Curation of my work for Sideways into the Distance

Galerie RDV, Nantes, 23/06/18-27/07/18

Artists:

Pascal-Michel Dubois
Lara Davies
Victoria J E Jones
Jason Rouse

The curator of the show, Pascal-Michel Dubois, had two of his own pieces that he wanted to position on opposite walls. The prints were of 180-degree photographs, taken in an abandoned play park in the valleys. This method of displaying entirely suited the two prints, but it wasn’t long after hanging had commenced that it appeared to also work well for my Digital Border triptychs. As the show developed, it became clear that also hanging Pascal’s two opposing prints in this same method would be immediately gimmicky. We refrained from showing those two pieces.

I was particularly happy with how my two triptychs had enough breathing space and also how they occupied opposite walls in the gallery. I plan on experimenting on how this might be applied to my other work (video/games) and how this might be implemented with a dual monitor or projection. Upon reflection, I might guess my fascination with this method came from seeing Willie Doherty’s famous Re-Run Derry bridge piece at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in my formative years.

My third work in this show was to be a pre-recorded video, played back on a projector or screen. In preparation for this, we had contacted the gallery via email to confirm if they had a display and a projector. This was correct. I was planning on using the screen for some video work to compliment my di-bond panels. Pascal had intended on projecting a video animation piece onto the floor via a roof mounted data projector. As the show developed, Pascal decided against showing his animation.

There was a small problem with me using the display, a 1080p HD television, in that it had a built-in ’foot’ which made it unsightly for wall mounting (as you’d typically expect in an exhibition). After searching the back room for tech, we found one other display, but this was a rather old 4:3 monitor that wouldn’t match the cleanness of the rest of my work for this exhibition. To remedy the situation I tried taking apart the monitor but found that the foot had been somewhat difficult to remove without risking significant damage. We asked a nearby gallery (Galerie PARADISE) for help, and they were able to offer us a larger display. I was happy to take this or opt for the projector, but Pascal thought that the current monitor was the perfect size and any larger would dominate the room (he was right, of course).

I stopped short of taking a saw to the extended foot, for fear that it might make it look worse, and compromised. I felt that the positioning of the cable down the wall helped to negate any issues, and Pascal reassured me that perhaps the clientele of Galerie RDV was used to this display and found no problem with the extended foot.

There were some further problems with the video itself. I had the game ready to go (for screen capture) and had done a small, short test before the show. Having only my laptop with me, I found it difficult to get the right settings in Unity for the game app. My MacBook Pro doesn’t default display at 1080, and unity automatically sets the window size to your current screen. I had to do some last minute code to overwrite this and export to a simple 1080 window, ready for screen capturing. I had some issues with this, as my little Mac was dropping frames all over the place trying to render out my game and screen cap simultaneously. This was remedied by both changing screen cap software and removing some of the in-engine visual effects such as vignette, noise, colour correction, and later adding these back in via Final Cut Pro and rendering there. This was useful too, to help get the optimum colour on the oversaturated monitor, and something that I couldn’t do so well if it were a live game direct from a computer–something to be aware of with my new experimental interactive work.

My videos typically don’t have sound. This is on purpose, but when you send a movie file to a tv without a soundtrack, it misunderstands and pushes up an error message at the start of every loop. I had this problem in the past, and couldn’t remember exactly how I remedied it–I think with some particular codec or similar. This time, I fixed it a little simpler by just adding an audio track in Final Cut Pro and then muting it, which worked. I also had issues with which video codec to choose, exporting multiple iterations and test videos. I didn’t download Compressor but I kind of wish I had at that point. Oh, and my final export was too big for the USB drive, and I needed to get another (thanks, Lara).

We had about 4-5 days worth of setting up, and although we didn’t need all of it, the cushion of time helped ease the problems. With thanks to Pascal for the first three images.

RYAN ADAMS 1989

Just got back from a fantastic week in Nantes and I'll have to do a proper write up of it for the blog soon. For now, I've dug out a short paragraph review I put on Facebook on January 2nd, 2016. This was one of the albums I had on rotation in France last week, and seeing as I wrote this original review while on a plane back to Wales in an equally reflective frame of mind, I thought it belonged here too.

