Spotlight: Sam Bailey and The HIX Award 2018

Surreptitiously housed down the winding staircase of the Tramshed Restaurant, Shoreditch, HIX ART Gallery has slowly but surely established itself as a forward-thinking hub of contemporary art in London’s lively East End. Known formerly as the Cock ‘n’ Bull Gallery—named after the eponymous sculpture of Damien Hirst, elevated in monumental style above the diners upstairs—the gallery was inaugurated back in 2012 with a succinct manifesto for progressive and exciting art exhibitions that drew from established voices to the very best of London’s up-and-coming.

Occupying the cosy basement area of the restaurant and fuelled by the passion of its founder Mark Hix—friend to many of the YBAs and himself a dedicated art enthusiast—the gallery is currently curated by the talented Sophie Harriott, turning around a series of six-weekly shows that engage with a plethora of artistic styles and concepts.

In the last year alone, they have exhibited infamous illusionist and oxymoron aficionado Patrick Hughes—accompanied by all 12 of his studio assistants; the pop-expressionist social vignettes of Philipp Rudolf Humm; the celebratory yet subversive all-female Brains & Lip Takeover show; and numerous solo-presentations of nascent artistic careers, including the Matisse-come-Perry still lifes of Jacob Yarwood, the quasi-exotic surrealism of Joshua Raz or the prosaic yet heroic figures of Ben Edge’s intimate outsider portraits.

Launched soon after its opening, in 2013, was The HIX Award. Confronting the irksome limbo that exists between graduation and going-pro, the Award aims to foster a breadth of young artists teetering on the proverbial knife-edge of their gesso stained palettes. Since its inception, the Award has garnered a national reputation for its accessibility and success. Nominated artists take part in a curated group exhibition at HIX, with a generous cash prize and solo-show presented to the winner.

Shortlisted by Hix himself, each year’s finalists are judged by a new cohort of esteemed visual artists, the panel having included the likes of Stephen Webster and Dylan Jones, as well some of Britain’s favourite enfant terribles, the YBA’s Tracey Emin and Gavin Turk. The unique addition of a People’s Choice Award provides a direct link between the artists and public; a germane and novel dialogue for artists at such an early stage of their career.

The HIX Gallery’s earnest manifesto is ratified by its Award’s talented alumni. It’s first winner, Nicholas Permain, selected for the prestigious FBA Futures in 2015; its second, Felix Treadwell, named GQ’s ‘British Artist to Watch’ in 2017; and its third, Ally McIntyre, a print of her HIX Award-winning painting, Moon Cries for Ferdinand, now a part of the V&A’s permanent collection. Sam Bailey, the most recent of which, busy grinding away in his studio in advance of his solo-show with HIX in November. 



Graduating from Central Saint Martins in 2017, Bailey’s works are a series of mnemonic whispers. Layering watercolour and gouache on archival newsprint, anonymous and lurid apparitions are laced with a subtle melancholy. Both aesthetic and haptic, the material substance of his work echoes the DIY ethos of his subjects: images of activists from various protests in the 1980s, such as the Women Peace Camps of Greenham Common, the subject of his winning piece, Smoker 3 (2017).

A nauseous blend of mustard green and hollow grey, the self-effacing figure oscillates from recognition to neglect; the loose splatters and stains evoking a warm and quasi-nostalgic dotage. The materiality of his portraits—Baconesque phantoms that beleaguer the histories of protest, media and affect—are indeed concerned with questions of time and physicality during the crossover from Fordist to Post-Fordist modes of production and consumption. However, their very inability to be grasped—like memories themselves—reflects the cognitive dissonance of an age; stretched from nostalgia to futurism, paranoia to anaesthesia.

Whilst Smoker 3 exudes a plaintive disposition, Bailey’s works equally turn to the fiercely existential. Whilst his palette seamlessly shifts from darker hues to the ethereal, his characters’ consistent lack of a graspable identity is tantamount. His work, Beanie Test (2018), reminiscent of the supreme alienation one would find in Giacometti’s Annette (1952), the mix of muddied flesh and vertiginous black souls a rapturous expression of the modern self.

Ahead of his upcoming solo-show this November at HIX, I spoke with him about the Award, his work, and the ambivalence of digital life.

Smoker 3 (2017) (left) and Beanie Test (2018) (right)

So, Sam, how did you hear about the HIX Award?

There was a card left by my work at the St Martins degree show and then a few days later Sophie Harriot from the gallery emailed me suggesting I apply. I’d had a few emails asking for applications for various opportunities but Sophie’s was noticeably more personable. It’s been an incredibly generous and friendly experience from the beginning. 

How was your experience of the Award?

It was great, it was very exciting to get shortlisted and to be given the opportunity to show work alongside, and meet, so many talented artists. It was a real boost after graduating.

How has winning the HIX Award contributed to your practice?

