ArtTop10.com Founder Robert Dunt in conversation with Laurence Noga.

Collyer Bristow presents Make_Shift - Curated by Rosalind Davis
Fifty years ago, artist Richard Serra created the artwork Verb List that became a road map for his own process of making and an influence on the work of many others since. The abridged verb list emphasizes
a compelling attitude towards creativity epitomized by actions, processes and the ideas underpinning Make_Shift. The artists manipulate and modify different mediums and processes; assembling, layering and collaging both literally and conceptually to disrupt our expectations of objects and images.
Many of the works acknowledge the mechanized or inhabit its process, such as Gemma Cossey’s repeated gestural marks or Richard McVetis meticulous stitched work. There is a distinct desire by many of the artists to steer away from the artificiality of screens and the virtual such as with the work of Fran Gordon and Fiona Curran who disrupt our reading of space. Even when digital tools are used in the process of production for example in Otto Ford’s work, his outcomes evidence a strong sense of materiality and a sensual tactility related to the hand made. Many of these artists work across two and three dimensions and back again. Making, shifting and utilizing the provisional or rudimentary materials to construct their work such as Michael Samuels, Laurence Noga, Gunther Herbst and Jake Clark.
Michael Samuels’ practice can be characterised as a form of contemporary bricolage, which utilises industrially produced Modernist furniture, 1960’s Scandinavian Glass Vases and cast concrete. They are liberated from their traditional roles, reconfigured and displaced into structures that no longer have a utilitarian purpose. Dislocating these everyday objects heightens the tension between the functional role of the objects used and their immaterial value. Many of the materials used in Laurence Noga’s assemblages are linked to his own history; found items from his father’s garage. Found industrially produced material is combined with the mysterious and forgotten in a poetic construction.
Andrea Medjesi-Jones’ installation ‘PinkPaintingMachine’ was created specifically for the exhibition. Through production of material and formal variables Medjesi-Jones assembles a coded machine, whose repetitive and laborious gestures comment on disciplinarian and enclosed strategies of labour. Alan Magee’s practice is an investigation into the power or powerlessness of the individual in an increasingly controlled and organised world.
Charlie Stiven’s highly crafted, composite architectural models are derived from the form, function & condition of vernacular European street kiosks. He sees these low tech, transient structures as being representative of a broad range of social, economic & political points of tension. ‘Der Gefoulte Traum’ comes from a heading of an item found in the German tabloid newspaper ‘Bild’, concerning the extra marital activities of a certain sports personality. Günther Herbst’s works are a series of ‘fictitious monument’ sculptures and the subsequent paintings made in response to them. This allows for an intensification of play with symbols, signs and styles as a way to address issues around temporality in oscillation, hovering between commemoration and possibility, historic events and possible refolding of our present with other narratives. Jake Clark’s paintings are a response to rudimentary cardboard models and collages that he has made, influenced by suburbia and games such as crazy golf as well as influences of Brutalist architecture and a backwards look at the space race. Neill Fuller assembles, and then paints from, combinations of found or self-made objects gathered into small intimate tableaux. Some are chosen for their ability to imitate something from the real world. Many are detached from their previous lives – now coerced into new uses as they are within Peter Jones’ paintings of found vintage toys; rejected or lost playthings that reveal their own inherent uniqueness and potential for portraiture.
Both Fiona Curran and Fran Gordon are concerned with digital imagery and technologies. Digital technologies can be seen to compress and condense space and to contribute to a general sense of acceleration. Fiona Curran focuses on the impacts of new technologies on landscape space and the increasing presence of the illuminated screen in our day-to-day lives. Fran Gordon’s collage works
investigates the intersections between skin, touch and the material world through a collection of printed matter, materiality and the mediated image. Tensions are delved into by shifts in scale and use of the fixture as an indication that things could fall apart.

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