Collective Gallery
Press Release
New Work Scotland Programme
Jack McConville | Ash Reid | Amelia Bywater & Christian Newby
21 January – 19 February
Collective's New Work Scotland Programme sets out to identify and support a new group of creative practitioners every year, reflecting current movements in visual art in Scotland. As NWSP enters its twelfth year, and in this current climate, Collective feels it is even more important that this programme continues to support and challenge emerging artists, writers and curators at a pivotal stage in their career.
Each consecutive New Work Scotland Programme is informed by feedback from the previous years to develop and refine the programme year on year. This year Collective broadened the application criteria, and now encourage artists who can be up to six years out of art school to apply. In addition we are working with Tramway, Glasgow, to support one NWSP artist to have a solo exhibition. This seedbed approach to change offers a chance to test each new development and to continue to work towards the goal of offering the best opportunity for creative and professional development at an emergent level in Scotland, whilst continuing to work with many other partners and networks adapt and enlarge the programme.
Mining the Horizon is the title given to New Work Scotland Programme 2011/12. The title was designed to give a more coherent context for the work within the programme and to offer applicants and selectors, a frame by which to explore the various possibilities offered by the programme. This title reflected our proposition to this year's applicants - to think of themselves as active agents within a framework and to consider themselves as a cohort, a team acting within that structure. Their proposition: to probe our collective horizons, through research, practice and presentation.
The New Work Scotland Programme selection panel changes each year, and this year it included Steven Cairns, Ian White and Torsten Lauschmann, to whom Collective are extremely grateful for all their insights and commitment. Collective made this year a transitional year marking a new, more integrated approach. Collective believe that in order to give practitioners the best chance of a developed outcome we need to invest more in their research and development.
Alongside the introduction of the title we have offered more space for group dialogue, demanding more from the participants, but offering them more in return. For the first time, all of the artists were invited on a 'retreat' weekend at Hospitalfield House, Arbroath.
Additionally, to reflect this shift, the residency Collective run with Studio Voltaire in London, moved from a solo opportunity to involving all practitioners in a series of collaborative residencies, resulting in greater opportunities as well as enabling stronger connections between peers within the programme, providing
time for the development of shared concerns.
The New Work Scotland Programme publication has also evolved and this new, more substantial annual gives a space and context for artists' pages, which allow for an alternative encounter with (or sideways glance at) the work of those involved in NWSP 2011/12. A critical/interpretive text will be commissioned to accompany each exhibition.
All New Work Scotland Programme selected artists 2011/12
Joey Villemont | Ash Reid | Gordon Schmidt | Oliver Braid | Florrie James | Jack Mcconville | Rhianna Turnbull | Christian Newby & Amelia Bywater
Artists' Biographies (full biographies are available upon request)
Jack McConville
Jack McConville graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 2008 and works primarily in painting, creating images in open dialogue with art history and informed by contemporary cultural imagery. Within his works, the surface shifts between abstraction and figuration; objects and figures are rendered as graphic signs stripped of either expressive or descriptive intentions. Representational systems employed by Modernism are juxtaposed with those of 80's video games, in the examination of the continual shifting between the sign, the signified and the gap that separates them.
Ash Reid
Ash Reid graduated from MA Fine Art from Edinburgh College of Art in 2007. Working in collage, film, drawing and sound her practice explores memory, the nature of how it is formed and ways in which it can be revisited to survey effects of current cultural conditions. Particularly interested in the hypnagogic state as an entry point for this enquiry, her work forms fleeting situations that discombobulate past happenings into a series of punctuated actions.
Amelia Bywater and Christian Newby
Amelia Bywater and Christian Newby both graduated from the MFA programme at Glasgow School of Art in 2009. Their collaborative project integrates collage, photography, sculptural installation and publications. Informing their joint practice is a consideration to how objects and images can be re-appropriated and reinterpreted as a means of investigating the interference, translation and stability of the image and its relationship to history, nostalgia, narrative and resolution.
Gordon Schmidt
Gordon Schmidt studied Sculpture at the Emily Carr Institute, Vancouver and was an exchange student in the Environmental Art Department at Glasgow School of Art.
Rhianna Turnbull
Rhianna Turnbull graduated in 2006 from Painting and Printmaking at Glasgow School of Art. Working across collage, video, drawing and painting her work is concerned with lifestyle and identity.
Florrie James
Florrie James graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 2010. Her work comments on cultural history and art history: existence, failure and continuation, explored through the medium of appropriated design, writing, painting and film-making.
Oliver Braid
Oliver Braid graduated from Glasgow School of Art MFA in 2010. Oliver describes his practice as: "exploring strategies with which work can be made and received. I often work with other individuals, and use collaboration as a way to challenge the conventional understandings of the procedures governing the making and reception of art, and search for an alternative." Taking inspiration from contemporary cultural sources from Big Brother to Harry Potter, Oliver offers a new lens with which to read contemporary art practice and its theories.
Joey Villemont
Joey Villemont graduated from Glasgow School of Art MFA this year. Working in sculpture, installation and film he explores elemental links between counter-culture and the prehistoric or primal. Through interweaving the past with popular culture Joey's work is concerned with the remaking of histories, proposing historical narratives which have never existed.
