Ibid.—Solo Exhibition of Alec Shepley
2014.12.26～2015.02.15
09:00 - 17:00
Ibid., the new work created by UK artist Alec Shepley for KdMoFA, references the idea of previous works and alludes to the artist as a traveller, drawing the viewer in and inviting them on an existential journey – a journey through imagined sites of the fragment such as those witnessed by readers of Invisible Cities. The work in this exhibition focuses on architecture and site as metaphors for our own mental states, confronting the viewer with fragmentation and an incomplete project that perhaps is within our nature to shy away from. In this new work however, an attempt is made to put into reverse the negative stereotypes of the ruin - to invert it and create the potential for amore positive metaphor. The viewer is immersed in a set of visual relationships that subconsciously he or she is aware of, to create allegories, new meanings and to foreground the creative potential of the fragment in a process of renewal and redefinition. Ibid. is an example of Shepley’s improvised sites made by grouping together various materials such as found and made objects and models, broken forms, photographs, video and sound, to invite the viewer to move around a place of making (and unmaking), speculate on the notion of a work’s becoming and to create a narrative of possibility. The elements within the show combine to reference unstable and subjective concepts of space and understanding, and tempt the viewer around seemingly unstructured activities and makeshift actions which ultimately draw attention to the unresolved poetics of the everyday and the indefinable beauty in the ordinary -particularly through such works as ‘I am from Leonia’, made especially for this show at KdMoFA. This new video piece is influenced by Italo Calvino’s book Invisible Cities, and in particular the sections about the cities of Leonia and Sophronia. In this short film played on a loop, the viewer witnesses a figure steadily and progressively sweeping his way around what appears to be an abandoned and ruined building and attempting to fulfill a seemingly impossible blueprint referred to by the inhabitants of Invisible Cities. The voice over in the film recalls the street cleaners who are welcomed like angels to the city, and who ‘engage in their task of removing the residue of yesterday's existence in a respectfully silent ritual that inspires devotion’. This is perhaps because once things have been discarded nobody really wants to have to think about them anymore. In the book, as in this show, the reader is compelled to reflect on the ultimate outcomes of such accumulations of the debris as an outcome of daily progress and thus question a wider logic around production and unbridled modernity. This question about what to do with our worldly possessions, once we no longer have a use for them, is as poignant today as it ever was and Ibid. is an attempt to pause, visualize and reflect on the status of the fragment within an embodied relationship with the world. Through enacting his nomadic studio in neglected urban spaces as well as galleries, Shepley is negotiating a transient and momentary ‘aesthetic of regular experience’ and asking a question about his own (and our) presence in this process.
Ibid., the new work created by UK artist Alec Shepley for KdMoFA, references the idea of previous works and alludes to the artist as a traveller, drawing the viewer in and inviting them on an existential journey – a journey through imagined sites of the fragment such as those witnessed by readers of Invisible Cities. The work in this exhibition focuses on architecture and site as metaphors for our own mental states, confronting the viewer with fragmentation and an incomplete project that perhaps is within our nature to shy away from. In this new work however, an attempt is made to put into reverse the negative stereotypes of the ruin - to invert it and create the potential for amore positive metaphor. The viewer is immersed in a set of visual relationships that subconsciously he or she is aware of, to create allegories, new meanings and to foreground the creative potential of the fragment in a process of renewal and redefinition. Ibid. is an example of Shepley’s improvised sites made by grouping together various materials such as found and made objects and models, broken forms, photographs, video and sound, to invite the viewer to move around a place of making (and unmaking), speculate on the notion of a work’s becoming and to create a narrative of possibility. The elements within the show combine to reference unstable and subjective concepts of space and understanding, and tempt the viewer around seemingly unstructured activities and makeshift actions which ultimately draw attention to the unresolved poetics of the everyday and the indefinable beauty in the ordinary -particularly through such works as ‘I am from Leonia’, made especially for this show at KdMoFA. This new video piece is influenced by Italo Calvino’s book Invisible Cities, and in particular the sections about the cities of Leonia and Sophronia. In this short film played on a loop, the viewer witnesses a figure steadily and progressively sweeping his way around what appears to be an abandoned and ruined building and attempting to fulfill a seemingly impossible blueprint referred to by the inhabitants of Invisible Cities. The voice over in the film recalls the street cleaners who are welcomed like angels to the city, and who ‘engage in their task of removing the residue of yesterday's existence in a respectfully silent ritual that inspires devotion’. This is perhaps because once things have been discarded nobody really wants to have to think about them anymore. In the book, as in this show, the reader is compelled to reflect on the ultimate outcomes of such accumulations of the debris as an outcome of daily progress and thus question a wider logic around production and unbridled modernity. This question about what to do with our worldly possessions, once we no longer have a use for them, is as poignant today as it ever was and Ibid. is an attempt to pause, visualize and reflect on the status of the fragment within an embodied relationship with the world. Through enacting his nomadic studio in neglected urban spaces as well as galleries, Shepley is negotiating a transient and momentary ‘aesthetic of regular experience’ and asking a question about his own (and our) presence in this process.
