths display these constellations of artefacts, positioned to form resonant arcs and axis. Stacked around the gallery periphery, large compressed blocks of raw wool in various dyed hues can be laid on by visitors; from there, a series of suspended paper hangings can be viewed. The collaged hangings use differing textures, opacities, paper weights and sizes to create an abstract tonal enclosure of sepia and blues. A series of three hand-woven panels produced by local Sarule weavers; Lucia Todde, Rosaria Ladu, Pasquala Piredda are allocated to each table arrangement. The weavings are a further illustration of the artist’s continued fascination with the process of translation and interpretation from the drawn medium to a handmade physical object, where slippages in form, scale and colour occur. The intention with this collaborative production is for the composition and outcome to be determined and translated through the eye and expertise of the weavers, and in this less deterministic process new views emerge. Through this body of work Entwistle is searching for a line of sight that synchronizes personal histories, geographical regions and shared material practices. Sarah Entwistle originally trained as an architect at The Bartlett, UCL and Architectural Association, London. She is the 2014 recipient of the Le Corbusier Foundation Grant for Visual Artists and in 2015 presented a solo exhibition at the Le Corbusier Foundation in Paris. The exhibition coincided with the publication of her experimental biography, Please send this book to my mother, Sternberg Press, 2015. She was the recipient of the Graham foundation for the advanced studies in fine art, Chicago, 2014; the Artists’ International Development Fund, Arts Council England, 2017; and Main Prize winner for the Mostyn Open 21, MOSTYN. Museo Nivola in Orani (Nuoro), located in the middle of a park in the heart of Sardinia, is devoted to the work of Costantino Nivola (Orani, 1911–East Hampton, 1988), an important figure in the international movement for the “synthesis of the arts” (the integration of the visual arts and architecture) who also played a key role in the cultural exchange between Italy and the United States in the second half of the 20th century. The museum has a permanent collection comprising more than 200 sculptures, paintings, and drawings by Nivola and organizes temporary exhibitions focused primarily on the relationship between art, architecture, and landscape.www.museonivola.it Sarah Entwistle. You should remember to do those things done before that have to be done again. Curated by Alfredo Cramerotti Museo Nivola, Orani, (NU), October 31, 2020 – February 28, 2021Opening October 31Please note that due to the Covid-19 restrictions, there won’t be a formal vernissage. Main sponsor: Fondazione di SardegnaInstitutional Partner: Regione Autonoma della Sardegna, Comune di Orani, Distretto Culturale del Nuorese.Handling and installation: Art Handling Services by Luca Pinna – Seneghe OR; Tiemme srl -SassariTechnical Sponsor: Cantine Tenute Bonamici Mamoiada.Thanks to: Brundu Edili Orani, Cusinu Marmi Orani, Arte del Ferro di Pierpaolo Ziranu Orani, Tessile Crabolu Nule and the weavers from Sarule Lucia Todde, Rosaria Ladu and Pasquala Piredda. |
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