[Album of 2015 for me has got to be Ryan Adams 1989. Re-recording the Taylor Swift album in its entirety was a great idea and came completely out of nowhere. I was dismissive at first but in reality it's just a wonderful record. Adams takes the upbeat radio-friendly girl pop to a dark and introverted place, with hints at Springsteen's sparse Nebraska album and Let Me Up era Tom Petty. At the end of the day the songs speak for themselves.]

Stay tuned for a Nantes post.

COLTER WALL & 1970s TEXAS SONGWRITERS

I’ve been considering writing about this fantastic album for a while now. There is something so odd about finding a new artist who embodies everything you love about a very obscure and very localised music scene from the 1970s. I’m trying to get my head around how Canadian Colter Wall’s self-titled album could have ever gotten made in 2017.

Perhaps I should begin with my own experiences in this area. My interest in the 1970s Texas songwriters scene stemmed from my love of the music of Steve Earle. Earle was relatively big in Ireland. Look no further to Mundy/Sharon Shannon’s incredibly popular bubblegum cover of Galway Girl in 2008, which is still the 8th highest selling single in Ireland to date. Earle crossed genres between Country, Rock, Bluegrass, Folk, and dabbled in my background of Irish Traditional music.

If you follow Earle’s lineage back, you will find he cites his tutors in songwriting as two people: Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt. As fans of Earle, myself and friends dug deep into his catalogue and eventually found ourselves watching the 1975 documentary by James Szalapski, Heartworn Highways. This film depicts the spawning of the Outlaw Country movement out of the folk singers in Texas at the time.

Heartworn Highways was a staple of our late night DVDs back in rural Tyrone, with outstanding performances and insights into artists such as Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, Rodney Crowell, David Allen Coe, Steve Young and, of course, Steve Earle. The more we watched this documentary, the more we dug deeper into the mythology and music associated with that scene, finding obscure CDs or bootlegs or cover versions and sharing around like it was pure gold. I even picked up one of my prized possessions around that time for about a tenner: a signed copy of Our Mother the Mountain, arguably Townes’ greatest studio album.

I want to say the hype for this music amongst my peers picked up around 2003/2004, with Earle’s performance in the Ulster Hall on anti-Bush The Revolution Starts Now Tour being a noteworthy high point. The band that I was in played a raucous F the CC at a gig immediately following that show.

It’s difficult to say whether or not the internet helped with popularising obscure music, or whether it just allowed more people with obscure interests to openly and easily communicate. Although Earle has always held something of popularity in Ireland, Mundy’s Galway Girl cover certainly cemented it (ask any culchie DJ). I’m not lamenting the fact that Earle and his two mentors have gained in popularity, it is quite the opposite. I’m happy that more people are digging deeper into this amazingly rich music scene. It’s with this context that I’ll try and explain Colter Wall.

So imagine me, in Bristol’s Rough Trade shop, picking up a copy of this album on the recommendation of the sticker (and I love anything Dave Cobb gets involved in). When I got home and put the CD on I was blown away. This album lived and breathed that 1970s songwriter scene from Heartworn Highways. Teenage me would not believe that this kind of record could get released in 2017, that it would have gone under my radar, and that it would have been one of the strong recommendations of a local record store. I was amazed at how intensely developed his sound was for a first album, and how this recording captured that atmosphere with pin-sharp accuracy.

Let’s analyse a few of the songs. The opening Thirteen Silver Dollars starts as a relaxed story about an encounter with the police that picks up about halfway through with a Cash style stomp along chorus. Not only does this song reference Bluebird Wine, Rodney Crowell’s contribution to Heartworn Highways, but also Blue Yodel Number 9, the Jimmy Rodgers song Earle fans will recognise as appearing on Earle’s live album Shut Up And Die Like An Aviator.

The next track, Codeine Dream opens with a Townes-inspired picking pattern reminiscent of Townes’ version of Cocaine Blues. The song’s theme feels like a sequel to Townes’ classic Waitin Around to Die, in that it could be about the same character. If that wasn’t enough, Colter also sings ‘Sometimes I get to thinkin’/ Why wait around to die’.

