show review!!!

takayuki hara

here is a list of work on show at standing on the frontier

The list

edward bagenal

Born in Southampton in October 1976, state educated, I attended the Surrey Institute of Art and Design before moving to London to complete a BA in Design at Goldsmiths College. On graduation, I worked in the research arm of a technology company for one year. I then completed an MA in Design at the Royal College of Art. I am now a practicing artist with an interest in the production of all social artefacts.
Aware of owning a quality of life built on the extracted wealth and suffering of a large number of other people, I am trying to exorcise the demons that this realization has spawned. I consciously try to attack and destroy my own bourgeois sensibilities in my work. I can not, however, avoid making work that also celebrates these sensibilities. The aim of the attack is to regain affinity with people excluded from this system, but often the resulting work alienates all groups concerned.  Any work that helps to dissolve social structures and meta-narratives on which class and wealth hierarchy are built, or the tastes that symbolize status within them inspire me. People like Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelly, Jeff Koons, Guy Debord and Bob and Roberta Smith. I also love painters in the same vein. Michael Borreman, Jenny Saville, Neo Rauch and Viktor Man. 
1996-2000 Goldsmiths College (Ba Design),Royal College of Art (MA Design Products) 
Lecturer and researcher in design at Goldsmiths college

EXHIBTION FLYER

ROBERT ORCHARDSON

“Robert Orchardson’s works on paper overprint photographs of epic landscapes from National Geographic magazines with black geometric forms and filigree lines. These abstract “structures” suggest giant otherworldly monuments or stills from science fiction films. Like Orchardson’s sculptural works, the reprocessed prints propose an imaginary architecture reminiscent of the utopian collages by Superstudio architects or the Gläserne Kette group.” (Henri Dietz, 2009)

Orchardson exhibits with Galerie Ben Kaufmann, Berlin; Wilkinson Gallery, London; and Monitor, Rome. His works can be found in numerous public and private collections in the UK and abroad. Exhibitions include A Stranger’s Window, Nottingham Castle Museum; The Associates, Dundee Contemporary Arts; Perfect Vacuum, Wilkinson Gallery, (London); Edge of the Superstructure, Galerie Ben Kaufmann (Berlin); Let Me Show You Some Things, CCA (Glasgow); Beyond, Monitor Gallery (Rome); A Cage Around the Sun, von Doering Contemporary (Schwabisch Hall, Germany); Robert Orchardson, Economist Plaza (London); Unfair Fair, 1:1projects (Rome); La Bomba IV, Rowley Kennerk Gallery (Chicago); Robert Orchardson and Aleksandra Mir, IPS (Birmingham); New Model Army – Robert Orchardson and Paul Gernes, Galerie Ben Kaufmann (Berlin), Bloomberg New Contemporaries, Cornerhouse (Manchester); LOT (Bristol); and the Barbican (London).
New Contemporaries, Cornerhouse (Manchester); LOT (Bristol); and the Barbican (London).

ROB LOGAN

Logan's complex, macabre works on paper and canvas borrow from surrealist approaches to mark-making such as frottage, and reveal an interest in phenomenology, perception, and psychoanalysis. Logan builds up the image with layers of charcoal, paint and varnish, emphasizing some areas to highly detailed intensity, while allowing others to recede. This suggests an almost photographic sense of space, the image looming into focus from uncertain gloom. The dark turns of his interwoven structures writhe and fluoresce as if alive, suggestive of many organic, possibly alien, sources. What exactly is being represented is impossible to identify. Analogies to Giger’s beautiful horror creations are evident, alongside suggestions of tangled vegetation or internal organs. Although the works are not intended to have a single clear meaning, Logan’s themes are embodiment, abjection, techno-paranoia and apocalypse.

Rob Logan lives and works in London. He graduated with and MA Fine Art from Central St. Martins in 2008. Group shows include Beast, Standpoint Gallery, London; Vienna/ London, WUK Projektraum, Vienna, Austria 2009; Transimulation, The Elephant Rooms/ Raymond Gun, London; Exquisite Decay, Château d'Alba, France 2009; Lust and Luxuria, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London 2008.

