DRIVEN

SARAH BAKER - HELEN BARFF - PAUL CATON - CEDRIC CHRISTIE - AMI CLARKE - LEIGH CLARKE


ANDREW CROSS - MIKEY CUDDIHY - ROBERT CURRIE - SARAH DOYLE - JAMES R FORD


ADRIAN GALPIN - NIGEL GRIMMER - ALEXIS HARDING - DAVID HOPKINSON - MARQ KEAREY


JOHN KINDNESS - TIM KNOWLES - DAVID LEAPMAN - LEE MAELZER - DAN McDERMOTT


JENNIFER MERRELL - LEILA MILLER - JESSICA POTTER -  BENEDICT RADCLIFFE - DJ ROBERTS


AMY ROBINS - COLIN SMITH - SARAH SPARKES - AXEL STOCKBURGER - HEIDI STOKES - BEN WOODESON



DRIVEN

An exhibition in which 32 artists make work about the automobile

curated by Sarah Sparkes

 


Few things have had a greater impact on 20th century life and culture than the motor car. In a hundred years or so it has metamorphosed from exotic plaything of the rich to indispensable adjunct to life in all developed societies. Freedom machine, sex symbol, design and status icon, offensive weapon, agent of pollution, devourer of the earth’s resources– it is all of these and more. From the romance of James Dean, Princess Diana, Jackson Pollock, the list goes on ...beautiful machines on the edge of death, to the weekly visit to the supermarket, the car is omnipotent. 


‘The more you drive, the less intelligent you are’ states one of the characters in Alex Cox’s cult movie, Repo Man. Driving being seen here as a mindless act in which any intellect is lost when operating an unthinking, unfeeling machine. Maybe, this is the view many of us have from the outside, as a potential ‘road-kill’ victim. However, from the inside as passenger or driver we can become transported into a realm of freedom, the car becoming a vehicle for our aspirations. We can lose our selves inside what Ballard referred to as ‘a huge metallised dream.’ As such, cars become metaphors for otherness, for escape, for our own private space, for the way we imprint our fantasies on life. ‘Like all epochal icons, the car does not mean one thing, but many things. In that sense, it is an ‘empty sign’. It is a vacuum. We fill it with meaning’ - as Allen Samuels states in 'Autopia' 


My most vivid early memories are of being driven, lying on my back in the car seeing a blur of trees, buildings, sky, a non-place in which to drift and dream. Later as a young teenager I would goad my father to drive faster and faster, loving the adrenaline rush that the car’s speed induced. That thrill of compressing time and space as a vector of speed became a repository of theory for the likes of Baudrillard and Virillo. Out of this process it is not surprising the car is fetishised, and it is not difficult to see why artists love cars. They are sculptural objects. A drive in a car takes us on a visual journey, quite literally altering our perspective on life. The form they describe. The noise they make. The marks they leave. The car can evoke both nostalgia and the future. 


Despite living in an age when the car has become demonised as polluter of the planet, I have to confess a love of driving - it is our dirty secret, as in the 21st Century it becomes a forbidden pleasure - gridlock permitting. With that in mind, ‘Driven’ is a group show that concentrates on the psychological hit that cars can deliver. Through the way they transport us into imagined worlds this exhibition aims to address something of this complex relationship.


 PRIVATE VIEW: Friday, 29 June, 2007, 6-9 pm

EXHIBITION CONTINUES: 30 June - 29 July



EVENTS -


THURSDAY, 5 JULY 2007, 6-9 pm
READING starts at 7:30 pm
Mikey Cuddihy reads her new story, 'Dinner at the Drive in Movies’



FRIDAY, 27 JULY 2007, 6-9 pm
DRIVEN BY CARS
Artist Films and Artist Talk, selected by Ricarda Vidal


Saturday - Sunday, 28-29 July
CEDRIC CHRISTIE's Disciples of History
gallery open until 9 pm on Saturday, 28 July

For the weekend 28/29 July, we will be putting the complete set of the
Disciples Of History in the gallery (All 12 cars that went on the crusade
from London...Basel...Kassel...Munster…in convoy). The numbers on each
car show the year of that Documenta - 55 being the first one - 1955 and so
on (e.g., 59, 64, 68, etc.). Each car has a selection of artists from the
Documenta of that year with the curator’s name under the number. 

