exhibition

Alumni 1

Artists Wendy Anderson, Clive Burton, Georgie Hopton, Nichola Ollis

17.Mar.05 - 10.Apr.05
Wed-Sun 12-6 or by appt; first Thursday 12-9

Curators Philippa Beale

Contemporary Art Projects
20 Rivington St
London EC2A 3DU
020 7739 1743
info@caprojects.com
Tube Old Street, Liverpool Street, Shoreditch / Hoxton

This exhibition brings together work by past and present students and teachers from Central Saint Martins College including Wendy Anderson, Clive Burton, Georgie Hopton and Nichola Ollis and is the first in a series planned to explore and trace the histories of the College.

Developments at Central Saint Martins never stand still and the purpose of these exhibitions is to present a ‘moment in time’, a snapshot of the diversity of practice, personalities and characters, stories and mythologies that make a colleges reputation. The exhibitions will also provide students currently studying at the college with access to works and artists, encourage teachers and students to return to the college a offers the public a glimpse of college life.

Wendy Anderson feels that making a statement about painting is always dangerous, for her, "looking", is the most important way to arrive at satisfactory answers. The process of paintings puts all perception in a state of flux as "the artist" continually tries to understand how things look. Finding a scale for each form, a surface, colour and shape define how the work progresses to an evocation of timelessness. For Anderson unity arrives through fragmentation and diversity. The crucial point is identifying when the process has to stop because the sensation of looking for moment has been satisfied.

Clive Burton’s preoccupation lies in the broad field of sculpture, installation and the tableaux using mixed media, material process and often combining three dimensions with two, concentrating on the presence and power of physical objects in juxtaposition, colliding within the context of art process and narrative. With current work engaging the ridiculous and the ludicrous with the paradoxical, hybrid and oxymoron; playing with chance and order, the related and the unrelated, the functional and the functionless. Layering serendipity and cross reference towards aesthetic purgatory.

Georgie Hopton’s work deals with the subject of 'Dead Life' which Hopton recognises as barely 'contemporary'. She attempts to communicate something of the human condition, whilst at the same time referencing Modernism and some of her artistic heros. The term 'Dead Life' describes a number of things; the fact that an art object may represent life but may never be truly 'alive', the way in which the work is made and necessarily 'killed' in order to make room for
the next creative act.

Nicola Ollism, in what seems to be traditional landscape painting reproduces scenes taken from the background photography of the ‘outdoor and leisure’ section of the Argos Catalogue, in the process, removing the commodities and freeing the gardens of their consumerist associations. What remain are depictions of imaginary worlds, perfect spaces, gardens or utopias, which are fetishised and connected through the use of paint to the hidden discourses of an earlier tradition of landscape painting and the picturesque.