Following that, we have Me and Big Dave, a lowkey story about two social outcasts. There is one line that reminds me of Our Mother the Mountain and Buckskin Stallion Blues by Townes. Compare the lyrics ‘So I reach for her hand, and her eyes turns to poison/ And her hair turns to splinters, and her flesh turns to brine’, ‘I heard her sing in tongues of silver’ with Walls’ ‘Their ears made of stone and their tongues made of poison’.

The next song, Motorcycle mentions Thunderbird wine, a  cheap & nasty fortified wine. The wine was a favourite with Towne Van Zandt penning Talkin Thunderbird Blues about the drink.

The album's centrepiece, Kate McCannon, a murder ballad that feels like a retelling of Earle’s bluegrass classic Carrie Brown (itself a very typical murder ballad) but set to the music of Ben McCulloch (minus the rousing major key chorus). There is another lifted phrase from a Townes song (Mr Mudd and Mr Gold) regarding the titular girl’s ‘long green eyes’, which I always assumed to mean greed/jealousy in the context of Townes’ song but perhaps just as a descriptive device in Wall’s.

The second half of the album features one song by Townes and one song that Townes had recorded. Snake Mountain Blues is played very well here, as is the duet of Fraulein with Tyler Childers.

Transcendental Ramblin’ Railroad Blues is similar to Earle’s Transcendental Blues in title only.

Altogether, I loved this album. My first listening experience was trying to figure out how to something that is so close to a 1970s Texas songwriter’s recording could be popular enough to arrive in my local record store. I enjoyed all the little references, audio and literary, to this period, and I’m sure I missed quite a few out. Looking forward to more from Colter Wall in the future.

BORDER PHOTOGRAPHS, 25th MAY 2018

On the 25th of May, 2018, Ireland voted to Repeal the 8th Amendment. As the votes were being cast, I decided to take some photographs on the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, along the Strabane/Lifford bridge.

The landslide victory for the Yes vote, one which shows how Ireland is finally ready to dump its image as a bastion of the Catholic church, also signifies just how backwards Northern Ireland is on this (and other) matters amidst extensive religious influence.

It’s difficult to discuss these images without taking into consideration the implication of religion as a political tool, one that now sees the ultra-rightwing party DUP now stubbornly at odds with both Ireland and the rest of the UK. I find this is particularly damning concerning the immediacy of Brexit: we currently have two weeks with no solution in sight. One can only hope that the current debacle will shine new light on the political darkness of Northern Ireland (on both sides of the religious divide) that was very much lacking in the run-up to the Brexit vote a few years ago.

THINGS I WISH I'D KNOW RECAP

 I exhibited some new work in Bristol’s The Island gallery as part of the third group show from the MFA in Cardiff School of Art & Design. This show was entitled Things I Wish I’d Known, and I think having a title and theme for this show helped us to bring it together a bit more than what we’d been previously doing.

The blurb for the show was as follows:

'Things I Wish I’d Known is an art exhibition featuring current Master of Fine Art students from Cardiff School of Art and Design. The group show brings an honest exposure of things we wish we’d known; exploring the often eschewed aspect of development and personal growth as an artist. Within the show, there will be a variety of works in different media from both local and international artists.'

My statement responded:

'This show marks a departure from my usual practice of work based on 3D computer games. It is the first exhibit of my exploration into both sculptures, via 3D scanning/printing, and into photography with the accompanying supporting image.

As an artist who typically utilises and manipulates software for developing games, I imagined that transitioning to 3D model software would be somewhat similar and easy to pick up. I was very wrong. My prior experiences creating digital worlds did not prepare me for the inherent difficulties with this new toolset. Ultimately, I went through 7 different pieces of software until I found one that was both easy to use and had enough complexity for what I needed to achieve.

The end result is a number of printed copies of a shell casing. The original object was a friend’s family heirloom; a relic from the 1970’s conflict in Northern Ireland, fired from a paramilitary weapon. The act of duplication is to try and describe the importance of passing on family stories, but also how intergenerational trauma is still an issue in these post-conflict communities. There are a few copies that I have modified to try and point towards what it means to have an unfaithful copy, referring to misinformation and especially important regarding the conflict in Northern Ireland.