With special thanks for the support of Richard Strange.

 

WITH THANKS FOR SPONSORSHIP BY CLASSIC CAR CLUB, CITROEN CITY www.city.citroen.co.uk, Hy-tek Electronics Ltd (48 Dalston Lane, E8 3AH)



SARAH BAKER


Sarah Baker has been examining superficiality of image and expectations of cultural representation reinforced by the mass media. Most recently, a series of opulent collages and cut outs is based on the repetition of iconic monograms. She incorporates her own signature, which is used as a branded symbol, much like the status symbols of luxury brands such as Louis Vuitton. Colliding high and low culture, her work becomes a mixing pot of iconic images that imply association through the repetitive unification of the, often contrasting, icons.



HELEN BARFF


Helen Barff’s work is a series of ‘after images’ of a place, space, time or thing. She works with objects – for example a piano, a train, a glass cup, a car or a collection of stones. The objects become anthropomorphic metaphors for some kind of evidence of previous human presence. The basis of the work is drawing. The processes Barff uses come out of the ‘blind’ gap or reliance on memory that she perceives inherit in drawing. She tries to close this gap in drawing by using direct contact, infiltrating vision with touch.


 For Driven Barff presents a selection of photographic works made from inside her ‘pinhole camera car’. Alongside this is a series of drawings made inside the blacked out car using touch, in the dark following the contours of the car with one hand and drawing with the other.  Barff’s process of covering objects in a layer of felt emphasises the form of the objects. It makes them appear both abstract and weightless. There is a sense of dislocation about the work, implying a movement between present and absent.

 PAUL CATON

 

I go shopping for the cars and then take them home and set them on fire. It's a boy's thing and it is fun. Then I take them out and make photographs with the help of my friend Jess, a hostile environment photographer. They might look like real cars, grown up ones, burnt out in a wasteland or an urban backwater. Their scale has been confused and this can be disorienting. But they are toys, look twice and you will see. You might find them disturbing, and they are. As though the innocence has been lost or abandoned. I try to make things that hold a certain responsibility. It is about growing up and being good. And about the real. I also hope the work has compassion. An empathy for the lost soul. But to have fun making, to allow yourself that and to be alive. Like ideas of beauty and the bad - that one cannot exist without the other. They will ultimately corrupt themselves.


CEDRIC CHRISTIE


Saturday - Sunday, 28-29 July

CEDRIC CHRISTIE's Disciples of History


For the weekend 28/29 July, we will be putting the complete set of the Disciples Of History in the gallery (All 12 cars that went on the crusade from London...Basel...Kassel...Munster…in convoy). The numbers on each car show the year of that Documenta - 55 being the first one - 1955 and so on (e.g., 59, 64, 68, etc.). Each car has a selection of artists from the Documenta of that year with the curator’s name under the number.  With special thanks for the support of Richard Strange.

AMI CLARKE


Ami Clarke will be producing Undercurrent: the car as a vehicle for sound; where the bass emitting from the sub-woofer of a passing vehicle, will be heard travelling through the gallery.