Alec Shepley Alec Shepley is an artist engaged in contemporary art practice whose work has been shown nationally and internationally. He is also currently the senior academic, Fine Arts within the School of Fine and Performing Arts at the University of Lincoln and has been an active participant in national and international artistic research seminars and conferences for several years. Shepley’s artistic research is an exploration of the poetics of confusion and anxiety, failure, melancholia, ambivalence and hope. Through an intertwining of reality and fiction he produces improvised sites that are dialectically linked ‘replies to one another’. EDUCATION 1996-2000 Manchester Metropolitan University, PhD (Installation Art Practice and the ‘Fluctuating Frame’) 1991-1993 Sheffield Hallam University, MA Art & Design (Fine Art) 1986-1987 Manchester Polytechnic, PGCE (Art & Design Education) 1983-1986 Wolverhampton Polytechnic, BA (Hons) Fine Art SELECTED PROJECTS & EXHIBITIONS 2014 Ibid., Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei National University of the Arts, Taiwan 2014 Detail, H Project Space, Bangkok, Thailand; in collaboration with Transition Gallery, London and Usher Gallery, Lincoln 2014 Resident Artist, Slumgothic, X-Church, Gainsborough, UK 2014 Test Department, Project Space Plus, Lincoln, UK 2014 INSERT2014: New Models for Common Ground, Mati Ghar, Indira Ghandi National Centre for the Arts, New Delhi, India 2014 Overtime, Wellington Park House, Leeds, UK 2013 Library, Library, 70 Arthur Street, Winnipeg, Canada 2013 By-Product Exchange Society, Sam Scorer Gallery, Lincoln, UK 2013 Entropic Union, Galeria Legnica, Poland 2012 PPLANT, (Zona Ventosa) Dutch Design Week, Eindhoven, Holland 2012 [sic], Courtyard Gallery, The Collection, Lincoln, UK 2012 Crocodile with a Second Skin Trash: Contagion and Symbiotic Practice, Over+Out, Lincoln, UK 2012 Site Drawing: Drawing Site, Robert E and Martha Hull Lee Gallery, Miami University, Ohio & Stella Elkins Galleries, Philadelphia, USA 2011 Distance 2, Academia Gallery, National Academy of Art, Sofia, Bulgaria 2011 A Working Title: Collateral Programme, Monks Gallery, Lincoln, UK 2011 Frequency: Lincoln Digital Cultures Festival, Lincoln, UK 2010 The Moment of Privacy Has Passed, Usher Gallery, Lincoln, UK 2010 …..but the steady re-negotiation of small realities, Vanguard Gallery, Shanghai, China 2010 Distance, Avenue Gallery, Northampton University, UK 2010 Pebbles and Avalanches, Crossley Gallery, Halifax, UK 2007 Un Jour de Beauté, The Nunnery, Bow, London, UK
Alec Shepley Alec Shepley is an artist engaged in contemporary art practice whose work has been shown nationally and internationally. He is also currently the senior academic, Fine Arts within the School of Fine and Performing Arts at the University of Lincoln and has been an active participant in national and international artistic research seminars and conferences for several years. Shepley’s artistic research is an exploration of the poetics of confusion and anxiety, failure, melancholia, ambivalence and hope. Through an intertwining of reality and fiction he produces improvised sites that are dialectically linked ‘replies to one another’. EDUCATION 1996-2000 Manchester Metropolitan University, PhD (Installation Art Practice and the ‘Fluctuating Frame’) 1991-1993 Sheffield Hallam University, MA Art & Design (Fine Art) 1986-1987 Manchester Polytechnic, PGCE (Art & Design Education) 1983-1986 Wolverhampton Polytechnic, BA (Hons) Fine Art SELECTED PROJECTS & EXHIBITIONS 2014 Ibid., Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei National University of the Arts, Taiwan 2014 Detail, H Project Space, Bangkok, Thailand; in collaboration with Transition Gallery, London and Usher