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Pencil plaque No1
2006
Neil Zakiewicz
If I was a sculptor, but then again, no...
Notes from the curator's talk by Neil Zakiewicz
23 06 07
A grey-blue afternoon, spattered with sun. Whacked over to Bearspace on the bike to hear Neil Zackiewicz (the guy who curated it) talk about the show on it's last day. About 18 people turned up, some Goldsmiths types, some from local studios, some Others.
Neil sat in a chair, slightly awkward at first, legs crossed, obviously unrehearsed. Julia Alvarez did the brief introduction and left him to it.
A couple of previous shows, this one (If I was a sculptor…) closely related to 'Plinth' devoted to art requiring such. There is an appeal in creating tight (but perhaps unnecessary) confines to a show. Humour is a gateway. Irony, that contemporary medium. Wanting to champion the formal aspects of the 'genre' but also simply to collate artworks that conform to that 'conceit'.
Some of the work:
Bob & Roberta Smith - 'Painting for the partially sighted'. About thirty pieces of fruit and veg crudely cast in plaster and supported like a starry night on an unfinished hardboard sky. The 'sky' panel next to this first is wrapped in silver foil like the reflector of a homemade satellite. At either end, a pair of pink kitchen doors act as wings. The artist has left instructions to the gallery that these may be moved by the viewer if they wish.
Jemima Brown - The head of a young man trying to look mature in a Tchaikovsky kind of way. Like a tailor's dummy made from wax. Dark hair and sad eyes. An obvious hairpiece and a false beard, a pale pink shirt. This head, apparently based partly on her father, partly on herself is surrounded by an almost funeral wreath of plastic flowers.
Graham Hudson - A brown cardboard box of utterly ordinary aspect, stuck to the wall with long pieces of coloured packing tape. As if someone has made a bad repair to something and wants it to remain hidden. But the box is slowly peeling from the wall. Visitors and gallery staff occasionally add a new piece of tape. It's called - 'How many pieces of tape does it take to support a cardboard box on a wall in Deptford?'
The show is charming, the work raises a smile, but there is perhaps a poignancy that lingers. Neil denies there is anything like sadness in the selection but acknowledges the sense of doubt in the show's title - as if somehow it wasn't quite right to make sculptures these days, or that the idea of simply painting, of being A Painter was too big a claim to make. But the work makes no apologies for itself: these are neither paintings nor sculptures, but realities for the eyes to touch.
Boys for Walt (Whitman) and Dennis (Cooper), 2007
Jemima Brown
(Not the piece in the show, but nice nonetheless)