22 June 2011 to 16 July 2011
Artists in this exhibition: Andy Jackson, Ross Chisholm, Nick Fox, John Reardon, Tom Walker
Mail Please,
I do not own a computer
I have an old typewriter where my letters begin
Feeling my fingers hitting the keys
The hammers hitting the page
And the sense of a visual correspondence:
Between letter shapes
Between the letters in a word
Between the words in a sentence
I’m engaged in an appreciation of abstract sculpture
I put words together instinctively
As if they were two abstract units
That have a visual correspondence
The above writing takes elements from an interview with the author Don Delillo. Delillo is responding to the interviewers description of Robert Rauschenberg taking materials to the studio as ‘buying an environment’. Delillo talks about the physical nature of typed characters inscribed into the surface of a sheet of paper. The physical quality of these letters group to provide a word and so begins the jump from aesthetic to language. This description of fiction process is a commonality amongst visual artists in pursuit of the final stage of an artwork, the jump from ‘things’ to ‘sense.’
From things to sense, from a singular sense to a collective sense – the sense of a group exhibition. Housed in the interiors of Imperial College, Blyth Gallery presents Mail Please, an exhibition comprised of 5 artists whose work encompasses the environments of digital screens, painted surfaces and re-appropriated scrap materials. Aesthetics from hard edged abstraction, interior décor, performance art, you-tube and classical chiaroscuro. Reformations of language: a concise sense plucked from the clutter of our contemporary culture.