Deep bass vibrations moving invisibly through the city. Something passing by that is almost elemental in its existence. You feel the sound as it passes you. An invisible physical presence. An undercurrent of the city. The bass is so overwhelming, the car’s primary function as a vehicle that transports you from A to B, is no longer its role. Navigating the city, tagging its territory as it goes, it is transformed from its original purpose.

http://www.amiclarke.com/index.htm


LEIGH CLARKE


Yarmouth Bloater Acrylic, oil and screen-print on linen 34 x 44 inches 


Tazio Nuvolari was born in Castel d'Ario, Mantua. Ferdinand Porsche called him "The greatest driver of the past, the present, and the future." His greatest ever victory was the German Grand Prix of 1935, where, in an outdated and uncompetitive Alfa Romeo P3 he defeated Germany's vaunted Auto Union and Mercedes Benz racing outfits in front of Adolf Hitler, who was said to be outraged and refused to shake his hand afterwards. The hosts were so expectant of a German victory that they didn't have an Italian anthem to play. 



The image of Nuvolari is photographed from a small chalkware bust bought on Ebay and shipped from the USA.

ANDREW CROSS


Andrew Cross presents a previously unseen work filmed in 2004 while driving through the night across the empty plains of North Dakota towards the small town of Rugby: the geographical centre of North America.


MIKEY CUDDIHY


My paintings and drawings inhabit both public and private domains. In my exhibition at Peer Gallery in 2003, 'James in Limbo', telephone jottings - snippets of messages and conversations scribbled down or arrangements made with friends and family were photocopied and pasted onto large canvases. Over this coloured cutout shapes derived from the doodles became leitmotifs for the work, hovering among painted calligraphic marks in a field of decorative activity.In Spirit Drawings, which I showed at Hackney Forge in 2005, I moved away from this complex layering to a simpler more pared down approach. Again based on notes and doodles, a small, intense area was selected and transcribed through simple enlargement onto large sheets of semi transparent paper. Using spirit-based inks, a deep red or tattoo blue which enters the surface of the paper, large biomorphic forms commemorated friends, now absent from the narrative; fragments of text (handwriting) was sometimes visible as a key to what might have been said. In December 2006, I had three short stories published in an anthology of artists' fiction - 'The Alpine Fantasy of Victor B & Other Stories', published by Serpent's Tail. A one-person exhibition, scheduled for June 2007 at Seven Seven Gallery will show the narrative links between my fiction and my visual work. For 'Driven', I am writing a story, which will be sited within the gallery space; maybe I will do a reading as well!

  ROBERT CURRIE


I plan to play a 10 minute extract of a familiar 'driven' movie through a 16mm projector. The 10 minute extract will contain 400ft of film. This film will be looped (in its entirety) around the/a space/room. The film will be positioned carefully around the space and in a purely abstract way. The film will be apparent and the use of neon tubes will highlight the movement of the film which will pertain to the movement of travel. Over time the film will scratch and distort over time altering the picture and the sound.


SARAH DOYLE


My work uses mixed media and drawing as the main processes. I have also created work in video and multi media. The subjects I deal with are typically to do with popular culture and growing up. My work concentrates on the emulation of icons and obsessions, feelings of isolation and trying to fit in. I Particularly use pop music and the images, which accompany this. As an artist I am interested in the emulation involved in the search for an identity of one’s own and the inherent security of finding an idol to latch onto. For my current work I am creating paintings using nail varnish and nail technician tools on mirrors.

 JAMES R. FORD

 

James R Ford is a British artist whose practice is concerned with loss of innocence and the endearment of the loser. The production and aesthetic is that of home made/made at home, mimicking the outsider, hobbyist or everyday enthusiast. Combining his 'new regressive' tendencies with pub quiz knowledge and chutzpah to create works ranging from a ball of bogies in a broken eggcup, to a formula predicting Bond film plot structure, to inventing a new home-based sport.


