Selected in 2018 for a programme of monthly peer mentoring forums held at The Showroom, London and supported by the Lux and Arts Council England. The forums composed of a mixed group of visual artists who are with and without disability. Participants engage in the programme through peer discussions, workshops, and talks by other art specialists. Speakers have included Sarah McCrory, Director CCA Goldsmiths University and Lucy Day, Independent Curator.
SupaStore Human – We are the Product reflects how technology and automation has impacted social interaction, commerce, and manufacturing, presented by Sarah Staton. As the goddess of art, trade, handicrafts and wisdom, Minerva (in her many guises) has become the public face of the SupaStore and represents the classical origins of these now mechanized exchanges.
SupaStore Human will be on view through to February 2018
Artists participating in SupaStore Human – We are the Product include Saelia Aparicio, Fiona Banner, Merlin Carpenter, Ejaz Christiliano Jude Crilly, Dd Davies, Denise De Cordova, Aaron Flint Jamison, Freee, GAS (Kelsey Olson and Katelyn Farstad), Alison Gill, Chiara Giovando, Justin Goldwater, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Natalie Price Hafslund, Anthea Hamilton, Cira Huwald, Steve Kado, Miguel Soto Karelovic, Tobias Kaspar, Lito Kattou, Lisa Kereszi, Adriana Lara, Tanya Ling, Paula Linke, Steph Luyinhuang, Adam McEwen, Sean McNanney Saved NY, Ariane Müller, Tracy Nakayama, Dmitri Obergfell, Joanne Tatham & Tom O’Sullivan, Jaehung Park, Hadrian Pigott, Paloma Proudfoot, Josephine Pryde, Cullinan Richards, Colleen Rogers, Lawrence Seward, Sarah Staton, Milly Thompson, Will Thompson, Nicola Tyson, Demelza Watts, Nicole Wermers, Seyoung Yoon, YES & NO MAGAZINE, and Anand Zenz.
Within the exhibition Altered Realities, Alison Gill’s Dreams of a Witch House has emerged anew from an earlier iteration of the work. Acknowledging a fundamental shift in global perception, and with a nod to H.P.Lovecraft, Alison Gill’s Dreams of a Witch House is intended to become a provisional site for the representation of new states of reality. The sculpture installation offers a parallel world for ‘dark times’ invocating ideas about ecology, folklore, shamanic rites and utopian dreams gone awry. Enter the geodesic dome. Alone, together. Close your eyes. Open your eyes…
Last chance to see the sculpture installation and hear the artist talk: ‘There is no such thing as a sculpture and other things’ at the Lethaby Gallery, 14 March 6-8 pm, Central Saint Martins, Kings Cross, London.
Come inside the new VR installation by Alison Gill produced with Iain Nicholls. Project Tomorrow People attempts to bring together real and virtual worlds.
22 February – 11 March
Opening hours:
Tuesday to Friday: 11am – 6pm
Saturday: 12 noon – 5pm
2017: What is going on? We stand at a hyperreal crossroads: a virtual reality in one direction, augmented dead ahead, and a post-truth, post-reality actualities another.
Against this backdrop Altered Realities has been formed. Comprised of works submitted via an open call to students, staff and alumni of Central Saint Martins, it comprises creative responses that acknowledge and respond to the altered states & twisted realities in which we find ourselves.
Within the exhibition, a social space will play host to a number of discussions, workshops and talks, aided by cold brewed coffee, ensuring participants leave refreshed as well as recalibrated.
Alison Gill and Iain Nicholls will be talking about their collaboration and the ideas behind Project Tomorrow People on 2 and 3 March from 4 pm to 6 pm.
