Changing Spaces

Interview with Trevor Porter

by Pete Jackson December 2011

Trevor Porter’s installation in the former Galloway and Porter shop window on Sydney Street was attracting significant attention from passers by even as he worked on it. Trevor had imported an assortment of artefacts to work with and was engrossed in a bizarre piece of construction as I arrived to talk to him, involving an old model galleon, complete with masts, stays and sails, which appeared to be in process of morphing into a suitcase…

I had been familiar with Porter’s work previously, and have admired his attention to detail in producing his characteristically fantastical pieces, bending familiar reality into things it was never meant to describe: doors that opened in the middle of tables, table tops made out of flattened chairs, quasi-human figures fashioned from defunct electrical equipment.

For this series he had also brought along a collection of old oil paintings – mainly landscapes – which he proceeded to cut and paste into various compromising positions: one formed the interior lining of a banjo case, another peeped tantalisingly from the folds of a threadbare fur coat.  Several more were laid out in various stages of hybridisation, ready to be deployed in some other mischievous invention.

There appears a sort of revelry in the unorthodox fate of these artefacts, a gleeful disregard for their original integrity, a wanton interpretation of the Duchampian readymade that operates through the subversion, rather than the apotheosis, of the objects thus press-ganged into service, but revealing a world-view that is at once playful and interrogatory.  I was keen to learn how the artist saw his creations.

TP: “I’m interested in the boundaries between sculpture and painting, and object and image, playing about with those, really.  I like to work with a combination of found objects and construction, adjusting the found object, presenting something familiar in an unfamiliar way”

PJ: “What I’ve liked about your work previously too, is this idea that reality as we see it is a sort of skin, and that you can penetrate that to reveal different stuff ‘underneath’, so to speak.”

TP: “Yes it’s just questioning reality in a really simple way.  Some people might see the painting as reality because it depicts a scene, others might see the object as real because it’s three-dimensional.  There are so many different ways of viewing it.  I just like playing about with that sort of reality.”

PJ: “But there’s also something quite challenging about using other people’s art to make your own in this way, you know, people have put their time in creating these pieces and you come along and just cut them up and force them to comply with versions of reality they were never meant to inhabit.”

TP: (laughing)  “yeah I know, I just come along and destroy them.  But to me everything is, uh, usable, if you know what I mean, you can’t get too precious about things.”

PJ: “Yes I agree, people can be very precious, but you’ve just appropriated someone else’s art, I mean, there are turf wars in London about that sort of thing, you know, if someone comes along and over-paints, overwrites someone else’s graffiti, people get mugged and attacked…”

TP: Yes I see what you mean, I guess that’s true..”

PJ: “I mean you probably do rely rather a lot on the fact that the original painter is never going to come along and see their work used in this way, but because it is someone else’s creative act, what you’re doing is you’re literally overwriting it, aren’t you?”

TP: “I see, yeah, that’s really interesting…I’d like now to get a kind of a tag on this one, you know, keep the process open!”

PJ: “Is the age of the object partly the attraction?  Looking at a lot of the stuff here, most of it does hail from another epoch, is that part of the interest to you?  Do you set out specifically to acquire older pieces?”

TP: “I don’t really set out, when I go out and buy these objects….I just find one object and keep that in my mind, then have a walk round and find something that connects with it and see how they combine.”

PJ: “There is another juxtaposition here too of course, in that the plinths are quite contemporary, but then you’re using them to display this collection of bizarrely presented ageing bric-a-brac.”

TP: “Yes I do like the contrast.”

PJ: “Would you also see these pieces as kind of site-specific, in that some of the plinths are actually retail display furniture, so it’s as though you are creating a sort of commercial window display?”

TP: “Yes I’m very conscious that this is a shop, and that’s part of the attraction.   It’s also the fact that people are engaging with the display as I create it, so it has almost a performance aspect to it as well.”

PJ: “Yes I note that you didn’t necessarily come here with pre-set pieces, you are creating them onsite.”

TP: “That’s right, I had maybe one or two pieces ready prepared but the rest I’m just really making up on the spot to see what goes with what and how I want them to be seen.  It’s not a set display either, the plan is to come in and vary it over the course of the weeks.  And it’s really fascinating to engage in conversation about the work as I am creating it.”

As we were talking, indeed, several people stopped to look and make comment.  Trevor ducked out on a few occasions to survey his work in progress, and inevitably was drawn into debate with his onlookers, answering their questions and observations.