Most importantly being able to focus on making artwork, there’s no way I would have been able to spend so much time in the studio without winning the prize. Also, the added confidence it gives you after graduating to push the work further.

Was there a favourite moment for you?

Probably being high fived by the artist Sue Webster at the after party, on the night of the award, it topped what had already been such an overwhelming and surreal evening.

Let’s talk about about your work, Smoker 3, which won the prize.

Where does the image come from?

This series depicts images of activists and protestors based on archival photographs. The activist shown is from a protest at Greenham Common, smoking in one of the Peace Camps, taking time to pause and think, but also achieving something at the same time by the very nature of being present, in occupation.

Do you always work on newspaper print?

I wouldn’t say always, I had a time when I focused on it more than other surfaces but now it’s one of a few. It came about from using whatever paper was at hand for testing ideas and I liked the effects I was getting with it, slightly blurred imagery, the paint bleeds into it much more than thicker paper. I wanted to use it for a project and it felt right when researching activists from the eighties, as a reference to pre-digital information exchange.

Is there a nostalgia at play here? For this pre-digital age?

There is an aspect of that in some recent work as it’s an age I grew up in but I’m not looking to make artwork that’s sentimental, or prescriptively saying the past was better than the present. I do have mixed feelings about the internet, it’s a great tool creatively, for research and learning, but the way it is with us all the time on mobile devices, meaning we’re essentially on call 24/7 is not so healthy. There seems to be much more time pressure today, to constantly be productive and quicker.

Protesting, of a kind, has also started to inhabit that space in a questionable one click fashion on social media. I wanted to look at protests in the UK when people didn’t have those tools, how committed they were and how for them time and their physical presence over long periods through occupation, were their weapons.

So, you work is an attempt to wrestle with these ideas of contemporary protest?

Not overtly, but it’s certainly been a contributing factor to my interest in the theme of historic protest. It’s hard to imagine that some aspects of ‘online activism’ will have a significant impact, particularly in the echo chamber scenario where likeminded people share their views and support for causes. But the internet has also been a great tool in raising awareness of positive action successfully, such as the Women’s March on London last year.

Is your emphasis on the importance time, materiality and physical presence, best understood in opposition to the hyperactivity of the internet?

Yes, it is. I’m really not very prolific when it comes to painting because I like to spend so much time looking at my work before I take the next step, building up layers and seeing where the work takes me, it’s a slow process. And yes, it has been a reactionary way of making work, I want to make artwork where the hand is evident and escapes the general homogenization of experience through slick digital media.

When I was studying there was a lot of work being made digitally, taking on our current malaise by using the same technology, there were some really impressive artworks being produced. But for me when I used something digital to make artwork it felt like I knew the end product before I got there, it felt too planned. I wanted to go back to making work where the outcome wasn’t so clear and human error, and the materials I used, created their own unexpected results.

Opening this November, Bailey’s upcoming show will continue in this earnest, painterly vein. Reflecting the confidence the success of the Award has given him, expect a series of works which push Bailey’s use of colour and scale to new heights. Continuing to work from used photographs, his new series will hone in on the perpetual twilight of our current 24/7 malaise of non-stop connectivity. Citing the work of painters such as Pierre Bonnard and Sterling Ruby, the show is likely to push its audience to the affective limit, combining historical sense with intuitive sensibility. To quote one of his favourite authors, Jonathan Crary, Bailey’s works are “a dark prospectus of human life in the absence of community or civil society.” One he renders, nonetheless, in a dazzling beauty.

Thomson & Craighead

Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead are an artistic duo that have worked across an entire generation of societal shifts in response to developments in technology and science. Working across a variety of mediums – sculpture, video, installation, sound – they have been present at many of the conceptual cornerstones of contemporary art: from 1970s structuralist film-making, to early pioneers in the net.art phenomenon, their work now occupies a conceptual place of its own, interrogating the myriad effects of contemporary technology on our understanding of the world.

Over the last decade, Thomson and Craighead’s practice has increasingly focused on human biology, the rise of the internet and the information age. Their earlier works, such as Browser Archaeology – a playable rendition of Atari’s Breakout, which locks you into a Netscape 4 browser page until you successfully fight your way out – or Trigger Happy (1998) – a Space Invaders gallery installation, where the alien hoard takes the form of text from Roland Barthes’ influential ‘Death of the Author’ – were wholly baptized in the vernacular of early internet art – focusing heavily on the medium itself and its virtual possibilities. But over the last decade their practice has quickly revolutionised in tandem with its technological muses, deconstructing and reassembling to capture its accelerating potential.

