CMR 'Everything is F**ked' Feb 2017

Fred McVittie made a proposal to have this theme for a show and there were several weeks beforehand when cmr members could go into the building in Redruth, Cornwall, and be in residence to work on it.

Fred had given a talk about the idea for cmr. He and Mary Fletcher and Jacqui Orly arranged to go at the same time on some Mondays so there was some discussion and working alongside one another and I found it helpful to focus whilst there and to also continue ideas in my studio.

Stuart Blackmore had volunteered to curate and put in a lot of work. He and I both learnt that communication over this was best done by phone not e-mail and that the boundaries of how curating is to be done would be best agreed at the start of a group show.

Alice Mahoney ably put together and produced a booklet showing images and words from each of the ten artists involved which in retrospect needed more time to be available to buy during the show but will be afterwards. Since the show was only on Friday evening and Sat and Sun this documentation is especially valuable. 

Personally I would have liked our names on the poster, and posters to be available for members to put up to invite visitors from Redruth and elsewhere. There was online publicity and on source fm radio and I sent something to especially local paper in St.Ives. The Echo,  about my part in it, which was printed and had everyone’s names.

Opening Night at CMR

The names of artists by the work and titles, and the handouts about it were rather discreet to the point of being difficult to locate and the instructions for my participatory anti bullfight postcards to take and insert in postcard racks in Spain were printed in a font so tiny that a magnifying glass could have helped. The idea of selling work was mentioned as a possible line in the handouts but I did not see any reference to it . All these facets of showing work were not discussed by the group and I think we could benefit from doing this. 

What are the reasons for keeping publicity mostly to the cognoscenti, playing down sales opportunities and minimising use of the artists' names? Is it de rigueur in  alternative art anti commercial circles to be so carefully good taste about this? Is there a nervousness that the local population might be a problem if we succeeded in attracting the in ?

However, the show looked well presented, sharing preview night with Back Lane West residency brought in more people I think and a lively sense of walking up and down to visit both shows. It became a parallel world just behind the Redruth's thoroughfare.

139 visitors were recorded over the three days.

Performance by J.Orly

The opening night warmed up to a buzzing atmosphere, dramatically silenced by the appearance of a woman, naked apart from a head obscuring headdress, feeling her way outside into the cold                                                                                                                                                                                                                      evening to empty out water from a container, returning inside to sit in the window under a dripping  tin of black treacle and then donning a wetsuit. The audience was entirely respectful and attentive and no doubt un phased by this performance art but the attendance of two youths who were passing by chance added a less art schooled reaction as their amazement, consternation and politely controlled nervous laughter in the face of adult seriousness, particularly when the artist's bottom was seen to have brown stains on it, presumably from the treacle, were authentically apparent.

audience react

 I suppose every watcher has their own reaction. Jacqui Orly's performance was certainly memorable, puzzling, brave and done beautifully. It had a title 'everything is not black and white' and  somehow related to her room with photocopies of cloth in black through to white tones and shells with amplified sounds.

I think J .Orly is one of those artists whose work evolves through surreal half conscious associations which are inexplicable but leave a strong albeit bewildering impression.

Alice Mahoney

Other works were on video. Alice Mahoney had a complex montage of high end consumerism entitled ‘I’d rather have a lot of shoes and bags than having animals’.

Stuart Blackmore showed the frustration of a tangled Newton's cradle. He had also made the entrance to the show dramatically dark with flashing words in lights.

 Mary Fletcher had caught two pigeons in mating behaviour on the wall at the back of cmr, which seemed to invite the audience to identify with them and aptly fitted the theme.

Her other work included a subversion of the show's title by adding 'NOT' in red with a red wedge recalling 1917 Russian revolution art, a drawing recalling her abandoned suicide attempt as a young woman when struck by tragedy and grief, her anti bull fighting piece and two images about the refugee crisis. She had a list of 'positive verbs for action in the world' which was a new take on Serra's verbs for action which applied to his work in sculpture

Mary Fletcher

Fred McVittie had been out on the hillside as a scientist despairingly arriving from a great distance away to hold up a misspelt sign about the state of everything, which coinciding with the title of the show was not a surprise but brought over a desperate, sad appeal to the unknown watchers.

Also he had transformed himself into a swastika as which he impotently struggled to be able to move or to be terrifying in an inadequate space. The tv monitor was set in a dolls house reduced scale domestic interior which I think made the piece, with a hint from its title, about the absurd horrors of domestic violence.

Fred McVittie

Fred also had some embroidered baseball caps, such as 'make America good again' and' make Redruth great again'.

I was a bit disappointed to find the Trump substitute grunting pig I had seen when I had been in residence there earlier had been edited out, but a whole wall of collaged cuttings and ideas gave some idea of the range of peoples' sources.

Merryn Tresidder had three paintings with implied interconnections and complex titles.’