DAVID ADKINS

David Adkins’  work draws on and refers to a collective relationship with particular painting and film traditions as well as an interest in Romantic philosophy.  
Nettle continues one strand of enquiry found in his work; Nature Pieces are replicas of ubiquitous organisms such as weeds or fungi, their status elevated through their materiality. Nettle’s artificial colours demand our attention, prompting us both to caution and further observation, a device utilised by nature itself. Having observed Nettle the viewer’s awareness is heightened and their response must be to tread carefully.  
Print Room describes the activity of searching for traces of human presence throughout a given space. Using the aluminium powder employed by forensic teams, fingerprints and half smudges betray the physical touch of a hand against the window. Though applied with a brush the marks are not so much made as revealed as already existing. 

David Adkins lives in London SE15. The focus of his practice is his studio space Refugio where he thinks, constructs work and holds quiet, deliberately isolated shows. In his forthcoming project Sightline, he will attempt to project a live image of the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral in the space.
David Adkins studied at the Slade and Wimbledon School of Art.  

PAUL CUMMINGS

Paul graduated from Cheltenham University in 1999 with a BA Honours in Fine Art. Currently working in a studio in the East End of London, his painting and print-work have steadily gained in popularity over the years. His professional knowledge of the digital environment progressively impacts on his traditional fine art practice, enabling him to deploy advanced digital processes to construct images of fallacious realisms. His work vacillates between reality and its virtual origins, never settling for one or the other. The fetishistic flattening of surface suppresses a neurotic anthropological undercurrent that is present in his works. His observations make a subtle pun on societal values but he also sublimates the banal in a precise, rarified manner. His work and influences are derived from photo-realism and its concurrent manifestation, hyper-realism.

NOA EDWARDS

Noa Edwards landscapes hover between fantasy and reality, emphasizing the interplay between natural phenomena and the environment. They explore the impact of weather upon the landscape and elemental conditions such as rain and fire.
The imagery is derived from tabletop still life and three dimensional models of found and cast objects. The intention is to create a possible place, which is expansive yet intimate, recognizable yet foreign.
The images evoke the theatrical, a stage set with billowing drapes, cavernous spaces, rock pools and architecture, intimating an imagined future or a decaying past. There is a suggestion of gathering points, converging on totemic structures, in these unpopulated landscapes, perhaps only momentarily deserted, which blend with an overgrown wilderness.
The paintings attempt to capture that sense of spirituality with which man imbues the landscape: a stage set where an imagined religion is played out and intricate rituals undertaken.

Noa Edwards studied Fine Art at Wimbledon School of Art in 2002 and then completed a
Masters in Fine Art at the Royal College in 2006.

Paul Westcombe

This recent work deals in part with the fantasy world of the imagination as a means of alleviating boredom and confinement (I started this project when employed as a car park attendant in an attempt to relieve the tedium of a 12 hour shift). This mechanism is a complex part of human desire: the capacity to construct the grotesque and phantasmagorical in moments of sensory deprivation. The cups, paper bags and travel card receipts form part of a decentred practice which involves large paintings on paper, expansive wall painting installations incorporating the architectural elements around it and making books of previous projects.

 

Paul Westcombe

Paul Westcombe

Chiho Iwase

My works are motivated by the memory of a childhood fantasy which, when I am depressed, manifests itself as a regression to infantilism. I also articulate the uncomfortable feelings that appear whenever I become aware of the instability of my identity. In this sense, the works, portray the inner demons of a melancholic personality, in which sculptures of weird creatures represent the conflict between maturity and childishness. To symbolize the contradictory states, my works contain ambivalent qualities, such as ‘cute’ and ‘grotesque’, or ‘humorous’ and ‘serious’. My sculptures consist of distorted images of my face and various parts of my anatomy which are attached to the bodies that I model in clay, plaster and expanding foam among other materials. In the process of modeling, significant childhood memories and childish gestures often appear in the shapes. I tend to use resin and latex, which give the textures realistic skin quality and emphasize the ‘uncanny state’ of my creatures. I am also influenced by Japanese subculture, especially the fashion for ‘cute’ products in contemporary Japanese consumerism. I believe that the fashion for cuteness perversely implies a pathological desire to revert to childhood.