Gallery, Lincoln 2014 Resident Artist, Slumgothic, X-Church, Gainsborough, UK 2014 Test Department, Project Space Plus, Lincoln, UK 2014 INSERT2014: New Models for Common Ground, Mati Ghar, Indira Ghandi National Centre for the Arts, New Delhi, India 2014 Overtime, Wellington Park House, Leeds, UK 2013 Library, Library, 70 Arthur Street, Winnipeg, Canada 2013 By-Product Exchange Society, Sam Scorer Gallery, Lincoln, UK 2013 Entropic Union, Galeria Legnica, Poland 2012 PPLANT, (Zona Ventosa) Dutch Design Week, Eindhoven, Holland 2012 [sic], Courtyard Gallery, The Collection, Lincoln, UK 2012 Crocodile with a Second Skin Trash: Contagion and Symbiotic Practice, Over+Out, Lincoln, UK 2012 Site Drawing: Drawing Site, Robert E and Martha Hull Lee Gallery, Miami University, Ohio & Stella Elkins Galleries, Philadelphia, USA 2011 Distance 2, Academia Gallery, National Academy of Art, Sofia, Bulgaria 2011 A Working Title: Collateral Programme, Monks Gallery, Lincoln, UK 2011 Frequency: Lincoln Digital Cultures Festival, Lincoln, UK 2010 The Moment of Privacy Has Passed, Usher Gallery, Lincoln, UK 2010 …..but the steady re-negotiation of small realities, Vanguard Gallery, Shanghai, China 2010 Distance, Avenue Gallery, Northampton University, UK 2010 Pebbles and Avalanches, Crossley Gallery, Halifax, UK 2007 Un Jour de Beauté, The Nunnery, Bow, London, UK
Ibid Review Duncan Mountford On the screen a ritual is enacted, the clearing of a path, a figure engaged slowly, carefully, brushing the detritus from the walkways in a ruined building. The lack of any certainty concerning the location of this ruin is reinforced by the narrating voice telling the story of an imaginary city, a city where the cleaners are figures of importance, for they clear the ground to allow the appearance of the new. The ruin in the video is reflected, refracted, in the ruin in the gallery; a wall half destroyed and illuminated by a fluorescent tube in the debris on the floor, a light seemingly caught at the moment of its slide to destruction; a model of a ruined building on a segment of earth, and floating in a pool of light as if it was caught in the act of escaping the gravity of its situation. Ibid defies any simplistic narrative of the romance of ruins, for the ruined structure in the video projection glimpsed though the jagged hole in the wall seems as much an echo of the future, a foretaste of the ruins that will be left behind when humankind has gone, leaving behind one solitary last man engaged in a melancholic act of cleansing. Yet the clearing of a ruin, the creation of a space in the midst of the concrete slabs overgrown with the forest, is also an act of making ready the space for something new. In this there is a connection to all the strategies of creation, the tidying of the desk before beginning to write, the laying out of tools before the start of construction, the brushing of the studio before beginning a new work of art. Ibid thus sits at an intersection between what has gone before, the ruined gallery wall left from the previous exhibition, and the process of creating a new work. The tables on which sit the monitors that showing further footage of the brushing of the ruin seem to continue this sense of interregnum, being quotidian rather than elements of exhibition language. Andrew Benjamin talks of installations as always being in the state of becoming, for the viewer is remaking the work at each navigation of the space. Ibid makes this plain, by quoting what has gone before, clearing the ground for what will come, and in itself being a space that connects to a modern ruin that is echoing what will come. The slow brushing continues, at a pace that speaks more of meditation than of employment. And we watch and feel time stretch.