A recent photograph from the area is adjacent to reference the graffiti sloganeering of kids contextualised via post-conflict paramilitary glorification.'

Overall, I’m relatively happy with how my work holds up in the context of the space. I arrived to set up the show with two images on paper and a box full of 3D printed replica shell casings. It wasn’t until a few of the other pieces had been displayed in the space that I decided to use a plinth against the wall for my tiny sculptures. My initial thought was to present these on the floor, but the floor was pretty messy, and I felt that they might get lost amongst the splashes of white paint down there. Perhaps if I had more of the shells produced (like 200 or so), it would have worked better. But elevating them on this plinth worked well, and brought them nearer to the double image I had included.

I had the photograph printed off and tacked to the wall via map pins. The image itself was on a standard A3 portrait page, with the image composed towards the top of the page. I intentionally used this typical format and wanted the white space to draw the attention down towards the 3D printed pieces. In retrospect, this was probably too much, and somewhat unnecessary. Perhaps even the image as a whole was superfluous, but at least this was a good experiment to do.

In the future, I’m not sure if I will do much more 3D printing, with a new focus on reinterpreting 3D topographies as before, but I think documentary photography or video might play more of a part in contextualising my scenarios. The next group show is in Penarth Pier Pavillion and will be followed by the MFA show in Cardiff School of Art & Design in September.

Included below are a few more images I took at the exhibition.

SKYROADS BOX ART ii

A few years ago I decided to make some box art for an old favourite of mine, the DOS game SkyRoads. I was using the emulation software Boxer, which displays your game collection on digital shelves with the big box art front and centre. It was about this time that I realised that my virtual copy of SkyRoads didn't have a cover, and after a little searching around the internet I discovered that, as the game had not received a proper commercial release, it never had a physical box.

So I made fake box artwork for this game as a bit of a fun design project in an airport waiting lounge, and after uploading the results to this blog I promptly forgot about it. That is, until recently talking about SkyRoads with a friend, after which I  googled it to find out some piece of information. When the search came through on Google, my faux-artwork was right up there at the top of the page. From this, I decided to do a little bit more digging to see if it had appeared anywhere else.

I was pretty amazed at what I found next: someone had edited and printed out my box art to fit their copy of SkyRoads (including the yellow sticker). I wonder if they knew it was not the real artwork and just my little afternoon project? Will there be any long-lost boxed copies of SkyRoads appearing on eBay with extortionate prices? Who knows?

You can read my original blog post here.

Half-Life: 2018

Working with a 19-year-old game engine

For a recent project, I’ve decided to make a change from using the game development tool Unity and begun producing some work using the original Half-Life Goldsrc engine. I did this because I felt that there could be a much easier setup of a server (using a deathmatch/bot driven system), familiarity with the tools and knowledge of its limitations. There is also a definite history of artists using this engine for game art such as Tobias Bernstrup, Aram Bartholl and projects like Velvet Strike. I’ve also made some stuff with it in the past.

Valve Hammer Editor

During development for Schooldays End, I wanted to move away from interactive work to creating self-playing work. This would be easier to display in a gallery setting, require less setup, and avoid the immediate problems inherent in typical interactive art (of any kind). I piggybacked a version of Jumbot, and, with some modifications, I was able to get relatively close to an autonomous first-person deathmatch game with on-screen narrative elements. The prototype worked well enough for me to invest more time in creating the map for the scenario.

Simplified prototype game

This proved to be quite the problem. Although I had some experience in the past working with Valve Hammer Editor, I found it somewhat clunky to set up from scratch (via Steam on a boot camped Mac), and once I got into the swing of things, there was seemingly no end of errors and issues. Finding fixes to problems was also tricky, often encountering dead links on old forum posts. Very different from my experiences with the most positive and supportive community with Unity.

In-game screenshot

Currently, I’m trying to find a way to record a video of my game in action for exhibiting, but I’m now having trouble with the game quitting after 5 or so minutes.

Part of me is strongly considering switching back to using Unity after completion of this project as I’m not entirely happy with the text-based narrative and the other aesthetic compromises.