Featuring works by: Jocelyn Anquetil, Rosemarie Back, Simon Banos, Craig Barnes, Daria Blum, Tom Bull, Nicolas Canal Tinius, Anais Comer, Asa Desouza-Jones, Hannah Doucet, Naomi Ellis, Katrin Elmer, Elliot Gibbons, Alison Gill & Iain Nicholls, Fi Hartley, Melanie King, Ayse Kipri, Benjamin Lansky, Dongsun Lim, Louis Lupien, X Marks the Bökship, Benjamin Marland, Juan Mateus Vargas, Henry Mills, Fié Neo & Alcinda Lee, Paul O’Kane, Gribaudi Plytas, Katarina Rankovic, Federico Sargentone, Alex Schady, Sana Serkebaeva, Esna Su, First Sukpaiboon, Lars Svaland Høie, Mark Titchner, Oliver Vanes, Kaitlyn Walker-Stewart, Matthew Wang, Neale Willis, Haocheng Wu, Clunie Reid
#AltReal
Opening 26th November – 19th December 2016, new and existing works will be shown in an exhibition curated by Charlie Dutton. The British Society Of Self-Deprecation- PART 1 – Works on Paper by Contemporary British Artists) will showcase works on paper by British Artists introducing a range of drawing practices to a new and predominantly Chinese audience at Cheng Centre for Contemporary Art in the 798 Art District of Beijing.
Alison Gill, Andrew Seto, Anne Lydiat, Antonia Manoochehri, Celyn Bricker, Charlie Dutton, Clare Price, Covadonga Valdes, David Dipré, David Webster, Emma Talbot, Geraldine Swayne, Hamish McLain, Harry Pye, Hedley Roberts, Howard Dyke, Iona Jackson, Jake Clark, Kirsten Glass, Laurence Noga , Marianne Basualdo, Martyn Simpson, Mick Finch, Paul Housley, Phillip Allen, Richard Elliot, Roshni Bhagotra, Selma Parlour, Virginia Verran, Wendy Anderson
“Times they are a changin'”
Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature with words like that. He sent notice to Stockholm to say he can’t make the ceremony. London will soon write to Brussels to say it has better things to do too. Trump Christmas cards from Trump Tower will land in people’s hands, and they will try and laugh when they find a voucher for one of those steaks tucked inside, but they’ll know it’s not funny anymore. Paper flying around the world carrying messages of self-righteousness, self-delusion, self-doubt, self-hate and round again.
So what to do? Self-deprecation has always been a very British way of coping, but they never really meant it. They had Empire, Marmite, Shakespeare, Churchill, Marks & Spencer’s, the Beatles and a proper cup of tea. But things are fragmenting. They’ll have to learn to criticize themselves without the jokes. Ideas and structures are fragile. They seemed fixed because they were written down in big strong buildings with expensive pens on nice paper. But the ground can shake and the buildings can fall down. There are gold-plated pens and bits of panic-scented paper waiting to be taken seriously. The rules are pieces of confetti tossed up in to the wind. It’s going to be difficult to get them all back in the box. Self-confidence becomes self-harm. British humour like that in the show might also prove useful. Irony, sarcasm, intelligence and expressiveness are equally on display. But as we are finding in countries all over the world, what is said and what is felt can be different things. British qualities might have changed this time next year.
To express yourself on paper requires a certain self-belief to commit your work to the blank page, and a certain amount of self- criticism to get it right. Plenty of words and images and photos, pictures and notes and songs, never leave the screen, travelling without landing. Pixels trump paper. A material surface is something to touch, and to know is really there, a sense of security. This show uses paper, which we are sure exists, but it is a little ephemeral, easily ripped, light, should be recycled. Transient safety.
Artists can be guardians of the tactility that we crave through their making. Some produce their final works on paper, some use it for preliminary pieces. Paint, inks, pencil and felt tips sketch and collage. In the British Society of Self- Deprecation, Harry Pye’s work is fun and funny incorporating a childlike use of felt tips. He usually collaborates, like a comedy double act, this time with his young nephew. Kirsten Glass reminds us of the innocent and macabre patterns that can be formed on paper, while the complexity of Antonia Manoochehri’s work juxtaposes against the simplicity of the material. Howard Dyke usually works on a large grandiose scale with rigorous energy layers of macho power and an iconoclastic look at politics. Geraldine Swayne uses a miniature scale, producing sexually charged images by painting with enamel on copper, like secret little Victorian possessions. Alone amongst the painters is sculptor Alison Gill works which venture into uncanny spaces, creating imaginary worlds and romantic fictions.
Scroll Down is a grandiose project that will run alongside and within the British Society of Self-Deprecation exhibition. A large drawing on paper will cascade through the exhibition, rolled down like an ancient tapestry or a seismograph measuring the movements of the Earth. For two weeks Celyn Bricker and Charlie Dutton will draw on this Scroll creating a new work of art, attending to it with a daily religious devotion. The epic drawing will be exhibited and they sold off piecemeal at the behest of the consumer. Free-market economics will determine how the whole is carved up, breaking it down. It will be measured and priced accordingly. Nothing will be sacred and anything can be cut away.