The Solution to “Brexit” explained with rope,

 1.CTRL[and Seize the means of Production]

2. ALT [Ownership of Land and Property]

3. DEL [Any Remaining Framework Allowing Existence of the Bourgeoisie}

David Axtell

 David Axtell had a range of collages and montaged puns and comments referencing, viagra, 

Trump and Farage and other things including a rewriting in less optimistic mode of a work from Yoko Ono.

Liam Jolly had a mystifying combination of curved and straight bananas with a canvas representation of a computer screen and a website address reference that needed technology to make sense of.

Liam Jolly

Tim Prykke had altered two chairs so that they would only function where they were placed and made some eloquently absurd photographs using bricks, grapes, eggs and concrete which seemed to be metaphors for impossible situations.

Tim Prykke

Jonathan Hayter had a whole room installation and used fluorescent paint and ultra violet lighting to great effect so that his expressionist anguished imagery using images of war, of religion and phallic sculpture made a powerful glowing experience once you committed to going through the curtain to be immersed in it.

Jonathan Hayter

I think the show was lively and left people with memories and images that might embody something of our difficult  times and showed artists grappling with how to express some things that were questioning and painful.

Please keep in touch with CMR, the artists's collective in Redruth, for information about future shows.

CMR, Redruth-Digital Film Installation alongside Cornwall Film Festival

CMR. Digital film installation alongside Cornwall Film Festival. Saturday Nov 14th 2015

As far as I know CMR got involved to put this on at short notice because of a contact Cat Bagg had with Cinestar at Back Lane West. She and Alice Mahoney acted speedily to get this going and some of us put work in, installed all round the building in Redruth, which is conveniently near the cinema where Cornwall Film Festival was happening that weekend. Stuart Blackmore was technical backup. 

I managed to get a poster put up inside the cinema just where people were passing to go into the films and I decided to add all our names to it as contributors to try to interest more people.

Attendance wasn't high, it was bad weather, but a lot of those going to the analogue originated films at Back Lane West probably came to it.

There was a nice spirit of helping together at the installation and feeling it had been a good idea at the end of the day drinks. Redruth closes early, most shops were shut at 4pm, it was dark and almost deserted, four saffron buns for a pound at Warren's, and they go outside and shout this to the few people passing.

Cat Bagg, Alice Mahoney, Jonathan Hayter, Claire Stockings-Baker, Frances Walsh, Fred McVittie, David Axtell, 

Morwenna Morrison and myself took part.

Alice chose my 'Art Notes' from what I offered. It's a satirical piece about trying to make a mark as an artist and the sound, a song, is essential to it. I saw someone using the headphones and laughing so I was pleased. It can be seen on my Vimeo page, 1min 46.

This brings me to a point that I like the length of films to be posted so I can decide whether to embark on them. I also like a notice about them posted by them and only some of the work had this, otherwise there were notes in a handout but only three copies of it. The notes were very interesting and illuminating.

On the same floor Fred McVittie had a piece which a young man told me he was very confused about. I asked if he was an artist and he said no, he was a media studies student, which seemed a bit sad to me to differentiate between the two. Fred's blurb referred to graffiti and protest art and the film, rather strange and menacing perhaps embodied I thought frustrated rage and alienation.

Alice Mahoney's 'feast' was really a metaphor about consumption, a rather grotesque meal slowed down.

Jonathan Hayter showed experimental colourful imaginatively made forms, with music by David Handford, and strobe lights.

Claire Baker's video was projected in one of the rooms and made an impact as a lone adolescent girl wandered in a stark landscape, rather poetic and moody, a sublime contrast to Fred's figure emerging in a lonely landscape, and my person in an urban cul-de-sac.

Downstairs Cat Bagg had work using standing stones that were seen in a whirling around inventive way inside circular vignettes with a pattern of lights on the floor. She explained to me some of the complexity of working out how this was done to fit the space.

David Axtell had a brooding sunset behind a structure of Tibetan flags on a sea edge cliff and went alongside a poem about loss and war by Laurence Binyon.

Frances Walsh showed 'Lighting a fire' , a beautifully filmed piece with clear colours and subtle sounds in which the artist collaborated with her young son.

Morwenna Morrison also used a room to install her piece, which had a lovely old armchair for viewing and getting into the mood of her montaged shots from old footage about marriage, which cast rather a jaundiced and wry comment on the institution and is part of her focus on nostalgia in her work.

As usual a very mixed bag, easy to move amongst and take in as the visitor felt inclined.

This was in contrast to the Cinestar films at Back Lane West, which had the advantage of being seen from start to finish but the disadvantage that the rolling programme leaves a viewer stuck in experiences they may tire of because they are not to their taste. Some of it was very fuzzy, some abstract experiments that were a bit long for me. Also it was even colder than CMR and with only a hard box to sit on whereas up the road we did have a few chairs.

