Naoko Shohi

NEW TALENT:

Naoko Shohi

‘On the Globe’ 2011

‘Summer Holiday Memorial’ 2011

‘Back to the Ground’ 2011

NEW TALENT: Naoko Shohi
‘On the Globe’ 2011

‘Summer Holiday Memorial’ 2011

‘Back to the Ground’ 2011

Right to left. All works acrylic on canvas.

New Talent presents new work by young artists from the North-East of England, including recent graduates from the universities in the region.

Naoko Shohi is a Japanese painter whose work combines the bold colours and graphic cut-out forms of manga cartoons, with a delicate melancholy. Both the Japanese and English traditions of painting are renown for their use of watercolour, and Shohi adapts parts of both traditions to create something entirely new. Famously, watercolour requires exceptional skill and dexterity, as mistakes can never be erased or painted over. Creating a watercolour is, therefore, akin to a musical performance where no mark or gesture cannot be undone.

Shohi’s magical scenes often include human beings and animals in unexpected or even surreal combinations. In one of her other works, titled ‘Whales in Tokyo City’, we see exactly that: giant blue whales floating like zeppelins over an endless sea of tower blocks. The whales turn their eyes out to us, and, surprised to see us catching their eye, look back accusingly. It is as though we were impudent enough to challenge their authority on the planet, despite being only a fraction of their size.

Emma Stark

 

Emma Stark

Domestic Bliss

2010

 

 

My work takes inspiration from the stereotypical roles of women as the housewife and my fascination with traditional methodologies of making paint.

 

The process of making oil and acrylic paints and that of creating icing for a cake are for me, inextricably intertwined. My painting process uses of both conventional and unconventional art materials: Commonplace kitchen utensils may be used to create works in oil while a hogs hair brush paint on icing and food dye. The resulting works are gestural, abstract and saccharine sweet.

 

My performance explores the perceptions of the ‘perfect’ wife, mother and sensual woman via holding an icing lesson. I have taken on the look of a 1950’s housewife for Domestic Bliss because during this period women were expected to be the perfect homemaker and ever so reserved.  This of course is in direct contrast to my messy and indulgent improvised iced/painted works created during my performance.

 

Dining Chair and Painting combines domestic furniture with household paint. The painting while resting on a dining room chair has been layered with paint just as one would compile layers of a cake – one after another layers of paint were added to the canvas.  I not only explore the domestic in this work but also issues, such chance and mark-making through the physical properties of the paint. In essence I investigate the fine line between the “art of cooking” and art itself.

 

“I’m a terrible cook, but if I could cook, I would see that as art as well, its how much creative energy you put into something.” Tracey Emin

 

Neil Armstrong

The Tunnel – Neil Armstrong

Acrylic on printed cotton

The work plays with ideas of the imagined landscape. An idyllic place, of often utopian properties set within the traditional escapist notions of the natural world, as demonstrated by artists like Caspar David Friedrich.

Here these notions are contrasted against the banalities of everyday domestic life by examining the physical use of the natural world by man, and it’s psychological impacts. Trees are the ultimate symbol of nature and when one thinks of nature ultimate freedom comes to mind.

The transformation of a naturally free force, like trees, into a socially acceptable enclosure as part of the home raises the question, at what point does the material cease to exist in its naturally symbolic form? When does it stop inspiring notions of freedom? And were those notions justified in the first instance?

This work attempts to draw attention to the fact that the material exists solely as its fundamental properties: Wood. It is the symbolic emphasis which we, as humans vulnerable to romantic notions, place upon materials that dictates our relationship with them.

Stephanie Hunter

Viticci 2010. Decorator’s caulk.

‘New Talent’ reveals new works created by students currently on Sunderland University’s Fine Art and Photography, Video and Digital Imaging courses.

Stephanie Hunter’s installation of hundreds of miniature sculptures is akin to a viral landscape that has begun to spread across the gallery walls. Hunter is interested in the contradictions that underpin our tastes, and how materials accrue different sets of associations, and become ‘gendered’. The construction trade – and the associations of most building materials – remain very largely masculine. If producing spaces is men’s work, it is still women’s consumption choices that determine the way most homes look and feel. Even stranger, one of the strongest taboos throughout the whole history of modern art has been ‘decoration’. A number of high-profile female artists in recent years, from Rachel Whiteread to Doris Salcedo, have used building materials like plaster – in thoroughly undecorative ways – to reimagine the space of the home. Hunter, by contrast, coats the gallery in icing-sugar forms of plaster, to corrupt the plainness of white gallery walls with a surfeit of decoration.

Suzanne Williams

Suzanne Williams has the next New Talent spot at the NGCA, which runs from next Thursday 20th May 2010.

