Novellus Castellum
Works by Helen Smith and William Struthers
Apexart, Curatorial Biennial: New York, USA
July 7th August 11th 2007
Apexart’s focus is on ideas, and our programs and printed materials are intended to encourage thought and commentary and to stimulate public dialogue about contemporary art, enriching the cultural landscape of New York City, USA.
Exsertus Exhibition Space
Space. We all need this in our lives. But rarely do we have enough of it, or the spaces we inhabit or work in are dissatisfying and unrewarding. The great thing about spaces, is that when we get them, we can fill them with things. If we inhabit a space we can fill it with our stuff. We can dream about what can go inside. What colour to paint the walls and what to do in it.
Another form of space is time. When we have time it also gives us space in our minds to make decisions, plan things, fantasize and visualise about our future. Space and time are vital for artists. Whenever we are offered space and time as an artists we are free to create things and fall in love again with what it is to be an artist. However, artists like people, in general, have little time and space and because of this deficit, their love affair with art is often short lived or fraught with dissatisfaction.
Recognition. We all need recognition to function. To know who we are. This is also a huge factor regarding ones position as an artist. We need to show our work, have people write about our work and have the opportunity for our work to function in the world outside and be valued for what it is. Artists need public recognition so they can feel appreciated and understand their critical position in the world.
So what was Exsertus. Exsertus was a project space curated by Novellus Castellum, which offered selected artists: Space, Time and Recognition. The use of a large 10 meter squared project space. One month to make work in and an exhibition event at the end of these mini residencies. Exsertus worked in a similar way to Matt's gallery in London. First and foremost, it was an exhibition space, but it also functioned as an artist's studio because the work was shown where it is made. Exsertus was a unique gallery space in the North East of England, which set up parameters for the creation of new experimental work and the possibilities of site specific installation.
The Exsertus project aspired to add significant and important focus to selected artist's practices and was a dedicated platform for artists to discuss work in progress and allowing them valuable time for decisive incentive self-reflection, where they could try out new ideas and extend the boundaries of their art practice.
James Johnson-Perkins
The Exsertus residency/gallery space was based in a huge disused studio in an old factory building called Harkers in Byker, Newcastle Upon Tyne. It was generously lent to Novellus Castellum by Waygood Gallery and Studios.
Alfie Leahy, Wednesday 5th September
Playfully elegant whilst intoxicatingly sultry, Alfie creates stop frame animations of the female form, beautifully choreographed and composed with an underlined sense of nostalgia. This age old technique enables her to create a visual world of illusion where her subjects extrovertly prance through her make believe stage sets. Alfie’s films touch on the burlesque and cheekily cross the boundaries between art, theatre and fashion. Following in the footsteps of Leigh Bowery and David LaChapelle, her work is encapsulating, fun and gregarious.
There is a love in Alfie’s work, of possibilities, In each of her films she explores, the many ways a person can look, a metamorphosis of appearances, with the aid of costume, body art and movement. Her figures are like chameleons, constantly changing shape, colour and form. Presented with a panorama of characters in her work, we can wonder, in the same way we may view Cindy Sherman photographs, at the many different ways a woman can project herself. But unlike Sherman, Alfie’s work concentrates solely on positive projections, unswayed by the modern anti-aesthetic photography.
In the Exsertus space Alfie invites us to explore a series of experimental films working with professional dancer, the fabulous Georgie Leahy.
James Johnson-Perkins
The day approaches three o’clock. A library of records leans against a partition, dust is caught beneath a wall’s white emulsion. Thomas gesticulates. He wants to talk about notions of quality within art. Thomas claims he led him to this point. There is a smile. Somewhere outside the gallery, footsteps can be heard.
This is not work, Walker tells Thomas.
Next to a false wall is a brown box containing materials for a previous project; the box has been opened but remains full. Walker’s previous installation had been cancelled after one day. He spent four months working on it. Thomas asks for the name of the new project. Therapy, Walker replies.
By the door are eight paintpots, arranged in two stacks. There are also two tables in the room. It appears that Walker uses one for writing and one for painting. Thomas looks away but cannot avoid looking at the two words on the wall. It is not always possible to talk about what it is that one is seeking to recover from.
