Contents Alpine Boards
by Sabrina Guichard Page 3 -13
ReCOLLAGES by Laurene Bois-Mariage Page 15 -25
Post Referendum Portraits by Rob Birch Page 27-36 ––––
Angle Magazine #1 Edited by Jorge Lizalde
Email: hello@anglemagazine.uk
Cover Image
© Post Referendum Portraits - Rob Birch © #1 Angle Magazine, September 2017.
––– Legals: As an arts magazine we take the intellectual property rights of our contributors very seriously. All copyright in this issue belongs to the authors or originators of the material and may not be reproduced without the written consent of the author. Unless otherwise stated, all material has been produced by or for Angle Magazine. We take great care to ensure that informatio within the magazine is accurate and fair, but opinions stated within this issue are those of the author and not necessarily of Angle Magazine. If you find something that is inaccurate or misleading please let us know, and we will attempt to remedy any errors on our part at the earliest opportunity, either in print or on-line.
Alpine Boards Sabrina Guichard
Mountain is the place of all constraints and all freedoms at the same time. These pictures are the results of several trips in the French Alps. Here, mountain is not seen in all its absolute mass but cut out, sampled. Volumes and reliefs are flattened. The aesthetic experience of the mountain is reduced to the simple surface, almost epidermal, gathering a nonexhaustive sum of its shapes and various upsurges. A double reading of the pictures appears. The first one is factual, objective and frontal aiming to an almost-scientific observation of landscape. The second reading is sensitive, dealing more with aesthetic and formal considerations. The distintive features of the mountain, firstly identified, turn into almost abstract colored and textured geometric shapes. Alpine Boards is the exploration of the pictorial and abstract potential of the mountain, the research of an aesthetic of the minerality: colours, shapes, textures, lines, compositions, etc... These images question both the mountain and the human perception of it.
Sabrina Guichard is a young french visual artist graduated from the Fine Arts School of Nîmes (South of France). She works between the mediums of photography and video. When she doesn’t work on solo projects, she collaborates in videoworks or photograhic series with Pierre Chancel, another young french artist that also graduated from the FineArts School of Nîmes, from comissions to international artist-in-residence programs. She essentially treat issues related to the relationship between men and nature. She has a physical and direct approach of the issues linked between men/nature relationship and landscape. Indeed, beyond the thought process related to the realization of an idea, the physical confrontation with the landscape, moving and walking in it, are essential. The analysis of structures and reactions of the human mind vis-à-vis nature, studying the sensitivities of human in front of it, they are all factors leading to her artistic approach. She constantly pay attention to the subjective perception of the human environment.
ReCOLLAGES Laurene Bois-Mariage
All submitted works are part of ReCOLLAGES: a series of screen shots featuring open internet windows arranged online after some famous collages and photomontages by such artists as H. Bayer, H. HĂśck, K.Schwitters, G.Stein or K. Teige. The work explores both the diversity of sour ces found on the Internet and the dematerialization of image in the digital era; where boundaries between photography, painting and drawing become blurred and finally irrelevant. ReCOLLAGES also reconsiders the validity of boundaries distinguishing amateur, art and professional productions; and correlates an increasingly easy access to pictures with the increase of legal restrictions of use. Collage, a term derivated from the French coller, meaning glue, it is a technique consisting of an assemblage of separate elements and different forms of all kinds, thus creating a new whole piece. It is also a major form of appropriation that ReCOLLAGES proposes to replay with digital media.
Laurene Bois-Mariage is a French artist living and working in both Estonia and Finland at the moment. Graduated from the Arles´ Ecole Nationale Superieure de la Photographie, her work deals with collective practices of photography and explores its new contexts of production and circulation. In 2016 she was the recipient of Taike regional project grant for her ReCOLLAGES exhibitions at Hippolyte Photographic Gallery in Helsinki (FI) and Tallinn Photography Museum (EE). She recently participate in Mediated: An Urban Projection Event hold by Indiana State University (US), and in Ajankuva group exhibition at Kuusisto Art Manor (FI); while her work is published by A5 Magazine in Portfolio #3 (GB), by Transart Institute in On Contemplation And Everything Else (US, DE), and by Postimees in Fotomuuseumis Avatakse Noiduslik Naitus (EE).
Post Referendum Portraits Rob Birch
Identity is at the core of every social movement and it informs who we are and how we are. It shapes and forms our understanding of our place in the world and defines the laws we create for ourselves and by which we live. The notion of subjectivity, and its manifestation within the visual arts is a complicated and vexed one. Its role and authenticity in contemporary life and the way in which various strategies and agendas are employed to find a satisfactory expression; points to a specific and highly mediated understanding of what this can be. In the light of the recent decision to leave the EU this has become an almost impossible issue to resolve. Clarity is hard to reach and satisfaction impossible to sustain. Richard V. Reeves wrote that Brexit crated identity politics defined not by who we are but what we are against. That being “British” is defined by not being European . The referendum took away our ability to know who we are and replaced it with the notion of identity of subtraction (we know who we are by knowing what we are not). Any focus on this issue appears to be is coming from the radical fringes at the edge of these arguments, where polarized versions of self (radicalized, racist and fascist) are now becoming the accepted norm. The Brexit referendum was a referendum about the identity of the UK and its inhabitants and as Scot Nakagawa states “Facts lose their power when Identity is in play” . How are artists going to react to this issue? And what will a visual representation of identity look like in the light of the confusion brought forward as a result of the collapsing social/political framework on which it is hung?
The traditional portrait is a highly political image. In this age of political flux, not to mention gender fluidity, sexual experimentation and the ability to create new virtual representations of the self, can the need for a “likeness” be reconciled with the inability to find a satisfactory visual lexicon with which to do so. Through a series of studio based projects I will explore this issue, and with support of written thesis propose new ways in which the portrait can satisfactory represent “the self”.
__ The notion of subjectivity, and its manifestation in our communities and our individual lives is a vexed one. Its role and authenticity in contemporary life and the way in which various strategies and agendas are employed to find a satisfactory definition points to a specific and highly mediated understanding of what this means. We are no longer able to call upon the forms and structures generated from within society to understand whom we are. Rob Birch work has been described as visual skepticism. It is a knowledge that understands that truth is reliant upon context, experience and fearlessness. It also expresses the understanding that “Art” is not made, but found. (A) truth is always inherent in the real and resistant world, and it is my job, as an artist to act as the facilitator that brings it out into the light.
Index Alpine Boards Sabrina Guichard
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Page 11 - 12
ReCOLLAGES Laurene Bois-Mariage
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Post Referendum Portraits Rob Birch
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The Editor First issue I thought it would be a real challenge, as I wasn’t sure what would be the response and the number of applications, hence the no specific theme. To my surprise the number of emails were overwhelming. I decided to go for a more pintoresque theme abstract, collage and mixed media. Photography on its beginning was an attempt to capture what painters where doing at the time, until in mid 20s when technology improved and took a different path. Because this is the first Angle Magazine journal, I thought it would be a good metaphorical beginning starting with that resemblance. Today is not often we see photographs imitating paintings, if we don’t count the nearly real painted portraits based on photographs or viceversa, obviously. But this digital era is slowly changing those premises and there are more and more mixed media. I hope this first issue serve as an example and contribute to that dinamic. ––––
Angle Magazine #1 Edited by Jorge Lizalde
Email: hello@anglemagazine.uk Twitter: @Anglephotomag Facebook: @angle.photo.zine Instagram: @angle.photo.mag Now open for applications issue #2 Theme “Death”. deadline 20th December 2017. © #1 Angle Magazine, September 2017.
Š Angle Magazine, September 2017.
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