Change is a constant and the way we use and interact with materials and each other will never be static. The 798 gallery was a weapons factory not so long ago. But tangible expressions of moments such as these will live on, and are resting places as we all strive to define our new identity in our new world, and create a self-portrait we can live with.
Text by Kate Saffin
Alison Gill’s limited edition print is now available from Gazelli Art House. Dreams of a Witch House was made using collage, Photoshop and screen-grabs from Experiments in a Virtual Double World. The work represents an eruption of the uncanny where real material security has been supplanted by some kind of spatial anxiety. With a nod to H.P.Lovecraft, the metaphoric bogeyman here materializes fear in the form of the architecture of a familiar domestic house surrounded by a ghostly aura and a geometric landscape. Dreams of a Witch House points to the pleasures and dangers of a new kind of experience, an immersive language in development.
Lookout Lookout – Experiments in a Virtual Double World
Gazelli Art House, London have invited Iain Nicholls and Alison Gill to their online residency to document their collaborative process during June. During this time they will be developing a new work combining Virtual Reality, sculpture and installation centred around a residency at The Lookout Tower, Aldeburgh 26th June – 3rd July. It is a development diary of ideas for the work to be created during the residency.
The loose aims of the collaboration is firstly to investigate the relationship between making art using digital media and Virtual Reality and making art in more traditional ways, with real materials, objects and spaces. Secondly it is hoped to then experiment with how these new ‘virtual spaces’ relate to the ‘old’ space of reality with reference to the space the residency takes place in – The Lookout Tower, Aldeburgh.
During June and July, Iain Nicholls and Alison Gill will be working in collaboration, in an experiment to transport audiences from the beach to another place using arcane and VR technologies.
Guest Artists for Deptford X, opens 25 September 2015
Alison Gill has made a new sculpture, Regenerator (Utopia n) for Deptford X: London’s Contemporary Art Festival 2015. It is a wire sculpture, each part resembling tumbleweed. The structural branching forms have been metalized with ‘fool’s gold’ in a vacuum chamber – generating a futuristic, science fiction effect. Think of tumbleweed and it conjures up images of Western films, desolate locations, abandoned gold rush towns or tragic-comic emptiness and silence. Tumbleweed, in visual media, often appears where everything else has gone; the place is wiped out (i.e. nothing left but tumbleweed). If regeneration seems to kill a place, Regenerator (Utopia n) offers something potentially more hopeful. The sculpture will move between various locations during Deptford X aiming to raise questions and conversation about local development, regeneration and speculators attracted to the area. Importantly, the work plays out an alternative, another kind of speculation, one focused less on capital; to speculate is after all a creative act of imagination and ‘dreams are made of this’. *
*Squeeze lyrics
The work will feature at Deptford X Gallery and another venue each day to be announced daily via social media.
Collyer Bristow Gallery Curated by Day+Gluckman
2 JULY – 21 OCTOBER 2015 Private view 1st July, 2015
Guler Ates, Helen Barff, Sutapa Biswas, Sonia Boyce, Jemima Burrill, Helen Chadwick, Sarah Duffy, Rose English, Rose Finn-Kelcey, Alison Gill, Helena Goldwater, Joy Gregory, Margaret Harrison, Alexis Hunter, Frances Kearney, EJ Major, Eleanor Moreton, Hayley Newman, Freddie Robins, Monica Ross, Jo Spence, Jessica Voorsanger, Alice May Williams and Carey Young
Works by over 20 women artists will reflect the changes in art practice within the context of sexual and gender equality since the introduction of the Sex Discrimination Act (1975) in the UK. Some artists confront issues that galvanised the change in law whilst others carved their own place in a complex and male dominated art world. From the radical movements of the 1960s and 70s, the politics of the 80s, the boom of lad culture in the 1990s to the current fourth wave of feminism, encouraged largely through and because of social media, all of the artists’ question equality and identity in very different ways.
The exhibition presents a snapshot of the evolving conversations that continue to contribute to the mapping of a woman’s place in British society. Body, femininity, sex, motherhood, economic and political status are explored through film, photography, sculpture, performance and painting.