Ibid Review Duncan Mountford On the screen a ritual is enacted, the clearing of a path, a figure engaged slowly, carefully, brushing the detritus from the walkways in a ruined building. The lack of any certainty concerning the location of this ruin is reinforced by the narrating voice telling the story of an imaginary city, a city where the cleaners are figures of importance, for they clear the ground to allow the appearance of the new. The ruin in the video is reflected, refracted, in the ruin in the gallery; a wall half destroyed and illuminated by a fluorescent tube in the debris on the floor, a light seemingly caught at the moment of its slide to destruction; a model of a ruined building on a segment of earth, and floating in a pool of light as if it was caught in the act of escaping the gravity of its situation. Ibid defies any simplistic narrative of the romance of ruins, for the ruined structure in the video projection glimpsed though the jagged hole in the wall seems as much an echo of the future, a foretaste of the ruins that will be left behind when humankind has gone, leaving behind one solitary last man engaged in a melancholic act of cleansing. Yet the clearing of a ruin, the creation of a space in the midst of the concrete slabs overgrown with the forest, is also an act of making ready the space for something new. In this there is a connection to all the strategies of creation, the tidying of the desk before beginning to write, the laying out of tools before the start of construction, the brushing of the studio before beginning a new work of art. Ibid thus sits at an intersection between what has gone before, the ruined gallery wall left from the previous exhibition, and the process of creating a new work. The tables on which sit the monitors that showing further footage of the brushing of the ruin seem to continue this sense of interregnum, being quotidian rather than elements of exhibition language. Andrew Benjamin talks of installations as always being in the state of becoming, for the viewer is remaking the work at each navigation of the space. Ibid makes this plain, by quoting what has gone before, clearing the ground for what will come, and in itself being a space that connects to a modern ruin that is echoing what will come. The slow brushing continues, at a pace that speaks more of meditation than of employment. And we watch and feel time stretch.
The lightness of thought and the weight of objects Dean Hughes “I am from Leonia” announces the voice, at the same moment at which (mirroring what is being said) white text appears across the screen, running from left to right, drawing my eyes to traverse as first an ‘I’ then an ‘a’ then a ‘m’ delineates the sentence that is also appearing as a phrase in my mind at the same time “I am from Leonia”. The combined effect of audio arising, alongside typographic appearance, places this utterance within a mental space which queries its origins. It seems to ask me ‘is the voice a product of the text? Or is the text a record of a voice?’ This binary dynamic is established at the beginning of Alec Shepley’s video ‘I am Leonia’ and is central to the work’s structure. The text disappears and the voice continues, allowing my question to reverberate for me about the origins of the voice. The screen depicts the inside of a modernist ruin, St Peters Seminary in Cardross, Scotland to be precise, clearly identifiable through its cast and molded concrete pierced by the outside light and foliage. The horizon demarks and splits the screen in half. Entering from the right a sweeping brush first, and then next a figure move along this indeterminate line and circle around to double back, all the while slowly accruing and moving dust and detritus to a point located approximately center stage. It occurs to me that this path taken by the lone figure with a sweeping brush is opposite to the direction at which the text appeared and announced the beginning of the video. As a filmic device entering from the right and moving to the left, acts as a disjuncture that arrests my comfortable viewing. As an artwork ‘I am from Leonia’ is filled with futility. There seems little tangible attempt to actually cleanse the space in any demonstrable sense. This feeling is enhanced when in one sequence the figure’s attention is centered upon sweeping along a shadow cast by the ruin’s distinctive vaulted ceilings. What could be filled with more purposeful purposelessness than following a contour whose only certainty is that it will have shifted as soon as one has completed the activity of following along its path? This unassailable quality is further testified to when the figure diligently sweeps along the edge of what would have been a balcony seemingly oblivious to the genuine detritus, which constitutes the floor below. Neither is the sweeping piecemeal in the way that it might be conducted if one was passing time within monotonous employment. The sweeping is carried through with diligence and attentiveness to