Highlights: 29 July - 4 August, 2024

New Art Highlights of the week includes: Simon Hall, Garth Gratrix, Joanne Masding and Stuart Robinson

'Let's Get Phygital': Eye Of The Beholder, 2022

Simon Hall

Commissioned by Axis as part of the 'Let's Get Phygital' project investigating strategies for hybrid creative working, Simon explored the use of virtual reality (VR) and three-dimensional creative technologies, as a means to deepen engagement with the wider cleft lip and palate community. Participants were invited to interact in a digital interface with 3D models of the artist created with photogrammetry and imported into virtual spaces. In workshops, creative sculpting tools to modify and manipulate to their own designs were used to explore aspects of the fantastical self, stigma and representation, while maintaining a safe environment for participants.

The project worked with specific individuals (a facial surgeon, cleft psychologist and an adult with cleft lip and palate) to explore varied perspectives. It opened deeper learning around sharing of our digital selves with the artists 3D identity being altered by participants. Additionally the participants reflected on how such novel digital tools could be useful in healthcare decision making to experimentally view the holistic cranial and facial appearance beyond the limits of photos and mirrors. The collaborative reflections were utilised as inspiration to create further surrealist works in virtual reality, with immersive spaces a participant can move around and interact with the artist’s portrait.

Phygital Toolkit

Project page

Flamboyant Flamingos (Dip in the Pool), 2024

Garth Gratrix

Polished Bronze spinning plates, coated steel, wood, egg shell paint.

Sculptural installation

Solo commission, Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool.

Feat. Works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres & Derek Jarman

Dimensions variable

New Rehang (series 3), 2017

Joanne Masding

New Rehang (series 3) are a set of objects that begin with a catalogue of artifacts from The British Museum. Liberated from the page, coated in holographic transparent vinyl and backed with plaster cast in the artists hand, the series considers ways in which objects that are not able to be accessed by bodies can be known, and the durational experience of standing in front of something.

They were made for the exhibition stuffs wander off, a shape steps in, for Two Queens, Leicester (2017). Borne from the context of the museum the exhibition presents works made to think about the parameters of objects, how they are known and disseminated, and spaces in making translations between object and image.

Arcade / Facade, 2024

Stuart Robinson

Inspired by a combination of previous works with text based signage and play with the word-form of ‘arcade’ Arcade/Facade mimics rooftop hotel signs and arcade facades. It features a set of changeable letter-forms, presented on a functional steel framework, that borrow the idea of cinema marquee signs and the famous changing phrases on the hotel sign in the Fawlty Towers titles.

The font used was inspired by text on the ‘Automatic Change Giver’ machine in an arcade in St Ives. The simple font style functional yet authoritative, with red chosen for it’s prevalence in the rooftop signage mentioned earlier as well as for its contrasts against the blue of the pool. Its location in the space both overlooks the rest of the exhibition while the backdrop of the fake rocks creates a filmic landscape quality.

Over the duration of the exhibition the letters on the sign were removed, changed, replaced  at irregular intervals, cycling through different words of 6 or 9 letters suffixed with ‘ade’. All familiar to the holiday experience the words used were arcade, facade, parade, promenade, motorcade and orangeade with the unused letters of each iteration piled below. The changing messages adding to the narrative of the rest of the exhibition while evoking ideas of change and transience.