A ladder holds its place near to the entrance. Elsewhere, various everyday objects are scattered throughout the workplace. Some look as though they have been broken, others look as though have been fixed. An office chair with wheels waits invitingly in the centre of the room. This is not work.
Some people feel that art and life inform each other. Thomas looks at the uncut logs set upon easy circles of woodchips and splinters, he looks at the keyboard, the marinucci organ and the xylophone. In the corners of the space, uneven grey floorpaint curls at the edges. He looks at the words on the wall once more, he cannot fathom why. Here, somewhere, there is an interest in etymology and slippages of meaning. Thomas sits on a red chair.
What is that blanket for, Thomas asks. Security, Walker replies.
Audiences are detectives, readers are operatives. In exploring the relationship they have with their own art, artists question the autonomy of meaning. Thomas looks once more at the two words on the wall, questioning. There are slow rewards here. Justification, fulfilment, finality; all are sought and seldom found. Yet still we look. The typewriter and paper, seemingly the focal point of the room but not always noticeable, sits on the table. The paper is blank.
This is not yet work, Walker says. This is the beginning of the work, the start of a tangent from itself. This is not work. Footsteps can be heard again from outside.
Thomas looks to the two words on the wall and understands. They are over ten feet high.
Adam Thomas
At first view Andrew Burton's new work in the Exsertus space plays with your sense of scale. The work is a wall constructed from thousands of fired bricks dividing the space into two. The bricks however are finger sized, a kind of lego-like miniature construction block from which Burton has built a wall that would be well over head height if normal sized construction bricks were used.
The wall structure gives the sense of creating a boundary, or in a space that lies along the route of Hadrian's wall, a frontier. In stepping over the barrier and viewing the work from the far side of the space, we can see that the wall has been filled with street tags, but due to tiny size of the bricks and the scale of the wall, the graffiti writing is of a miniature scale.
Burton's inspiration for working with fired bricks came from the experience of working in India, and observing what at first appeared to be piles of discarded bricks, but were actually the product of local brick yards. These piles of bricks had an order to them, and could be found all over India, an example of the staple Indian building material. The chances of seeing these discarded bricks may become a rarity, as the Indian government moves towards financing large-scale construction from concrete and more modern building materials.
This piece, constructed in the Exsertus space is one of a number of works that Burton has constructed from the same bricks. Here they have taken on a life of their own as they are reused in successive sculptures, bringing with them remnants of the paint and glaze from the works that have gone before.
Bricks are a universal material for construction, and they are found worldwide. Their versatility as a method of construction lend themselves to forms that are solid and permanent. Bricks give us a sense of solidity and comfort that they will not fall down. Burton's piece is neither solid nor permanent. Its precarious nature invites danger in the simple act of stepping over it. The precariousness of the construction reflects the precarious nature of the area that Harker's building is situated. Industrial buildings are being levelled on virtually all sides reminding us that the Exsertus space itself, like the Harker’s Building is only a temporary home for artists.
Matthew Cowan
With Johnson’s work the audience is forced to re-appraise her uncanny props, which often portray elements of decay, regurgitation and waste. Her work is undeniably influenced by gothic horror and science fiction and tips its' hat to James Herbert, Franz Kafka, H.P. Lovecraft and films such as Alien and The Thing. Her work also has similarities with artists such as Mike Nelson, Ilya Kabakov, Lynda Bengis, Cindy Sherman and Gavin Turk, in that her practice investigates abject states between reality and fiction.
Kathryn Johnson likes to instigate people's natural curiosity and to stimulate their imagination, creating sculptural scenarios which have multiple interpretations. The dazzling effect of her work is that we are offered the chance to indulge ourselves in creating our own fantastic stories and reasons to understand her faux hallucinogenic, bizarre and surreal panoramas.
James Johnson-Perkins
The Polynesian spiritual concept of tapu governs many aspects of sacred and everyday life, in particular food its consumption. In some situations designated members of society, as sacred practicitioners are unable to feed themselves because they are in a state of absolute tapu, and to touch the food itself would represent a transgression of their tapu state. They have to be fed in a special way, so as not to contaminate the food by touching it themselves. It elevates the status of the food itself as a sacred object.