This installation has been a highly appropriate and very full engagement with one of Changing Spaces’ central outcomes – that of facilitating meetings between art and the public in an accessible local forum.  Porter also undertook to take up temporary residence in Cambridge during the life of the exhibition, where he was to be seen monitoring public responses to his work and even interviewing people about their reactions, as well as making on-the-spot changes to the display itself.

Trevor Porter’s exhibition combines a few concepts in one installation.  Beyond the gallery interest of the pieces themselves and their aesthetic and conceptual intricacy, the installation is also both site-specific and durational in nature, offering the streets of Cambridge a glimpse of artistic sophistication beyond the usual.

There will be another opportunity to view Porter’s work in the New Year, when another Changing Spaces project, this time a “pop-up” gallery at 100 Regent’s Street, makes its appearance during the months of January and February.  A combined exhibition featuring artists from Cambridge and Camberwell will run from 6^th – 16^th February 2012.

Pete Jackson, December 2011

Interview with Louis James Parker

Pete Jackson, August 2011-10-24

Interview with Louis James Parker

Pete Jackson, August 2011-10-24

Louis James Parker has just graduated in Photography from Cambridge School of Art.  His highly original take on youth culture utilizes a selection of elderly people dressed in typical contemporary youth garb, riding BMXs or sporting skateboards, and hanging out amidst graffiti-plastered public spaces.  The poses are startlingly authentic, each tableau wholly believable – a real double-take kind of image that at first deceives as to its urban ordinariness, until the contradiction dawns on you.

I caught up with Louis just after he had hung his photographs in 75 Regent Street this summer.

PJ: Louis, I’ve actually seen your work before, at Cambridge School of Art, and I was quite taken with it, so I’m really pleased to have the opportunity to talk to you about it.  My first question is, regarding the subject matter that you have chosen, does this come from personal interests of yours?

LJP: It was actually from my granddad, he’s quite a grumpy old man, and I always thought if you saw that in the street, how different that would be, and how old people see us as so different now, which is understandable, but some people get the wrong idea about the younger generation, which is kind of why I wanted to do it.

PJ: Have you ever done BMXing or skateboarding yourself?

LJP: I do an extreme sport called weight-boarding, which is why I chose those sort of things as well, and because those sort of people wear hoodies, that’s why I went down the line of thinking about this sort of thing.

PJ: yes, so I suppose there’s social comment there as well…the whole hoodie thing…

LJP: Yes there is, with everything that’s happened now I’ve been thinking of maybe carrying it on and going down different lines of thinking.

PJ: I suppose one of the things that appeals to me personally about it is I’ve got a sixteen year old kid who’s a BMX rider, and he’s been doing breaking and skating and BMXing and one thing or another since he was about five, so when I saw those pictures, you know as a parent, when you see these kids doing that stuff you think, if I were twenty years younger I might be doing that, d’you know what I mean, so for me when I saw those pictures I thought that was what it was about…

LJP: Yes I suppose there weren’t so many of those sports around then…

PJ: No, that’s right…

LJP: Those sorts of things have come on a lot more now, you see them around in English towns, but yeah, I didn’t really look at the work from that point of view.

PJ: Which is interesting isn’t it, that there are different ways of looking at the same work, it means different things to different people.

LJP: Yes, I’ve heard lots of different takes on it.

PJ: You must have done!  The generation thing is quite an interesting one I think, I was talking to our photographer about this a little earlier, because I think a lot of the time the sort of stereotypes of generations are actually perpetrated by the media to a large extent, and they’re not real, we end up believing in them , but they don’t actually reflect who we really are.

LJP: No, the stereotypes are definitely something to be taken on.

PJ: And what does your granddad think of it?

LJP: He’s actually in one of the photographs, he’s the one that looks quite mean, with the cigarette, and he actually, when he did it, he actually quite enjoyed doing it, even more than I thought, in fact I thought he wouldn’t want to do it, but in the end I didn’t have to tell him much, he just went ahead and did it and was just his normal self, which was really good.

PJ: Obviously these are staged pictures, there must have been quite a lot in terms of the resources you would need to put that together?

LJP: Yes, it was probably one of the hardest projects from that point of view.  It was really hard to find the people to volunteer, I did put posters up to try and get people to come in but I didn’t have any response at first.

PJ: Were you looking for any particular qualifications, I mean, they weren’t actors or anything?

LJP: No, no actors at all, just friends or family.

PJ: And the kit?

LJP: The kit was all borrowed from shops and friends, mainly.

PJ: You’ve got some serious BMXs there!

LJP: Yes, they were borrowed from shops, and from friends, obviously with no budget it was a lot harder, and if I had money to throw at it I could have done it on a bigger scale, got more people involved, but because it was for a uni project I didn’t have those resources.