the job at hand that seems at odds with the apparent situation at hand. The intersections between the opposite forces that is apparent within ‘Leonia’ activates a potential for meaning to be created by a viewer through a continuous process of purpose forming which is initiated and then refuted, and discarded. Watching Leonia I cannot help but think of American artist Douglas Huebler’s famous assertion from 1968 when he states, “The world is full of objects more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more”. The protagonist within the video is intent on moving and remodeling matter rather than making a new construction or order. Shepley’s video presents itself as a tension. What is the nature of this sweeping? What is its purpose? The action is carried out and performed with a sensitivity removed from simple cleaning (what indeed could be cleaned?). The figure seems to be part archeologist unsure of the status of what is being dislodged, moved and uncovered. There is equal reverie being given to dust and dirt as there is to surface. I think about cleaning and the points at which cleaning occurs; after a party, after a meal, before and after visitors. All moments similar to these are epiphanies within our lives when compared next to the act of removing and discarding after the event. I wonder if cleaning is ever the event, or is it resigned to be the melancholy moment after the fact. Cleaning, sweeping in this instance, is the quintessential point to reminisce and a point not to be in the present. Is there virtue in seeing all things, and all activities, outside of a hierarchy and as being equal? In a likewise manner artworks exude and pronounce themselves as events and pre-eminence is given to the arrival at this state via the popularity of the phrase ‘installation’ within our lexicon of contemporary art practice. Leonia, in its residual dwelling on what has long passed and is out of place, makes me wonder how little contemporary art thinks of de-installing, the act of removing an artwork from a situation or event. Perhaps de-installing lies too far beyond the commodity address? Concentrating upon the site of this modern ruin I am struck by how indeterminate it seems. Is this the fate of modernist buildings of this nature that fall into emptiness and disrepair? Unsure of their own status, the building’s vice is to exist in perpetuity as both forgotten relic, and abandoned beginning. Alec Shepley’s ‘Leonia’ testifies to this curious status and in turn one can watch the video thinking that the building is new or under construction, the sweeper preparing the ground for further work, and yet at the same time it is apparent that this is a wreck and very much a former glory. The consistency and sensitivity of the sweeper, as he attests to his strange occupation, occludes singular readings and provides meaning in multiple positions. ‘I am from Leonia…’ enters my mind again and I look again at the text where the body of the narrative is taken. Italo Calvino’s last section of Chapter 7 from Invisible Cities does not begin with the authorial phrase ‘I am from Leonia’ but the remainder of the dialogue is congruent with the 1974 original. Invisible Cities is famously a book narrating different facets of one city, Venice. Leonia is a city obsessed with newness and replenishment. Shepley’s ‘Leonia’ is a meditation on matter out of place. The perfomative ‘I’ introduces a speaker, a listener, and a place, and the work’s structure allows me to place myself in a variety of roles. “I am from Leonia” I say to myself as I consider the weight of objects introduced to the world, in comparison to the lightness of thoughts that lie at their origin. (December 2014)
The lightness of thought and the weight of objects Dean Hughes “I am from Leonia” announces the voice, at the same moment at which (mirroring what is being said) white text appears across the screen, running from left to right, drawing my eyes to traverse as first an ‘I’ then an ‘a’ then a ‘m’ delineates the sentence that is also appearing as a phrase in my mind at the same time “I am from Leonia”. The combined effect of audio arising, alongside typographic appearance, places this utterance within a mental space which queries its origins. It seems to ask me ‘is the voice a product of the text? Or is the text a record of a voice?’ This binary dynamic is established at the beginning of Alec Shepley’s video ‘I am Leonia’ and is central to the work’s structure. The text disappears and the voice continues, allowing my question to reverberate for me about the origins of the voice. The screen depicts the inside of a modernist ruin, St Peters Seminary in Cardross, Scotland to be precise, clearly identifiable through its cast and molded concrete pierced by the outside light and foliage. The horizon demarks and splits the screen in half. Entering from the right a sweeping brush first, and then next a figure move along this indeterminate line and circle around to double back, all the while slowly accruing and moving dust and detritus to a point located approximately center stage. It occurs to me that this path taken by the lone figure with a sweeping brush is opposite to the direction at which the text appeared and announced the beginning of the video. As a filmic device entering from the right and moving to the left, acts as a disjuncture that arrests my comfortable viewing. As an artwork ‘I am from Leonia’ is filled with futility. There seems little tangible attempt to actually cleanse the space in any demonstrable sense. This feeling is enhanced when in one sequence the figure’s attention is centered upon sweeping along a shadow cast by the ruin’s distinctive vaulted ceilings. What could be filled with more purposeful purposelessness than following a contour whose only certainty is that it will have shifted as soon as one has completed the activity of following along its path? This unassailable quality is further testified to when the figure diligently sweeps along the edge of what would have been a balcony seemingly oblivious to the genuine detritus, which constitutes the floor below. Neither is the sweeping piecemeal in the way that it might be conducted if one was passing time within monotonous employment. The sweeping is carried through with diligence and attentiveness to the job at hand that seems at odds with the apparent situation at hand. The intersections between the opposite forces that is apparent within ‘Leonia’ activates a potential for meaning to be created by a viewer through a continuous process of purpose forming which is initiated and then refuted, and discarded. Watching Leonia I cannot help but think of American artist Douglas Huebler’s famous assertion from 1968 when he states, “The world is full of objects more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more”. The protagonist within the video is intent on moving and remodeling matter rather than making a new construction or order. Shepley’s video presents itself as a tension. What is the nature of this sweeping? What is its purpose? The action is carried out and performed with a sensitivity removed from simple cleaning (what indeed could be cleaned?). The figure seems to be part archeologist unsure of the status of what is being dislodged, moved and uncovered. There is equal reverie being given to dust and dirt as there is to surface. I think about cleaning and the points at which cleaning occurs; after a party, after a meal, before and after visitors. All moments similar to these are epiphanies within our lives when compared next to the act of removing and discarding after the event. I wonder if cleaning is ever the event, or is it resigned to be the melancholy moment after the fact. Cleaning, sweeping in this instance, is the quintessential point to reminisce and a point not to be in the present. Is there virtue in seeing all things, and all activities, outside of a hierarchy and as being equal? In a likewise manner artworks exude and pronounce themselves as events and pre-eminence is given to the arrival at this state via the popularity of the phrase ‘installation’ within our lexicon of contemporary art practice. Leonia, in its residual dwelling on what has long passed and is out of place, makes me wonder how little contemporary art thinks of de-installing, the act of removing an artwork from a situation or event. Perhaps de-installing lies too far beyond the commodity address? Concentrating upon the site of this modern ruin I am struck by how indeterminate it seems. Is this the fate of modernist buildings of this nature that fall into emptiness and disrepair? Unsure of their own status, the building’s vice is to exist in perpetuity as both forgotten relic, and abandoned beginning. Alec Shepley’s ‘Leonia’ testifies to this curious status and in turn one can watch the video thinking that the building is new or under construction, the sweeper preparing the ground for further work, and yet at the same time it is apparent that this is a wreck and very much a former glory. The consistency and sensitivity of the sweeper, as he attests to his strange occupation, occludes singular readings and provides meaning in multiple positions. ‘I am from Leonia…’ enters my mind again and I look again at the text where the body of the narrative is taken. Italo Calvino’s last section of Chapter 7 from Invisible Cities does not begin with the authorial phrase ‘I am from Leonia’ but the remainder of the dialogue is congruent with the 1974 original. Invisible Cities is famously a book narrating different facets of one city, Venice. Leonia is a city obsessed with newness and replenishment. Shepley’s ‘Leonia’ is a meditation on matter out of place. The perfomative ‘I’ introduces a speaker, a listener, and a place, and the work’s structure allows me to place myself in a variety of roles. “I am from Leonia” I say to myself as I consider the weight of objects introduced to the world, in comparison to the lightness of thoughts that lie at their origin. (December 2014)
Works