The atmosphere in the performance space here too is one of a sacred realm, with sheets of paper containing fragments of writing - spanning a large central circle in the middle of the space. These pieces of writing are not literal or concise but hint at the elements of the performance in which they are a part of. Some contain text from Carole’s weblog, a parallel ingredient to the performance. The words describe her time, removed from everyday life, in the space as being a kind of retreat, drawing from the monastic traditions of solitude and contemplation, but with a focus on hunger. Arranged in the circular shape they map a well-trodden path over the course of the residency.
Matthew Cowan
“I am going; I’m going away; I’ll be away for a few days, away for some time; I’m going away from everyday life; there will be a time for you to visit if you wish. I invite you to visit I invite you to visit me if you wish I invite you to visit me in my place my place away you can come visit me if you wish.”
Carole Luby
Set in the Novellus Castellum gallery space Exertus, Matt Fleming fills the space with old cameras, projectors, monitors, he creates a sort-of-ghost-like landscape of stuff. The sputtering, whirring almost attic like detritus might remind you of the unravelled psyche of some obsessive and unworldly geek but its much more than this. Memories of childhood peep out against the broken, static hiss of a deranged television studio camera, while a slide-projector ‘ca-chunks’ violently somewhere in a dimly lit corner.
On an entrance wall are records of Matt Fleming’s ideas on the installation. It alludes to notions of Irony and melancholy. Melancholia can often be read as a metaphor for the mind's collapse. This is where Fleming toy’s with us as his experiments, his machines collapse and spit their parts out at us. His machines are challenging us, mocking us and prodding us to find a meaning in something that is, associated with the twee, the post-adolescent and the nerdy. Its Tinguelyesque art brut mixed with a subtle pinch of Takahashi spice topped with Gondrylike garnish for the digital age all finished off with a rye smile. You could mistake this for real chaos, and the yet the post-modern ethos of chaos is seen as no longer original. Fleming’s success is that the layout of the space functions very much like a Dutch still life. Hence the originality lies within deciphering the externally and internally complex language and the organised chaos of this machine-like landscape laden rich in its jokes, puns and wise cracks all cleverly hidden and sub-verted for our pleasure.
Richard A. Phipps
Mat Fleming presented a series of experiments in 35mm film, 16mm film and video, which developed through his residency at the Exsertus project space. A cacophony of machines and films, amongst other things, attempt to deconstruct the process of translating 35mm photography into film; reverse engineer the pixel; and reveal the sculptural mechanics of the process.
Ele Carpenter
“The aim of the show is to create something of beauty. I think beauty is truth, keeping in mind 3 things: that one shouldn't take oneself too seriously, that truth is stranger than fiction and that something should be true to its own trickery. Like Godard said: cinema is "reality 24 times a second".
My show of work produced experimentally over the last month hopefully embraces that contradiction and my own limitations working like an artisan in an industrial medium.
I am hopefully turning failed science into good art and presenting new entertaining film installations in progress.”
Mat Fleming
[Collaboration on 35mm film with Chris Bate]
In March 2006 Novellus Castellum curated a group exhibition of emerging artists, performers, filmmakers and musicians from the North East. From the live music of Cathode, to performance artists RudeBoy Noah and Chris Rollen. Visual artists with considerable exhibition experience were participating alongside the finest recent graduates from two of the best art schools in the country: The University of Newcastle upon Tyne and Northumbria University.
This show was a multi-disciplinary event which expressed a vibrancy that exists in the North-East, a chrysalis for inspired art, music and film. It will took place in venues across the city Gallery North and the Project Space at Northumbria University, the Long Gallery at Newcastle University at Morden Tower, and at one of the most exciting new galleries in the UK: Workplace, Gateshead.
The Long Gallery, Newcastle University
Phil Marsden, Ant Macari & Graeme Walker
In Phil Marsden's work 'The Fucking middle of nowhere' he uses a comic strip which traces an unsettling and crazy dialogue between to characters one with a cowboy hat and the other with a wrestlers mask. Eventually they both turn guns on each other. Ant Macari's 'Im loving it your way' complements this work, using an exquisite paper robot (made from a map found on the internet), which communicates with a hapless hamburger. Graeme Walkers 'You are now entering the real world'* reinterprets an exit sign and makes us ponder what world we are in, and what’s real or not. All three of the works have a existential quality that mockingly questions life.