‘One minute nine Seconds’ DVD, 2010

see

http://vimeo.com/7960575

‘From Durham’ DVD, 2010

see

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPnBDAMU2dI

‘New Talent’ reveals recent work created by students at Sunderland University’s Fine Art and Photography, Video and Digital Imaging courses. Suzanne William’s short videos ask us to look again at what might seem to be familiar sights.

‘One minute nine seconds’ is the journey time by train from Tyneside to Wearside, albeit accelerated by Williams from the usual fifteen minutes. Williams’s work rests on blurring the boundaries between still and moving pictures. Video footage seems to become a series of still photographs: the landscapes almost seem like ‘blipverts’ – images that flash past so quickly they are only ever grasped by our unconscious, and never fully register with us.

‘From Durham’ consists of apparently simple landscape photographs, all taken at the same time of day over a month-long period. One of the most traditional roles that Western artists have undertaken is finding beauty in unexpected subject matter. More recently, many artists have reversed this, attempting to find beauty in subjects that are over-familiar. David Hockney recently began painting sunsets, saying: “A sunset might be a cliché in art – but it isn’t in nature.” If every subject has already been used, Williams asks, how can art continue to ‘make the familiar unfamiliar’, and find new forms of beauty?

Susan Bulley

‘Brigitte #1’, ‘Brigitte #2’,

‘Chandelier #1’, ‘Chandelier #2’

All works cyanotypes, 2009

‘New Talent’ reveals recent work created by students at Sunderland University’s Fine Art course. Susan Bulley’s ‘cyanotypes’ are based on paintings the artist made about the Fritz Lang 1927 film ‘Metropolis’. The paintings were made in unconventional ways, but are at one remove here. They were then placed onto light-sensitive paper to create negatives and sometimes positives of them.

The atmospheric contrasts between light and dark in the four works here resemble those of Lang’s films. Subjects become difficult to decipher, or even seem menacing, magical or mysterious. It becomes impossible to gauge what spaces are being shown to us, as though we had entered a darkened room and were stumbling through its half-light.

A ‘cyanotype’ is a photograph created using one of the earliest methods of photographic printing. The process was invented in 1842 by the great British scientist Sir John Herschel. Cyanotypes are the origin of the term ‘blueprint’: the process enabled Victorian engineers to make copies of their drawings easily and quickly.

Exhibition  Open Fri 5th March- Sat 1 May 2010 Preview Tue 9 March 6-8pm

Leanne Collin

Untitled, 2009

New Talent reveals new works by students from Fine Art at Sunderland University, created or selected to accompany each exhibition. Leanne Collin’s work here is ‘carnivalesque’ in the sense it inverts hierarchies of value, and displays low-cost or no-costs goods as precious, ornamental objects. The objects here – bucket, a splodge of concrete, and plastic butterflies all covered in metallic paint – were provided free by a DIY store, being ex-display or unusable. The builder’s bucket contrasts with the somewhat over-feminine, delicate shapes of the butterflies – though both are industrially produced plastic.

Caryll Jack Dawber

‘Ryallac’ 2009

New Talent reveals works by students from Fine Art at Sunderland University, created or selected to accompany each exhibition. Caryll Dawber’s image has been chosen to complement the exhibition ‘The Fool’. Her work shows a 1970s childhood toy – a clown – covered with ‘fool’s gold’ – artificial gold leaf that has no financial value. Covered in gold, the object is rendered useless as a plaything. A child would be unable to identify with the character: the toy is now lifeless and inert. Rather than being an object we could use to project fantasies onto – a source of vivid imaginative play in other words – it is now a hilarious status symbol.

Dawber asks us to think about how memory transforms certain types of ordinary objects into iconic or talismanic ones – into almost sacred objects whose meaning is particular to our own life stories. She asks us to consider how far the adult world is ‘childish’, in fetishising dumb status symbols – cars, clothes, furniture. As children we use objects as triggers to spark imaginative flights of fantasy and chains of ideas: she also asks us how far children occupy worlds that have an imaginative complexity that adults can, quite literally, only dream of.

Bradley Lay

“One of Several Correct Answers asks the viewer to contemplate an image that is derived from a close up view of polystyrene balls. Under certain conditions polar opposites in material, scale and process can exhibit similarities, rather than differences. Organic/inorganic, atomic/universal, digitally altered or non-manipulated? This is simply an image. Interpret it in whichever way you choose.”

Lisa Pullen

New Talent profiles new work by Fine art students at Sunderland University. Lisa Pullen’s image has been selected to coincide with the exhibition’ The Female  Gaze’. Pullen’s peculiar fantasy world is literally a sugar – coated concoction, a confectionary creation in which she has ‘ gilded the lilly’ to adopt a popular proverb.