PJ: But I think the nice thing about it is it looks as though it’s well-resourced, and obviously the presentation helps with that, but the tableaux are believable, actually, and they’re authentic.

LJP: Yes, I think because I used my friends, it was more believable, because I was using stuff that they were using.

PJ: (laughs) were there any sizing problems?  People tend to get bigger as they grow older!

LJP:  It wasn’t too bad to be honest, because nowadays people tend to wear their clothes baggy anyway, so no, I didn’t really have that problem.

PJ: Good!  So what next with it then?

LJP: Well right now I’m doing some freelance work, having just left uni, but I’d like to take this project further, but it would just be whether I have the time and the money to do it, to push it to the next level, so I’d have to get some funding.  But right now I have to work really.

PJ: are you interested in doing post-graduate at all?

LJP: I’m not, to be honest, I don’t know why, I think because having done three years now, I’d rather just get out there and work, quite honestly.

PJ: Talking about the kind of work you do, this project is the only example I’ve seen, I don’t know your other work…

LJP: I’m doing a lot of extreme sports photography, a lot; I do all sorts of photography.  Projects like this one mainly relate to uni, as that’s the sort of project that we had to do, and I really enjoy those sorts of projects, and I’d like to do more, but because they’re really hard to set up, that I suppose there aren’t so many opportunities, for example to display them.

PJ: So I guess you must be quite pleased at this opportunity?

LJP: Yes I am, when I got the email I was really pleased to go ahead with it.

PJ: Well that’s one of the things Changing Spaces is there for I guess, people coming out of uni who want that kind of opportunity.

LJP: Yes I know, it was really good, and I hope more comes out of it.  I did get this work published in  Turning Pro magazine, which was also really good.

PJ: They are such compelling images, they’re very arresting, I can see them going a long way, for me, they should be seen, definitely.  They would work very well in magazines as well as in the gallery.

LJP: I would like to do more projects where they could be used for advertising, or to prove social behaviour etc…but it’s just a question of whether I get the opportunities or not.

PJ: Well, the best of luck with that!

www.louisjamesparker.com

New Changing Spaces volunteer, photographer Lou Dellow

Lou Dellow is the woman behind all the recent great pics featured on our website. She is in her first year BA photography at Cambridge School of Art, Anglia Ruskin University and has become an indespensible member of the volunteering team providing images of all Changing Spaces exhibitions we use for publicity and documentation. Here she writes about her first encounters with Changing Spaces, the challenges behind the tasks and her thoughts about the projects function as a public art space.

I first heard about Changing Spaces at the Cambridge School of Art in Anglia Ruskin.  I was at this year’s Degree Show in the Ruskin Gallery in June and was asked if I’d be interested in volunteering.  I knew instantly it was something I wanted to be involved in.

On the face of it, the idea is very simple – any artist, both professional and amateur can apply to the project with a proposal to show work in one or other (temporarily) empty shop front on the high-street, and my part in it is straightforward – I record the work on show photographically and those photographs are uploaded onto a website for public consumption.    But I am finding that that is a bit like saying all it takes to make wine is grapes.

At the moment, I am exploring how much the changing light conditions affect the work on display.  The interplay of shadows and reflections through the windows on the work (in addition to the state of cleanliness of the windows) creates an atmosphere around it which is absent from a gallery.  Diffuse light can be helpful for straight recording, but I love to make use of sunshine through the ‘Changing Spaces’ sticker on the window, or the shop architecture itself.  That interplay is an important element for me; it places the work firmly within the idea of ‘alternative’ space and opens up new avenues of discourse around venue, value and a big one for me, the function of art.

This is having a big impact on my own development as an artist and changing how I might approach production and exhibition of my own work. Through the process of regular and systematic recording of other peoples’ work, my own practice is developing. I am more aware of how I look at art, what elements attract my attention. My photographs try to capture that. I begin with a long shot and gradually close in on the piece, or further, into a small part of it, to tell the story of how I am drawn to the work.

The premise of Changing Spaces has opened up a whole new range of thought for me, on the themes of alternative ‘art space’ versus gallery space, value and price and the function and purpose of art.  The shop window is such a unique space –offering advantages over the ‘cheek by jowl’ jostling for attention that works hung on gallery walls can suffer from. There is immediacy to it – right on the high street – It offers one to one engagement with the work, but without requiring the viewer to go out of their way to a purpose built venue. There is intimacy to it, where one artist has that space, the work can breathe and the viewer can take it in and look without the pressure to ‘move on to the next’ often complained of during museum visits or ‘blockbuster’ art shows.