Browser Archeology (1998) 

Their first shift came in the wake of the 2001 dot-com crash and the rising significance of data analytics in both computing and automation – it was in the same year that the META Group published their original and formative research paper on the emerging challenges posed by increasing and diversifying data loads. In 2003 they created the piece Weather Gauge, a live-data installation that simultaneously monitored weather statistics in 105 countries; and in 2004, Decorative Newsfeed, an animated live-news wheel that curves and twirls around its screen, raising questions on the mutability of information and the importance of its medium. These artworks signalled a shift from Thomson and Craighead’s origins in net.art to more subtle concerns with the rise of data-based information technologies and the deepening roots of digitization.

The same experimentation present in Gauge and Newsfeed continued into some of their later works, with both Belief (2012) and A Short Film about War (2009) utilising images and content exclusively sourced from the worldwide web to create fractured and warping narratives on contemporary issues through the image banks of Flickr and YouTube. In both cases, the visual content is mirrored by a tautological logging apparatus: in the case of Belief, a compass directing the viewer to the content’s global origins, and in War, a primitive blog-source text log runs parallel. These analogous media forms serve to ‘explore and reveal the way in which information changes as it is gathered, edited and then mediated through networked communications technologies or broadcast media, and how that changes and distorts meaning’.

Weather Gauge (2003) 

Belief (2012)

A Short Film about War (2009) 

In the last five years Thomson and Craighead have continued to push their practice to incorporate new and pertinent developments in human knowledge and experimentation. Their Corruption (2014) series, a subtle and self-effacing aesthetic mediation on historical Modernism and contemporary techno-virology, recodifies an instance of file corruption as a moment of visceral digital beauty. Using lenticular printing, each portrait consists of several frames of the corrupting virus which animates and playbacks as the viewer moves around the artwork, emphasising the nature of looking and perception in our formation of reality.

Their most exciting recent works, however, are Stutterer (2014) and Temporary Index (2016), both exhibited alongside Corruption in their solo-show last year at the Carroll Fletcher Gallery in London. The latter work takes a minimal form: a rustling and anxious set of numerical columns uncomfortably poised 90 degrees off centre. Accompanying the large screen is a small table, topped with an open booklet detailing 9 nuclear waste storage facilities that correspond to the crumbling numerical towers in front of the reader. Each digital clock represents a countdown until these sites of inhumed nuclear waste become safe again for humans, ranging from its soonest at forty years, to sites uninhabitable for over one million years.

Corruption (2014) & Temporary Index (2016)

The former, Stutterer, shunts their sombre, minimal tone into a schizophrenic overload. Once again faced with an abstract trail of alphanumerical code, pitched in a silent, B&W projection, this time the audience is also faced with a hypnotic fusillade of broadcast media clips that chime in succession with the slowly unravelling cipher. A ‘poetry machine’, using the letters T, C, G and A – representative of the coded human genome and its four nucleotide bases – in correlation with a self-assembling collection of 500 clips from broadcast media in the 13 years it took the Human Genome Project to complete it (1990-2003). If the piece were allowed to play out its full 3.2 billion letters, it would run continuously for over sixty years.

Shuttering between images of the decade – from the 9/11 attacks to Thatcher at the despatch box, Mandela’s release from prison and the US & British invasion of Baghdad – the strobing clips give a stark portrait of the recent socio-political developments that have sistered our rapid advances in both molecular biology and computer technologies. It re-establishes the often neutral, and atomised narrative of technological innovation with its often-darker political framework. It asks important questions, such as to what extent are our rapid industrial and technological advances a result of aggressive imperialist policies abroad? Or to what degree are those very developments transforming and disguising new forms of political power and suppression?

This eponymous conceptual provocation, that technology and politics are ‘stuttered’, unaligned with the teleological boulevards of their great Enlightenment muses, chaotically provoking, attacking and engendering one another across time and space, marks a radical break from the insidious nature of our collective unconscious: that the progression of technology and politics are a deterministic and naturally flowing progression of ideas, research and science.

The truth, is that knowledge and power and never inextricable. Just as physiognomy in the 18th century was the medico-scientific manifestation of institutionalised racism, recent developments in biological and zoological research could rather be used to give birth to an army of inexhaustible cyborgian soldiers. Understanding and being critical of these points at which technology, science and power interact is of vital importance to us in a world increasingly defined by an obfuscated material reality. And one which, even at the moments when we see it clearest, is becoming weirder and weirder.

Spotlight: Femke Herregraven

How much of capitalism can we see from the moon?



When you think of the financial market – insurance, banking, stocks, hedge-funds – you’re likely to conjure images of Wall Street, the City, Hong Kong. Men in pin-striped suits with Versace cufflinks striding down sterilized boulevards and chain-smoking Menthol Superkings in pseudo-public parks, all encased in a labyrinth of glass, steel and Starbucks. You think of the monolithic skyscrapers, of the All Bar Ones and the bottles of Moet. A world that wholly exists inside the parameters of a single square mile, or even just one street. And when you talk of the financial market, it is simply impossible to escape our established nautical lexicon: Flows and ripples of capital; investor liquidity and market equilibrium; dark pools, channels and floating assets. The market has frozen, evaporated. The trickle down effect. 

