by Aaron Jolley
This project, 'A Response to X Y Z', may at first seem somewhat confusing. I thought I'd break down for you what exactly we're trying to do here, in a nice and digestible way.
You’ll notice that our website is organised by media type, rather than medium. For instance, ‘Photos’ contains photos both of paintings and sculptures instead of there being separate pages dedicated to ‘painting’ and ‘sculpture’. This is because we’ve decided to organise around the different representative formats, instead of a shared theme or idea. The focus is on how we represent.
A finished artwork could be said to be a representation in itself. Regardless of it’s intentions or intended effects upon an audience, artworks can’t help but be, at their core, outcomes. For better or worse, they happen to be records of all the bad drawings, books read, shows visited and unfulfilled ideas that go into a sustained, developing artistic career.
Of course, if we weren’t living through a world health pandemic, physically showing artworks (as tangible evidence of artist’s practises) would be a direct and effective way of communicating with an audience. As we are unable to do so, the need to represent one’s practise becomes more pressing and in many ways more demanding. Whereas, for many, the representations of practise beyond the finished artwork was an after thought, it is now essential. Our website aims to identify and explore ways in which artists may choose to communicate their artwork and the broader processes of conceptualising and making.
But why focus so heavily on this idea of representations? Does that not detract from what the artworks themselves are doing? Well, as isolated artists, we’ve been making in isolation. Without the everyday, in-person engagement with each other’s work, it’s only natural that our works may not have anything to do with each other. By organising around how we share and show what we do, we can publicly exhibit together in a way that doesn’t pretend a sense of unity. Instead, we hope the format of our website allows audiences to see clearly the different ways we’ve responded to our own interests, themes and ideas.
While we are a varied collection of makers and thinkers, I do think that there are impulses and gestures which, although expressed differently, can start to be teased out when looking at our work in this way. I start to see a shared emotive sense and preoccupations with the personal and individual. Maybe you’ll see things differently.
The whole ethos behind this project has been towards accepting our individuality as makers, while finding a common ground. By organising into media type, we’re able to see those differences clearly, but are also able to tease out similarities. I hope that this engagement with the act of representing- through still photos, moving image and written text, may also speak to a wider context wherein ‘the original’ has been forcibly devalued in favour of the 'reproduction'.
This website hosts 8 artists. We haven’t always known what each other have been making or responding to. What we do have in common is that we are all reacting to ‘X Y and Z’.
Enjoy x