Of the works, I have several favourites already. The sheer diversity of work on display is a joy, but what I am most interested in is how each person’s work translates to the space. I look forward to recording the same shop fronts again and again, inspired by the range of creativity used by the artists to display their work.

Cambridge is well placed to showcase the Changing Spaces programme. A large number of visitors and a yearly crop of new students present artists showing work in these shop fronts with an even wider audience than traditional spaces such as galleries or museums attract.   That is not all, however. It is, perhaps, Cambridge’s history of support for radical thought which may prove to be of biggest benefit to the Changing Spaces ideology. From the first scholars who fled here from Oxford, through such times as the Reformation, and of such as Newton and Darwin, to name but two, innovative ideas have found a haven here. Students, immersed in’ the new’ and ‘different’ for several years, assimilate a whole wealth of ideas, both on their course and off it and after graduation incorporate them into their adult lives.  Cambridge’s long and heady mix of academia with wealth and privilege offers innovation advantages that other places may simply not be in a position to.

Lou Dellow, August 2011

Pop-up gallery at NICHE, 90-92 Regent St until 6th August 2011

Interview with David Ryan

By Pete Jackson-Main

Dr David Ryan is Reader of Fine Art at Cambridge School of Art, Anglia Ruskin University.  He has been responsible for the Art School’s involvement with Changing Spaces from the earliest days.  I caught up with him on campus to talk about this, and about the latest CSA offsite project at the Niche, 90 – 92 Regent Street, Cambridge.

PJM: I know you’ve been involved with Changing Spaces since it’s beginning in 2009.  Can you tell us how that relationship began?

DR: Actually before it was called ‘Changing Spaces’ which was initiated by the City Council and property agents, we had been doing offsite projects in the art school.  When I first came to ARU in 2004 one of the things I wanted to do was for students to see the work in a very different context, and just by chance I happened to contact the City Council, and didn’t think I was going to get very far, but they were very enthusiastic actually.  I think it was the head of buildings or someone, and we were able to get spaces to do this in.  There was one particular place on Gwydir Street, where the deal was that we would decorate the space and get it into a better condition than it was in, and in exchange we’d have the space rent-free, so from my perspective that’s where it began.  The great thing about being aligned with Changing Spaces is that it’s given us more opportunity in terms of commercial properties, which we didn’t have previously, when we just worked with the council.  Occasionally we’d strike it lucky and get somewhere that was a good, accessible spot, but most often it would be places that were quite hard to get to, so there was an isolation factor that sometimes worked against putting on a show.  But what it didn’t negate, for me, was the actual idea of trying to test something out, for students to make decisions and looking and thinking, you know…they do that for the degree show, or the MFA show, but it’s not often they have a sustained go at it in a context outside the university.

PJM: Do you think there’s a place for the windows aspect of Changing Spaces, is that something that is of interest to you as well?

DR: Yes, I think there have been some very interesting windows interventions and displays and I think in some ways it’s harder to pull off, because of that shallow space. But you’ve got the advantage of it being literally public-facing, and there’s more of an opportunity to engage with the public.  There’s still a nervousness as soon as the space gets converted into a gallery, as to how do you build those bridges with the public, but if you’ve got the window spaces, it’s on the street, nobody feels that nervousness about looking or going inside a space.  It’s quite interesting because the public are looking all the time, in shop windows, so it’s got that immediacy.

PJM: Do you feel that it might limit the kind of work that can be shown in that context, for example there was a video project that ran for a time in All Saints Passage, how did that go?

DR: Yes, I believe it went well, though it was a funny time, it was just before Christmas.  The thing with the time slots is you haven’t always got the choice, it’s hit and run in one sense, you get the timings and you have to go with it, and that can be a challenge.  On the one hand with that project it was a good timing, as it was dark at least for the film projection, but maybe not great in terms of you know, the commercial focus of the season.  But I think in terms of the windows projects, there is that limitation of the shallow space, but people are always inventive about how they negotiate that.  But it’s variable.

PJM:  Do you think there’s also a benefit to students in benefit to students in terms of getting a visibility for Cambridge School of Art?

DR: It’s the big thing of getting work out there to the public, and there’s so many ways of thinking around that now, so that’s become a fascinating problem, can I call it a problem?  I think it is still a problem, you know, of how to make accessible work, or how to make difficult work, or how to get people engaged who aren’t perhaps conversant with the latest contemporary art, that’s an issue, but I think it’s one that a project like Changing Spaces at least can attempt to engage with from different perspectives.  I think it’s important that difficult work is shown, that we’re not attempting some kind of community art, I don’t think, though some works might fit that bill, and that’s fine.  It’s about different ways of testing things out.

