By Giuseppe Marasco
Unnatural Vibers
on the Right Peter Lamb ‘A Slow Gaze Charged’, 2017. Digital print on synthetic canvas. 266 x192cm. On the left Vicky Wright. ‘Torment of the Metals IV’, 2014. Oil on panel. 97x77cm
Emphasizing concept and process over end product the history of Collage draws attention to the incongruous collisions of meaning to better reflect the dynamic encounters and conflicts experienced in modern life. John Bunker and Michael Stubbs , the co- curators of this show, bring together their own work with that of three other artists. John Bunker who has curated several shows of the British Abstract Expressionist Frank Bowling OBE RA, sees collage as a way to knock into abstract art aspects of real life and social history, rather than just reconfiguring a smart closed self-referencing circulation of formal concerns.
The twinned 20th century techniques of Collage and Abstraction in art are both approximately 100 years old. They, by turns, push to the fore random encounters and emphasise the constructed nature of the modern world which can uncover powerful psychological undercurrents hidden by the ordering of society and the media.
The title of the show is itself a cut and paste deformation of the term ‘natural fibres’, announcing with a bang the ambition for the future of collage as an integral strategy in 21st Century ‘picture making’ that deals with the competing forces of media and the “constant waves of visual information that wash over our daily lives.” as Bunker observes.
In John Bunker I detect an ethical impulse in attitude to curation and collage- this outlook seem to contain the desire to remake the world and have it be more true than the perfect monolithic imagery of advertising or the limits of our own personal social bubbles. There is a certain romance to the receptiveness and openness with which an encounter or object may find itself incorporated into the works here- but underlying this is a serious strategy to take from the world and react to it in the realm of abstract painting. There seems to be an attempt at generating new reconfigurations of possible realities. Such strategies stand opposed to the smoothing out and ejection of other realities from the political, social or media spaces in our society- or from the linear models of the history of painting- especially abstract painting. For Bunker “This cut and thrust process of fragmentation and new synthesis represents life and art in it’s anxious incompleteness.” – for myself the future success of collage as a medium will be how it further reflects, in a Lacanian mode, on its own incomplete nature while mirroring the psychological schisms that take place when an individual or a society insist on proposing itself as whole, without contradictions or dynamic conflict – with out awareness of this Lacanian illusion at the root of self-perception.
The artists have been carefully selected for their variety of approaches. Bunker’s own work is a Punk romance of the city. His works are constructed from all sorts of debris including scraped functional containers, advertising, rags gleaned from the city streets and industrial sites. Theses are marked with the use and context of their consumption, often marked by the site of their original function or location. Bunker energetically emphasises the lack of polite limits in the work shown “with no picture-like rectangles or boundaries these works rely on a hell for leather visual intensity to define themselves against the wall.” . To make a point where collage should be a central mode of thought for the early 21st century then look at the disappointments of The Electronic Superhighway curated by Omar Kholeif (and others) at the Whitechapel Gallery, which failed in its ‘youth’ section precisely in its seemingly too much reverence for ‘the frame’ rather than tackle the challenge of generative conceptual or material multiplicity today. It was quite an obscene even curatorial criminal sin of the Whitechapel exhibition that it lacked any of this sort of visual energy.
Many different modes of Collage operate in Unnatural Vibers. There are huge prints that echo multiple windows opened on a computer desktop by Peter Lamb. They are digitally edited, cut and pasted collections of fresh paint (combining fields of stained colour washed and then enlarged as grainy pixelation from a computer monitor).
Michael Stubbs teaches at Glasgow School of Art and the London Met University as a painting lecturer. In his collage painting hybrids the artist makes his own slick reproductions of logos with vinyl stencils which are covered in varnishes of varying hues and densities. The inherent flatness resembles the flat digital screen but also creates a powerful combination of opaque and transparent planes denoting a disquieting sense of depth to the finished painting. Dominic Beattie echos the techniques of music sampling in making and cutting up wood and card and reconfiguring imagery reminiscent of street and industrial signage. Beattie turns and twists the grammar of hard edged abstraction- cutting, building and rebuilding until a new and memorable abstract image is produced.
Vicky Wright’s work snatches bodily elements and references a collagic process delicately returning it to a painting history infused with phantasmagoric forms along with elements of cartoonish characters variously deleted and merged.
These paintings are back to front, placed on the ‘wrong’ side or reverse of wooden panels, consciously inducing anxiety.
Unit 3 is a gallery and project space for artists working at ASC’s Empson Street studios.The Artist Studio Charity makes affordable studio spaces available to artists across London. Exhibition space Unit 3 is provided as part of studio rent, within striking distance of central London it provides a vital opportunity for emerging artists and curators to make cutting edge experiments across art disciplines and bringing a new edge to Bow’s embedded cultural quarter.
Unnatural Vibers
3 Empson Street, Bromley-by-Bow, London E3 3LT
Sat, Sun 13th, 14th 2-5pm
Sat, Sun 20th, 21st 2-5pm
Or by appointment. thebunkers4@btinternet.com