Workplace Gallery, Gateshead
Andrew Chadwich, Richard Rigg, Ebony Andrews, James Johnson-Perkins & Graeme Walker
Andrew Chadwick work displays a mathematic obsession with Polyhedra, like Macari he uses a modal to create objects. In 'International Kidney, Shetland Black' he re-represents two English potato species, These are obviously a metaphor for two large testicles and this is emphasised by the Playboy magazine displayed on the table alongside. Richard Riggs also re-represents objects but in a slightly different way. In 'No More nails' he makes nails from no nails glue and in 'Title' he exhibits a title which is the title of itself. In contrast Ebony Andrews makes objects using taxidermy which and are startlingly unusual and crafty such as in 'Meep' which has a Rat head in the form of a hunting prize. In the Upstairs gallery James Johnson-Perkins’ work ZX Spectrum is a full length video of an episode of the A-Team transformed into ZX Spectrum 8 bit Graphics.
This was not part of Workplace's general program
Novellus Castellum would like to thank Paul Moss and Miles Thirlow for donating thier gallery space to use for this part of the events program.
Gallery North, Northumbria University
Paul Moss, Matthew Cowan, James Johnson-Perkins, Starboard Home
In 'Word' Paul Moss' uses shapes from Microsoft Word made in sparklene and conteboard and contrasts these with a striking three dimensional optical illusion 'The possibilities are endless', these works harmonize well with Johnson-Perkins’ ‘Gauntlet’ a selection of large scale Lego robots which are both totemic and charming. These two artists works are both quirky and eccentric in similarity to Matthew Cowan’s ‘Pieces of plum pudding’ which shows a biomechanics video trace of a Morris Jig’ form the village of Bleddington’ performed by the artist himself.
In the Project Space Starboard Home (Susie Green and Illana Michell) presented thier stunning new video work in the project space which comprised of live music performaces from some of the best bands in the North-East.
Morden Tower
RudeBoy Noah, Chris Rollen, Film Bee, Cathode
In RudeboyNoahs ‘Performance no.12’, he transforms himself from a wrapped up cocoon into a fully fledged chav, including ghetto blaster and tracksuit. Acting both drunk and disorderly. This was followed by Chris Rollens astonishing ‘Gingham a era semic eht’ performance. Here the artist performs on guitar and vocals Bob Dylan ‘The times are changing backwards’, which is recorded and then played backwards. We were then treated to a selection of charming films made by the Film Bee film collective which specialise in using old 16 and 35 millimetre film equipment. To round of the event Cathode the North-East based one man electronica outfit presented us with a miscellany of live entrancing sound works.
*This work was also shown in Workplace and Gallery North
Panel Discussion, Bridge Hotel
Illana Mitchell - Director of Platform North-East and Starboard Home
Susie Green - Artist and co-director of Starboard Home
Helen Smith - Director of Waygood Gallery
RudeBoyNoah- Artist and Organiser for Novellus Castellum
Discussion Topic “What is the potential for national and international exposure of the North-East art Scene’
This was a thought provoking and lively discussion about the potential of the North-East’s art scene. The discussion panellists talked at length about the North-East and how each worked within it. It was agreed that ‘Something was happening’ and that 2006 is a significant time for change and action. The art critic Paul Usherwood, who was in the audience talked about the influence of the Baltic and alluded to the fact it may be harmful to the do-it yourself ethics that that small art organisations have had great success with. A lot was said about how other art organisations need to up their ante and increase their international profiles. That more needs to be written critically in the art press about independent art events in the area and that there is a need for a Newcastle arts festival akin to the Liverpool Bienalle.
Is this Newcastle’s moment? Memory is fallible but it’s hard to think of any time like it in the last thirty years.