The immense scale and complexity of the contemporary web of global financial trade, geopolitics and information-technology networks, reduced to a single image or a single metaphor. During this gross consolidation a vast material reality is concealed. These representations curtail and obfuscate an entire economic and political infrastructure that exists hidden in scattered warehouses across northeast China, on the banksides of the Columbia River and across the vast plains of the Icelandic countryside. Finance as ‘hyperobject’: an entity with both global omnipresence and –potence hiding almost entirely beyond human comprehension. 

Working at the intersections of these incommensurable Leviathans, Dutch artist Femke Herregraven has devoted her artistic practice to re-materialising the invisible contours of our contemporary landscapes of financial power. Coming from a background in design, Herregraven has gone on to produce art which stems from an ongoing research project into finding the secret places that capital and data hide – or are hidden. Taking the official form of a printed book in 2011, her still-ongoing project, Geographies of Avoidance, is a quest for the bare realities of tax avoidance through global financial distribution.

After taking up an artist’s residency in Amsterdam’s financial sector, Zuidas, Herregraven became quickly aware of the distinct lack of financial activity that taking place around her. Upon asking her facilitators if there was a list of companies that operated in the building/street, she was met with the reply, ‘No such list exists, and if it did, we wouldn’t give it to you.’ Forced to accumulate the data herself, Herregraven delved into the neighbouring Chamber of Commerce registers and produced a geographical index of the whole of Zuidas. 

Each index in Geographies of Avoidance represents a single address in the district. Some addresses, as shown, have one or two operational businesses and companies registered, some have ten or twenty. And some have a few thousand.

 

 

Geographies of Avoidance, 2011 

In some cases, however, whoever it is rerouting their capital through the Netherlands via these mailbox companies has lost even the faintest sign of discretion. Company titles flow down the page from Alpha 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. To Bravo, Foxtrot 10, V. O. F and Euro Zinger III. Alongside these facetious scripts of nominally-legitimate companies are info-graphics on tax treaties, ‘geopolitical sandwiches’ and BRIC false investments. All painting a rather deft, abstract and fastidious multitude of surreptitious financial smoke-screening. Stark evidence of the seedy and prosaic reality behind filtering your US corporate-capital through an Amsterdam-based radical vegan egg-painting charity called Alpha Yankee Doodle.

Following up from this project came a wish to cognitively map this process of tax avoidance for the everyday subject. Herregraven’s 2013 work, an online video-game called Taxodus, gave the player a chance to embody their favourite multi-national, using live statistics, tax treaties and national tax policies to circumvent their capital across the globe in a game to save as much profit as possible. This online-game, as well as later projects like Liquid Citizenship (2015) – a similar project where you are given an arbitrary national identity and net-worth, and proceed to – using real time statistics – browse your various options of buying citizenship across the globe, and where not possible, your ulterior, shadier options – are both novel attempts by Herregraven to meet the calls of thinkers such as Nick Srnicek, as he outlines the revolutionary necessity of “a navigational medium for making intelligible the dynamics of global capitalism.”[1]

Taxodus, 2013 

Liquid Citizenship, 2015 

More recently, however, Herregraven’s work has become more speculative. In both Malleable Regress (2016) and her ongoing project, Sprawling Swamps (2016 -), Herregraven visualises a fictional scenario, where the interstitial cracks of contemporary legislative and financial borders – ice sheets, waves, swamps, shorelines that drift from one place to another – are populated by futuristic, amphibian microplatforms – Test Den, Swamp of Forked Tongues, Bootleg Tribunal for Nonhumans, Empty Cache; Alpha 1, 2, 3, 4. Platforms established strategically in order to wire-up an ‘optimal high-speed planetary-scale trading infrastructure.’

In her work Malleable Regress, Herregraven has crafted a series of 10 polyurethane-rubber tiles from this digital world, each carrying its own microplatform brand indentity. These moulds are taken from the strange appearance of across UK and EU shores over the last few years, of Tjipetir gutta-percha tiles: slabs of tree-gum made on Indonesian plantations in the late 19th century for the production of the worlds first telegraph cables – the same veins of trade and communication that dominate and structure contemporary finance (it is no coincidence that imperial colonies are the major breeding ground for tax havens). This eerie embodiment fills the objects with the ghosts of failed infrastructures and collapsed worlds, pushing our imagination to the next shift-change in speculative finance. A change with which the majority of us aren’t likely to even witness.


http://femkeherregraven.net/

Look here for Herregraven’s TEDxVaduz talk on her project Geographies of Avoidance.

[1] Nick Srnicek, ‘Accelerationism – ‘Epistemic, Economic, Political’ in Speculative Aesthetics, ed. Robin Macaky et al. (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2014): 53.