ADRIAN GALPIN

NIGEL GRIMMER


ROADKILL FAMILY ALBUM

  ALEXIS HARDING

 

 “At the centre of Alexis Harding’s show are two pedestrian control railings, the kind of steel fences that represent the casual authority of bored urban planners, happy to direct the plodding citizen away from the statistical dangers of urban joy riders. The same joy riders that, I guess, drove straight into these barriers, twisting them into violent curves and waves, and which now lie and lean intertwined in the gallery, rescued from the municipal depot in Deptford. The transformation of ordinary matter from something mute into something loaded with significance preoccupies Harding’s work.”   -- JJ Charlesworth, Contemporary, Issue 59, p66


 DAVID HOPKINSON


David Hopkinson is a prolific multi-disciplinary visual artist working with video, sound, photography, performance, radio, dj-ing and vj-ing. His practice is concerned with constructing time-based work via careful and witty editing of collated material from his immediate social and physical environment, combined with interventions into entertainment and music spaces.


For DRIVEN, a new video piece has been constructed from footage of four individuals performing on a drum kit set-up inside a small traffic island on a busy thoroughfare. Meticulous editing creates new rhythms that playfully incorporate elements from both the drummers and the drivers in their parallel positions of seated noisy power.


MARQ KEAREY


I paint and draw pictures of posters. As well as offering up a pictorial view of an urban landscape, I present a time period and an action that is referable. The posters I paint look like the originals, and are displayed on panels of a specific shape. The works refer to quite formal things: colour, pattern and picture content, though they always support a landscape tradition. They are designed to aid a transportation of the viewer from voyeur of urban wall-spaces, to enlightened being. This is encouraged by my use of symbolism, sometimes seen in the actual shape of the painting, and other times in the shapes cut out of the paintings.


Driven

The paintings in ‘Driven’ are memorials to people that offered inspiration, passion, ambition, reflection and excitement. Like trail-blazing comets in the dark night, the brief illumination they offered, were alternative views of the world, and they were cool. During their lifetimes they were regarded as talented individuals, but after their deaths, all of which involved automobiles, the status of each one of them became legendary. Isadora Duncan, Albert Camus, Jackson Pollock, Bessie Smith, Eddie Cochran and Marc Bolan. Each of them shall be remembered in the two paintings produced for this exhibition, each painting chronicling aspects of their death and the car that delivered them.

New Paragraph

JOHN KINDNESS

TIM KNOWLES


Chance plays a crucial part in my work, akin to scientific experimentation, a situation is engineered in which the work is generated by factors beyond my control. It is the wind, rippling of water, motion of a vehicle, postmen, insects or players of a game that unwittingly determine the outcome of the work.  Much of the work explores ways of drawing be it with ink, light or another form and photography, film, the apparatus used in the works production and the title act as parts of a puzzle allowing the viewer to understand the process by which the work was produced. 


For Driven, Tim Knowles will present one his series of works where a drawing is produced in a moving car, in some cases these works have been made as a car speeds around different race tracks, whilst in others the act of delivering the work to the gallery produces the work itself. For these drawings, a mechanism holding a pen to paper is installed in the back of the car, as the car accelerates the pen moves back and as it brakes it moves forward, turn left and the pen moves right and vice versa.

DAVID LEAPMAN


Uncertain motor, 2007, Acrylic on unprimed canvas, 106.5x122cm.

This painting was inspired by my Orange1975 Citroen Dianne. A vehicle I owned from 1981-1983. During 1981 I drove it for several thousand miles around Europe and on one occasion drove from Kreutzberg in Berlin to London with my accelerator pedal firmly pressed to the floor all the time, the car loved it. 


While in former Yugoslavia my tent was stolen and I was forced to sleep on the back seat of the car. It is almost impossible to sleep on the back seat of a Dianne due to its strange design. I became an expert in tuning the carburettor, so I could make it cruise at 80+ mph! 


On another occasion in Yugoslavia my battery was not holding its charge so I took it to a garage, they found the fault and the bill was 50 pence. This car was superb to drive in the snow and ice and you could take speed bumps at any speed! 

LEE MAELZER


I am exhibiting new work that relates to ruins. There is a large painting based on the area
around Docklands... a metal scrapyard, trashed cars and abandoned tires and number
plates. A kind of montage in of general debris with automobile origins. Alongside this will
be photographic pieces. These are of vintage and modern cars in their correct and intact
settings but the photos are ruined through a chemical process of my own to appear out of
time and part of an instant archive.

