Touche, Éclat is a group exhibition that brings together 4 artists whose artworks flirt ideas of touch and value across media.
Nina Chua makes drawings that are determined by the capacities and constraints of the materials and tools that she uses. Each series of drawings explores a different nuance in the process, for example the amount of ink in a marker pen, the permeability of cheap A4 or the resilience of paper pulled from a roll. Her drawings are abstract dealing with line, colour and form, made up of straight lines or scribbles drawn repeatedly to cover the surface of the paper. Her deliberate use of Marker pen as an unforgiving medium means marks cannot be erased or reworked. Every slip of the hand and lapse of control is visible and the process of its making is fully revealed in each work. The transparency of the visual information and the accumulative quality of the marks convey a sense of time spent, through the gradual application of line after line.
Daniel Davies’ paintings are centered in a process of translating autobiographical information gathered from domestic 3D objects into digital information and then placing the new information back into real space through the act of painting and printmaking. Taking his source material from the everyday textures and shapes that have surrounded him including patterned clothing, woodchip wallpaper, and children’s building blocks, Davies is interested in how this deliberately flawed process results in undefined, poor quality images that when scaled, repeated, cropped, and overlaid create a more subtle, complex and almost transient image that captures something of our innate desire to constantly rethink and reimagine the space around us.
Joanne Masding’s work asks us to think about our relationship to objects: how worth is attributed, ownership assigned and physical stuff produced, and how these processes translate to a world that is increasingly digital, immaterial and reproducible. She interested in different ways of understanding and knowing objects and attempts to trace where their edges might be. Masding’s text works such as Cast Notes use the authority and materiality of written language to draw out characteristics of works, mechanisms and materials, to playfully suggest and infer rather than offer didactic interpretation.
As one of the last generation of non-digital natives, I’m in a position to consider both the shift towards immateriality that reshapes our experiences of the world, and how the physical vaults of our collective cultures get filled, and that these are urgent and exciting things to invest in. Masding 2017.
Yonatan Vinitsky is a prolific maker, a practitioner grounded in he development of techniques, specificity of materials and finding solutions for display. He is a magpie for obscure sources in art and the world at large, which he translates into his works with uncool, yet convincing sincerity. His technique happily occupies the traditional medias of scultpture, painting, drawing, and photography but he subtly uses and combines materials to pull them into indefinite territories. Is It Better to Say "Two Thousand and Fifteen" or "Twenty Fifteen”? (Part I and Part II) are new works that come from an attempt to show many images at once but to eliminate the familiar grid (as in Google images) as much as possible. Each image has been taken by himself and not from the Internet, deliberately presenting informally using magnets to imply that the composition could always change or mutate, even though it is final.
Workplace Gateshead is part of Arts Council England’s National Portfolio and is a registered charity 1174379.
For more information visit www.workplacegallery.co.uk
Exhibition continues until 16th December 2017