Meanwhile the festival was at the  proper cinema, this year warm enough thank goodness. It's quite expensive to go to things, it's reduced in scope, little publicity, no Cornish films, no artist-made experimental section now and I regret none of the cameraderie I  felt when it was all in Falmouth Poly or Princess Pavilions and one got into conversation and film making and film makers felt like a wonderful group of colleagues. There was more of that at CMR's impromptu drinks.

I saw at the cinema the films from Falmouth media program, and the room was packed with new students from the course. Oddly only three films were chosen to be screened and although they had some interest for me, some good acting, some novel ideas, the overall impression made on me was that all the students would be thinking they would do much better themselves.

This was followed by ' Taxi Tehran'  by Jafar Panahi , winner of the Golden Bear at Berlin Film Festival  this year, which I loved. It was ingenious, brave, funny and moving and so apt on the day after the Paris atrocities to see a film maker persisting in expressing himself within the oppressive regime of Iran, where he has been forbidden from making films and I read that one of his works was smuggled out to to Europe on a data stick hidden in a cake. I started to applaud and after a moment others joined in. It's the sort of thing that can happen at a festival showing.

So, from a completely realised drama about the most important things in life to experimental scratching on celluloid. An amazing day of contrasts.

'In The Dark Times' cmr Redruth Dec 2012

In the Dark Times - cmr - Redruth. December 2012

Members of cmr were invited to send in ideas for this show and then to attend a meeting at which those present spoke about their proposals, some of which were as yet very unformed. Following this the curators, Liam Jolly and Duncan Hopkins decided what to show and how and did the work of installing it.

On returning to invigilate I noticed that the rota had not been filled so the show had not been open as advertised, and another time I would suggest participants should be required to commit to this before their art work is accepted.
The temperature in the building was very chilly even after the two inadequate heaters had been on for several hours.

These practical matters are very important for the professional production of shows that people will bother to come to see and be happy to spend some time looking at. Interestingly there was no provisions for buying work,such as receipts etc. although some works were priced on the list provided.

As the work was installed with nowhere separated off for the invigilators to sit, we became part of the installation, two people in camp chairs, holding onto our warming cups of tea, sitting close to the heater, like two bivouacing squatters in the semi darkness, waiting for someone to come in.

At the entrance there was a shiny paper grotto to walk through which reminded some of one there used to be in a department store in Redruth. However this one contained a framed print that said 'Bomb the world', by Stuart J.Blackmore.

This encapsulated the contrasts of the show.

Jonathan Hayter's light show was a delightful visual ballet of shapes and colours, like being able to walk into a Bryan Wynter 'Imoos'.

In another room a dramatically lit mud-covered book lay on top of bundles of twigs. I didn't know what it meant. More mud books by Francesca Owen hung from a ceiling and Peter Ward showed bundles of sticks recalling a set for babes in the wood or red riding hood.

There was more about fairy tales and masks, dressing up - picked up in my ceramic figures of a New Year Bear talking to a Fairy. 

Alice Mahoney showed a rather creepy torn part of a toy bear and kit for a bear tamer.

 Ilke Cinarel’s video combining a naked man sitting on a toilet with images of children and their voices seemed similarly to hint at something unwholesome whilst recalling 60's graphics, Hockney, ‘found film’ on The Old Grey Whistle Test on t.v.?

Sara Bowler had been running mask making sessions in preparation for the closing 'Saturnalia' 

and I had invited the public to send in baubles expressing how they felt about Christmas, which resulted in a small but unusual and varied display and raised the issue of how we react to being in the grip of our culture and gained useful publicity in the local papers for the whole show. I was able to put inside a bauble shape my poem about being a humanist “It’s our Christmas Too”.

I also showed a previous collaborative piece in which people contributed Xmas tree pictures and words about their use of this custom. These had been made into bauble-like cubes to examine and re-arrange.

Duncan Hopkins had a painting in which a dark figure was behind colourful streamers. Towards the end of the show, following some unexplained bother, this was replaced by Charmaine Honeychurch's thickly painted “Calm after the storm”, the title of which may have referred to this event obliquely, which used gloriously gestural thick paint in a wintry palette. 

Ron Ford also had a whole wall of wintry and autumnal landscape modules showing his studies of the Gorran Gorras area, painted very dry and sparse and glowing attractively in the dim light.

Jayne Anita Smith had also used a mask and a strange masked figure in her paintings and sculpture, the latter shown under one of those domed glass covers that clocks sometimes have. Her paintings were small and benefitted from being shown with plenty of space around them.

“In the Dark Times” was a show swiftly put together and showed the way in which this artists’ group can be fairly spontaneous and show a variety of work that has not had to go through the many hoops that often intervene when artists make applications. Some of the work may be a beginning rather than the resolved result of long study, but it’s still interesting to see it. The curators had produced a well exhibited show, giving care and respect to each art work.

CMR is building a reputation for having something current and unusual to offer, worth being aware of in the sense that whilst at Falmouth on the MA course I heard people say that Redruth was the new St.Ives.