DAN McDERMOTT


“Dan McDermott paints dynamic photo-realist canvases. His work is original and expertly executed. Always emphasizing the choice of subject matter, his work may depict a New York street scene, a speeding car, the exterior of a San Francisco tenement block or a distant urban landscape. 


McDermott derives his material from film or television or from his own cine-film. The process is a layered technique that enthusiastically embraces technological visual media. By progressing through various generations of production, McDermott arrives at his rich representations typified by heightened colour and tone. His works are defined by a personal style enlivened by compositional cropping and unusual vantage points.” --Clapham Art Gallery, London 2006

JENNIFER MERRELL

JESSICA POTTER

BENEDICT RADCLIFFE


My work looks at a number of themes; my love of machines and engineering, commercial branding and familiar logos or graphics and transferring them to different contexts, forms and materials.


HOTBOX is a double-ended Mk 4 VW Golf. The work looks back fondly to my teenage years and the practice of “plotting”. Driving our modified cars somewhere discrete in the Kent countryside, listening to dub, getting high and chatting. The car promotes conviviality because the seats now face each other. There is a aspect of fetisism/obsessiveness in the attention to detail, the imported alloy wheels, the workmanship and finish. The work HELL ON WHEELS re-presents in 10mm steel round bar the American HMMWV (High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle). It was used in Desert Storm, Somalia and of course Iraq. The work celebrates the Hummer as a design classic and also using text comments on the American army’s attitude to war.

DJ ROBERTS

AMY ROBINS


“We order sensations in space through the dimension of time. Experience is a fluid state of being where moments cannot be frozen; instead they melt into each other in a private reality of duration." *


 I work with the documentation of impermanence - using my body as a recording instrument for the re-translation of experiential and transient data – sound/touch/movement/effort – into drawn form. Drawing In Time III captures a performance drawing which reflects the sound of traffic under Waterloo Bridge Road, but the qualities and capabilities of video, sound and the specificities of projection space allow the work to be reshaped as a new event, playing with control, choice and perception.


 * Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, translated by F.L. Pogson, M. A. London: George Allen and Unwin

COLIN SMITH

SARAH SPARKES



Sarah Sparkes is an artist and curator. She was born in Reading and lives and works in London.

AXEL STOCKBURGER


PSX Warriors: Gran Turismo (2001) is part of a series of portraits of videogame players that have been produced between 1999 and 2005. A young woman is filmed while playing a popular racing game. Her facial expressions and shifting postures mirror the actions that unfold in the game space. While it has often been argued that the body becomes obsolete in confrontation with digital media, one could argue that the opposite is happening. In order to play a game the player literally incorporates the interface into his/her spatial body scheme. Although the race takes place in a mental realm we are witnessing how her whole body reacts to the spatial nteraction. The work is part of the Jim & Mary Barr Collection in New Zealand

HEIDI STOKES


When you walk down a busy street or travel on a squashed tube, you can learn a lot about how an environment creates a certain kind of social conditioning. I often feel cities are built to function but do not necessarily accommodate our psychological anxieties. My work attempts to provoke, alleviate or highlight those anxieties. I reuse everyday objects, creating new functions for them that are more emotionally rather than functionally led, such as a plaster to stop someone talking so much, or a loudspeaker that you can scream into in a busy street, or a traffic light that a person carries to stop weary people in the street.

BEN WOODESON


CCTV, voice activated transmitters, bugs, surveillance, conservation of energy, form following function, information systems, information delivery, subversion, reinvention, wire as vehicle, manifestation and transference of energy, radio, sound, redesigning for inefficiency, drawing, energy fields, maximum effort for minimal achievement, magnets, Morse code, circuits, frameworks, rules, laws, rights, barriers, boundaries, news, politics, control, interaction, methods of exchange and almost empty galleries.

Share by: