Building Up-Not Tearing Down

Thursday, January 7th, 2010

 

 More Images of Building Up-Not Tearing Down

11th – 18th December

 

Building Up–Not Tearing Down is the result of a four-day residency involving six young artists from Birmingham, Bristol and Cardiff. As a conclusion to the series of city visits ending with December eleven the residency is an attempt to create a microcosm, or Petri dish experiment of what might happen if the three cities worked together in the realisation of an exhibition or project. The invited artists were granted complete freedom to chose their thematic remit, manipulate the fabric of the building and decide how much they would co-operate with each other.

As an exhibition space tactileBOSCH is predominantly known for performance and installation, work that by its very nature often leaves small remnants once the performance has concluded or the installation deconstructed. Many of these small reminders such as stray splashes of paint, dents in the walls and floors, hooks and pulleys in the ceiling often remain untouched during the post-exhibition clean up due to the vastness of the gallery and thus become more permanent then the original artwork. The six artists have continued in this process of augmentation and supplementation of the venue through creating a selection of delicate and unobtrusive works throughout the gallery, many of which could remain well into the future.

The artworks of Building up-Not Tearing Down do not hold an overt presence in the space nor are they pointed out through a map or set of plaques but instead the audience must search the vast space for each artists multiple contributions. It is during this process of exploration that they themselves will also become better equated with the fabric of the building that is itself a palimpsest of architectural and aesthetic features. The collaborative nature that the artists have approached in the making of the exhibition, to the extent of creating secrecy that excluded the residency organisers from knowing much of what they planned, perhaps provides a glimpse of what the Birmingham, Bristol and Cardiff trinity could become.

 

Curators:

Neil Jefferies & WARP

Artists:

Rhys Core, Fraser Cook, Sarah Farmer, Joanne Masding, Alistair Owen, Jason Pinder

 

Review

               I went to Cardiff yesterday with other west Wales friends to join in with December 11, a day of arts events and visits in Cardiff organised by WARP g39 and Chapter Arts. The day marked the end of an experimental collaboration of artists from Birmingham, Bristol and Cardiff.
              We started the day at Tactile Bosch to see Building Up Not Tearing Down, an exhibition of residency work from Rhys Coren and Fraser Cook (Bristol), Alistair Owen and Jason Pinder (Cardiff) and Sarah Farmer and Joanne Masding (Birmingham).
                 The work involved subtle interventions into the gallery space – so subtle indeed that we were required to actively search them out. It’s the sort of thing that can be quite intimidating if you’re not comfortable in ‘Artworld’ and not a Tactile Bosch regular, there’s a lot of scope for staring at details, trying to work out if they are art or not. Once I’d decided to embrace my self-consciousness, I really enjoyed it; the slight tension and discomfort became part of the experience; all part of the ongoing debate about the nature and function of art. The beauty of the experience was to intimately engage with this amazing, semi-decayed space with its peeling paint, cobwebs, buckets for the leaky ceiling (the most prominent objects in the room – and the first focus of enquiry), odd bits of ironmongery etc. I found myself watching other visitors to see if I could hijack their finds. I watched someone discover a really discreet piece involving guitar strings tautly installed along a number of beams and tuned to different notes – and then enjoyed pinging them myself in his wake. Delicately beautiful, intimate and democratic – the show was a gentle, funny celebration of the space and its artful decay.

 Kathryn Campbell Dodd