Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
Trinity Technology College, Warwick
11-23 February
Reviewed by: Alain Ayers
‘Somewheretogo’ is a smart move as well as being an intelligent and passionate exhibition at Trinity School in Warwick. Since graduating last June, Tristan Hessing and Candice Jacobs have been working non-stop to curate an exhibition of new work by recent graduates – most of whom are also members of Nottingham-based studio group Stand Assembly – demonstrating high motivation and a focus for their critical engagement.
It is a mark of trust coupled with a necessary instinct for risk that brought the school site into play: the Principal Dr Jim Ferguson and staff must be commended for their vision and commitment to the project in a time of change. It is a powerful message for the school to advocate that “the ability to express oneself artistically is of fundamental importance in nurturing the creative self-expression and independence of thought that we value so highly.”
The soon-to-be-demolished school building provides a perfect temporary place to explore how invention and problem solving around contemporary practices can operate. The rapid flow between opportunity and solution has been beautifully crafted and while the building as site has influenced the work it has also been tested to its limits for its purpose, functioning of imperfections, and its architectural parameters. James Bowen has used nine lighting fixtures extended almost to the ground creating an excavated symmetry, soft pools of white light of refined absence. In complete contrast up the hall Tom Allen and Ed Hick have collaborated on painting a wrap around fantasy of comic craziness in high colour and sharp wit, violent and playful characters acting up.
The seventeen artists have organised their work across classrooms, cupboards and corridors, generously sharing the poetics of the spaces and installing their own lexicons of memory and language. The ideas are good and the skilful methods of making are uniquely charged into the infrastructure. Alex Stephenson has claimed signs and scrawls, a forensic gathering from around the school into a cupboard. You see the after effect of this such as plaster rectangles hacked out and sawn chunks out of doors. Jacobs has installed electric fans that blow through the music room, a model vista of humming, plugged into sockets that once powered keyboards, and Hessing continues his work with powerful magnets suspended above TV monitors warping their functional stability with suggestion and playful psychedelic patterning. Nottingham will be the richer for their continued presence and ‘Somewheretogo’ provides a timely reminder that with the right connectivity there can be a confidence to see that where art resides is a positive place to go.
Writer detail:
Alain Ayers is Academic Team Leader of Visual Arts at NTSAD, Nottingham Trent University.
Venue detail:
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