Only 1990 comes to mind. There were two extraordinary events that year: the Tyne International and Edge 90 [Art & Life in the Nineties]. As the title suggests, the first of these, curated by Declan McGonagle, took place mainly on the Quayside. I particularly remember two telling pieces down by the river, both of which drew attention to the commercial exploitation of the area that was just beginning to happen at the time. The first by Krzysztof Wodiczko was one of the artist’s trademark projections, an image of skeleton hands paddling their way through mounds of coins, on the side of the nightclub-cum-ferry moored under the main Tyne Bridge. The other by Paul Bradley consisted of just two words, ‘True North’, in big steel letters on the north wall of one of the then vacant nineteenth-century industrial buildings on the southern, Gateshead, side of the river. These were positioned in such a way that they were all but impossible to read except from across the river in Newcastle and this was important because it served as vivid reminder that power in Britain always tends to be located in the South. That is, it’s not in the north you will actually find true north; the south, particularly London, is where ideas about northernness always turn out to be generated and ratified.
However, the event that really made 1990 special was Edge: two or three delirious weeks of performances and installations in buildings and spaces along the Quayside, a part of Newcastle that at the time few knew about, let alone visited. All kinds of interesting artists were involved. Orlan, for instance, was there, starting her celebrated personal transformation project. There was a mesmerising performance by Marina Abramovic in All Saints with pythons – live pythons – slithering across the floor. I also remember a live version of Isaac Julien’s homoerotic film Looking for Langston in which some twenty or so performers did strange, troubling things beneath the Tyne Bridge, in the official rooms upstairs at the Guildhall or amongst the headstones in All Saint’s churchyard. In addition, the dark, low-ceilinged, labyrinthine interior of the now mostly burnt-down nineteenth-century bonded warehouses in Hanover Street (opposite the site of what is now the Copthorne Hotel) was the venue for a number of remarkable installations. Richard Wilson’s was especially neat: another timely snipe at the impending gentrification of the Quayside, in the form of one of those dinky little balconies that seemed to epitomise stylish loft living made out of ancient planks that appeared to have been taken from the warehouse floor. Indeed, one’s sense of what might be called imminent Slug and Lettuce-ization was what gave a special urgency to Edge. It made the dark and dingy Victorian office buildings of the Quayside suddenly seem rich in possibility in a way they never quite had before.
However, there was a down-side. When Edge was all over there was nothing much left behind. Which, of course, is not how it is with the various DIY artist-run initiatives that Tyneside has now. They aim to stay. I am thinking of the yearly VANE jamborees and the Vane gallery on Forth Banks that they eventually spawned, and Waygood, Globe, Workplace, Gallery North, Platform Projects, Star and Shadow cinema, the artist communities in Berwick and Allenheads and, yes, Novellus Castellum. Together these all seem to add up to something we’ve never had before in Newcastle and certainly didn’t have in 1990: an established, self-sustaining art scene.
Naturally, when people talk about contemporary art on Tyneside today, they tend to focus on the Baltic. And indeed, as one of the largest dedicated contemporary art spaces in the world, the Baltic is undoubtedly a wonderful asset. However, it is becoming clear that as with any major public gallery, say Tate Modern, it is under pressure to offer star names, tried and tested acts and a kind of ambience that will appeal to, or at least not put off, a mainly tourist audience. So there is definitely room for small shoe-string galleries and grassroots organisations as well, the advantage of such spaces being that they can offer the offbeat, the surprising and the transgressive and can take risks in a way that the Baltic can’t. Also, they don’t have to apologise for showing the work of young, locally based artists at the start of their careers. Yet such spaces in turn obviously have their own drawbacks. For instance, after the opening evening they tend to attract only small numbers and that can make the experience of visiting an exhibition at that stage seem somewhat forbidding.
However, maybe Novellus Castellum has an answer to that. Their inaugural shows seemed to demonstrate that it is possible to put on exhibitions that are every bit as edgy and interesting, as in touch with what’s happening in the international art world and as professional in terms of presentation as anything you come across elsewhere and yet still command an audience. The way that they did this was in part simply by confining the event to just one evening – the evening of the private view. This tactic seemed to allow them to recapture the excitement and bountifulness of 1990 - plus there was the added bonus that you felt you were experiencing something that might lead on to other good things in the future.
Paul Usherwood
Paul Usherwood is a History Art Lecturer at Northumbria University and writes for Art Monthly, UK.