Sheila Hicks: Stones of Peace - Alison Jacques Gallery.

                                           Sheila Hicks - Photo Alison Jacques Gallery

On a bright sunny day I viewed the exhibition by Sheila Hicks at the Alison Jacques Gallery, entitled Stones of Peace. This includes a variety of her works, with large sculptural pieces that go beyond textile to inhabit the installation realm. They are imposing, soft, colourful sculptures that hang down from the ceiling, resembling loose ponytails, see pic. below - if you touch them they move. There is movement in this specific type of work, unlike her minimalist work on the walls, they change every time they are installed in a new exhibition space. Opposite on the floor are large balls of colourful intertwined yarns, more of a rough nature, made with synthetic yarns. Some of her work is made with handlooms. 

                                             Sheila Hicks - Photo Alison Jacques Gallery

On the walls of the gallery are her minimalist works; they are white and go towards paintings, they are more controlled due to being just one colour and wrapped on hard material, all of them are made with soft textile materials, some natural, some synthetic and what joins them together is the repetition of wrapping the material; it’s a very meditative way of working, spending time intertwining and wrapping see pic. below.

                                           Sheila Hicks - Photo Alison Jacques Gallery

In the more colourful works there is playfulness, while in the white minimalist works there is instead calmness, a stillness. The soft materials and the way in which they are shown in the gallery make you want to touch them, they are tactile, large and small but when they are intertwined with each other as in the balls on the floor they gain in volume, because they are also amassed together in a way you would want to sit on them and play with them. This is also due to the bright colours they are made of and the soft texture. I really felt the urge to pounce on them, but I refrained as I was aware I was not allowed; it would be great if they actually allowed people to jump on them and play with them, take the whole thing further, fill the whole room with them and allow people to just have fun, they tried this in another exhibition. At the moment you can look but you can’t touch or play with them so they sit in between, a sculpture, installation and textile, see pic. below. 

                                          Sheila Hicks - Photo Alison Jacques Gallery

The way she threads them also makes you reconsider what textile in the past was used for, but she shows the unlimited potential of the material, taking it into a new realm altogether, moving textile forward into new directions.

In the second room are her ‘Minimes’, small weavings which are made with a hand loom, which she has been doing for the past 50 years. They are intimate pieces with feathers, porcupine needles, shells, paper, or bamboo or even steel fibres, sensitively added on to the piece and not overpowering the work but complementing it. Some are more brown in tone than her other more colourful works in the main room. Due to the small scale of these works, they draw you in like you would find looking at miniature work, so you have to go close up to them to get a proper feel for them. Some say it reminds them of the paintings of Italian artist Giorgio Morandi, see pic. below. 

                                            Sheila Hicks - Photo Alison Jacques Gallery

Some of her initial work was based on pre Columbian weaving structures while from 2005 she started using synthetic filaments, which the balls also called boules are made of. All the work in this exhibition was presented indoors; I think next time I would love to see her outdoor works.

Sheila Hicks in an interview with Arnet Magazine said: Textile had been relegated to a secondary role in our society, to a material that was considered either functional or decorative.  I wanted to give it another status and show what an artist can do with these incredible materials.

This was a very enjoyable and stimulating exhibition.

Hicks has a BFA and MFA from Yale University and studied under Joseph Albers, and Eva Hesse was a fellow student.

Hamiltons Gallery Photographic Exhibition by Christopher Thomas.

I thought it was a normal day like any other but it wasn't to be. Inside the underground I was calmly walking behind a guy with a trolley suitcase when suddenly I saw a guy on my right, very tall 6 feet tall, rushing past me and bumping into the trolley suitcase in front of me; he fell forward really badly, hitting the ground literally in front of me and gashing his nose, I went up to him and asked him if he was ok. He nodded angrily at me that he was ok. Several other people rushed towards him. I decided to quickly move on as there was no way I could help the guy any further, by helping him to get up as he was so big & tall, so I let the other people around me help him up. I have often seen inside the underground people having accidents because they are not paying attention, when they are in a rush, or tired from long hours of commuting and work; sometimes they push others to get through. When I am on the escalators I always stand well away from tourists with large suitcases. I have seen time and time again people carrying huge suitcases and not managing them properly on the escalators, blocking others & accidentally falling forward basically causing accidents. I have also seen people running down the escalators not holding to the handrails and I am thinking jeez if for whatever reason the escalator stops they would fall forward and take others with them, and hurt themselves really badly. I have seen it happening, the injuries weren't a joke, a whole pile up of injured bodies down the escalators, luckily this doesn't happen often. But some  people still run down the escalators, and we are supposed to be the 'intelligent, advanced species on earth'! But we struggle with making even the most simple changes in our behaviour; in our routines we hold on to the same behaviour. So I still see people pushing and shoving others to get forward to get to the tube, as though their life depends on it. But the trains come nearly every minute! I finally got out of the underground and everything was fine.

Photo by Christopher Thomas - Hamiltons Gallery

I went to Hamiltons Gallery in Mayfair to see the photographic exhibition by German photographer Christopher Thomas (his background is in advertising) titled Lost in LA. While I was in the gallery I was greeted by Tim Jefferies the owner who was very friendly. He has a long history of  showcasing photography in the gallery. The photographs are made with a Polaroid film type 55 ( there is at the moment a revival of this and other Polaroid formats) and then digitally scanned so it's a mix of the two processes. The fact that they are taken with a large Polaroid with long exposure in black and white gives them a nostalgic, ethereal feel, they are photographs of classic buildings taken in LA, such as the Hollywood signs, and McDonald's, see pics. above & below.