Chiho Iwase studied Fine Art, Sculpture at
Chelsea College of Art & Design

Chris Roantree

Edward Bagenal

Takayuki hara

One of the inspirations I had was the poem by Ovid’s ‘Metamorphosis’, in which, human forms constantly shape-shifted into other entities, suggesting a new potentiality of being. In the world in which we live nothing ever remains the same; we exist in a world of flux, of constant shape- shifting. In a fragmented universe, shape-shifting offers an alternative way of unlocking the full potential of unknown space to the binary idea of ‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious’, or ‘whole’ and ‘lack propounded by the psycho-analysists, Freud and Lacan, which currently dominates the world of art. The French philosopher Giles Deleuze’s concepts of ‘becoming’ and ‘rhizome’ were amongst other inspirations for the idea. They provide a model of thought as an ever expanding labyrinth without a centre, capable of either opening up or closing down. As a result of the blurring and multiplication of our identities, we merge into a singular existence, where there are no other entities, countries or kingdoms. Deleuze’s theories, combined with ‘Wabi-Sabi’, a Japanese aesthetic system centred on the acceptance of transience, bring into focus the full potential of the beauty of impermanence, imperfection and incompletion and the realization that everything goes back to nature and My ultimate goal is to create a bridge between opposing entities. In my work, I want to evoke in the observer awareness or recognition in order to open up the potentiality to become a new entity as a whole and the potential to embrace the differences and emerge as one rather than dismiss the differences as demonic.

lyn goldsby

Lyn Goldsby was born in Birmingham City. ‘Desperate to move south,’ she journeyed down the Dorset coast to complete an HND in photography at Bournemouth Art College and a PQE at Salisbury College of Art. Since leaving art college, Lyn has worked for many years in London as a freelance photographic assistant, on a variety of photo-shoots from food to fashion. Commissions include the Sunday Telegraph, Magazine, Food Illustrated, The Guardian magazine, Harpers, Waitrose, M&S, Saatchi & Saatchi, Channel 4 Books and CBS records. Working as a commercial photographer’s assistant, she developed her technical expertise in traditional photography methods. Feeling the need to move in a different direction, one giving her greater freedom, she began exploring new possibilities within the realms of digital photography, creating projects about travel, contemporary portraits, still life, gigs and flowers.

pablo castillo

The work of Pablo Castillo moves on the edge of timelessness, in a two dimensional universe where each line is a potential animation. Shapes and contours manifest themselves suspended, suggesting, configuring personified characters that perform minimal actions.
His stories are no more a consequence of his own emergency traced on skin, a suspension of time, in a loop, perpetuating that lost second.
Under the name Namung, Pablo Castillo gives us a self referenced, dreamlike universe full of details, clues and memories, subtle messages that float or disappear, encrypted among lyrical fragments of Rock and Roll, voices that try to reach us and invite us to follow them and complete their mystical and arcane Rockstar ritual.
Peace and love. 
Pablo Castillo is a graphic designer, illustrator and animator.
He is the graphical/audiovisual/computational vice-president of the audiovisual group BITLS.

chris roantree

The work draws on the narrative form found in cartoons and comic books. This ongoing series charts the uprising of “The Buhtatman”. Described in the Upanishads merely as a soul bound by light or darkness, which follows works and which, born again from good and evil, rises or falls in its wanderings. Here, a sticky sublime state, seemingly made up of eggs, mud or smoke with eyes, without rules: “material appétit forman”*. The Narrative thread is paused, the communication or tale extracted and the characters pulled apart or hidden, while Buhtatman interferes with the image. *Matter strives for form.

Chris Roantree is currently tutor at The City & Guilds of London Art school and part time
lecturer at the University of Lincoln. He graduated 2003 from RCA Printmaking.

edward todd

Edward Todd starts from the supposition that everything is fragmented, that any object, person, or complex idea is divisible into an unfathomable number of component parts. The origins of these parts are so ancient as to be unknowable, and they have come together by chance, congealing to form the present entity. An object, then, when seen in these terms, is the sum of a near infinite tangle of threads which are impossible to unravel. The point of the work is to fight against this; it strives for solidity, coherence and simplicity, but, in doing so, becomes only an exercise proving the futility of such an attempt.

Edward Todd studied at Kingston University in 2001-2004 and then he completed a Masters in Painting at the Royal College of Art between 2007-2009.

takayuki hara

rob logan

pablo castillo

pablo castillo

chiho iwase