Photo By Christopher Thomas - Hamiltons Gallery

They show no humans or cars, but empty vacant spaces; quite the opposite of what we associate with LA which is busy and polluted; this is a rare thing, a dream. There are also photographs of solitary piers and oil pumps.

Photo by Christopher Thomas - Hamiltons Gallery

Christopher Thomas took the photographs over a period of three years while staying in a camper van; the photographs are carefully planned so as to keep them free of people; he would need to take them very early in the morning or late in the evening.  They are not conceptual photographs but they are his own portraits of the city, its structure, a peaceful view of a bygone era. The dim lighting in the gallery added to the nostalgic feeling of the exhibition. The quiet ambiance of the gallery suites the exhibition well.

The Natural History Museum Kensington Incident & Wade Guyton at the Serpentine Galleries.

Life in London is becoming more and more crazy, between terrorist attacks & weird incidents like the one I experienced this Saturday opposite the Natural History Museum in Kensington.

I had just come out of Kensington Station & I was walking up the main road when I got to the intersection where the Natural History Museum is and there was a pile of cars on the main road. At first I thought it was a robbery, one black car had crashed into a grey car and was facing the pavement with the driver trying to escape. I saw him being held down on the ground by three security guards, there was blood coming out of his nose, they were waiting for the police to arrive, I saw a pair of shoes behind him and the door of the black car wide open which made me think that he had tried to escape before he got caught. The official story in the papers yesterday from the Government was that this was a traffic accident. I am sorry but in traffic accidents you don't get people mown down by a car, nor do you get a guy being forcibly held down by security people, see the pic I took. 

                                                        Photo Copyright Mirta Imperatori

I saw a woman lying down on the floor next to the Museum helped by several people, she looked shocked. Then I read in the papers that 11 people were injured by a car. There is more to this story than meets the eye.  See how it has been reported in the media.
http://news.sky.com/story/kensington-crash-witnesses-tell-of-mass-panic-11071245
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/south-kensington-police-descend-on-area-outside-natural-history-museum-after-car-hits-pedestrians-a3652986.html
I quickly walked away from the scene because I could hear the police descending upon us so I decided to make a quick exit out of there before the whole area was put in lock down. I was just thinking that I had two near death experiences in the last couple of weeks. Just a couple of weeks ago I was walking on a road, I passed a rather large tree literally on my left hand side when suddenly I heard a huge thud behind me; I turned around and saw that the whole tree I just passed had come down and had crashed on top of a car that was parked there, causing considerable damage. It just missed me! 

Anyway I helped a Chinese couple redirecting them, I told them not to go where the incident had just happened, that the police were in the process of sealing off the area, I told them to go to High Street Kensington instead, they thanked me for my help and quickly moved on. So after all of this had happened I was really hoping to see a good exhibition at the Serpentine Galleries. Sadly this was not to be the case. 

                                                      Photo by Serpentine Gallery

The exhibition was of Wade Guyton see pic above and below.  His works are made using IPhones, cameras, and an inkjet printer. All the images were printed on canvas on linen, some images were blurred, he says they are a record of their own making. Yeah right, he is making them just using a machine, nothing new here. In the brochure it says that he analyses our relationship with digital media. I found the work in the exhibition outdated, not current, and a tautological exercise in blandness, the Gallery photographs of the exhibit actually look better than the originals. The original images don't give you anything back, just  accidental flatness.

                                                       Photo by Serpentine Gallery

This type of art is for corporates that want to buy this type of work to offset their taxes because there is really nothing else to the work, not the ones I have seen at the Serpentine Galleries on this occasion. What! You take pictures from your Iphone or inkjet printer, not even well taken and you just put them on a canvas.... how ground breaking! I mean there are loads of people online that do this and do it better, their work may not be bought by the big guns in the art world because maybe they don't know how to promote themselves, sell themselves with a clear package but that doesn't make it any less valuable. I have seen much better stuff inside Universities in the UK, more up to date with what is going on in digital media than this exhibition. The only interesting piece I found in this exhibition was of several canvases stacked together, the front was different from the sides, so it turned itself into a sculptural piece, most of the canvases were of  a standard size or large. There were also tables with more images inside printed on paper not on linen like the canvases, I find this pretentious, the images were of really poor quality, he could have left them out; by putting them inside the table as they are small and not of good quality it just didn't make me want to look at them. Why  would I want to look at something of poor quality inside a see through white table on poor quality paper at a lower level? The tables were smart tables like you see in pretentious establishments for wealthy people, bizarre! I find the concept of  this work poor. They call it conceptual paintings and that he goes against painting. He works with the machine but don't be fooled, he is no Gerhard Richter.  I have seen better work done online by strangers! It made me ponder the fact that if you finally get picked up by a big gallery you can really sell anything and pass it for innovative and then get more people to buy your work no matter what nonsense you give them - they will buy it because the big gallery has taken the work and given it value.. finally I just want to say that if a woman did this same work she would not be taken by the gallery.

I wasn't in a good mood when I came out of this exhibition.