PJM:  Have you managed to get much feedback into this process from the wider community?

DR: Only in terms of the obvious ways, like comments books and so forth, and surprisingly – though I shouldn’t say surprisingly -  they are very positive! Sometimes these can be quite destructive for the artist if you get a bookful of negative comments.  But the projects we’ve engaged in I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how positive the comments have been.  We did one in the Grafton Centre that got lots of people through, and again, very positive.

PJM: Talking about the latest project, the Niche, because this piece will probably be published during the life of the Niche, which I think hopefully will encourage a few people to go and take a look, has that been especially problematic in anyway?  First of all I know we were looking at 38 Regent Street, and that didn’t happen, and then the Niche came up and it was very much a case of scramble, now or never sort of thing…

DR: I think again if there was a problem it’s been more to do with the timescales.  There are pros and cons to the timescale thing, because on the one hand it’s quite nice having a Summer project, but the downside is that a lot of students go away, so some of your audience have left but so have some of your potential participants.  But I think apart from that it’s a very interesting space, it’s a space that’s got lots of different characters in terms of the different rooms.  Maybe it’s a little intimidating to the public, because of its shape, or perhaps because of its history, I think when you feel you are entering the space you are really entering it so to speak, it’s not like the Grafton Centre which had a more informal fluidity to it, and that’s interesting, those different patterns of how a potential audience might react. Almost like the architecture of the space and how you negotiate it.  But in terms of getting it together it’s been a very small core of dedicated people who have done a really good job.

PJM: Yes, I think it’s been extremely well-done, I was in there earlier today…

DR: The idea for this was that we have an initial show that then mutates, it’s a bit of an experiment really…

PJM: So this is curated by the students themselves?

DR: Yes, I kind of co-ordinated the first one just to kick start it, but then hopefully it will just evolve from that.

PJM:  Would you like to see the pop-up idea becoming part of the regular student calendar, do you think there’s a future for it, depending on availability of property clearly…Is there a particular advantage for example for third years leaving?

DR: Yes I think so, I think the hardest time for a student from my own experience was just having left college, that’s the really challenging time, and if you have something that engages what you’ve learnt on the course, your own work, how you think about it, how you display it, I think that can be a real kick-start for your own practice, giving you the courage, because it is courage sometimes, just to say, OK I know what’s going to happen next.  Sometimes you can leave and it’s a shock, no-one’s knocking on the door!  Those bridges are really crucial for students, and I think if we had more of that it would be great.

PJM: Maybe this is just me, but I’m sometimes aware of a slight tension between the art school – which is clearly an academic institution as well as a practical training – and the wider community.  You were talking about difficult work, and how it affects the public who encounter it.  Changing Spaces has a very wide remit, it does a lot of community art, charity art, and local artists who might be up to pretty much anything: do you feel within that broad spectrum that CSA and the students are holding their own?  Do you feel that tension at all, does it perhaps result in students being reluctant to exhibit in Changing Spaces because it’s too variable, too unpredictable?

DR: there’s always that potential, but from my perspective I think students really want to make their own space, so I don’t think it’s a question of them becoming snobbish or whatever.  I think it’s important to realise that you are going to be operating in that wider space.  Obviously students are going to have a more academic approach in contrast to a more community-oriented work.   It’s crucial I think that all these different focuses are represented in Changing Spaces.  I’m interested in how works operate, not just formally, but really thinking about how something exists within a space, how somebody is going to encounter it, all those things are important to me; where they might not be important to somebody whose remit is more about engaging the pubic in very different ways.

PJM: What about selling stuff?  Does that come into it at all?

DR: Well we try!  Selling stuff, yes, things have sold from Changing Spaces.  I think it’s very difficult with the whole idea of buying contemporary art, or buying students’ work.  Often pieces sell at the degree shows but they don’t sell in the Changing Spaces shows which is kind of surprising in a way, but maybe that reflects the kind of audiences, maybe it isn’t the kind of audience that would snap up contemporary art, although having said that, as I just said, things have sold, and people from other arts organisations have bought things from Changing Spaces shows.  So you never know, and that’s one of the great things about putting something in the window….

PJM: I notice in the Niche there’s a bit of merchandising going on..

DR: Yes there are some catalogues and things – at very generous prices, I have to say…

PJM: Grab them while you can! Plug it!  Is there anything you’d like to add?

DR: Come and see Niche!  And to underline the transformation element that is going on there, what’s interesting about this project it is going to mutate…

PJM: So come more than once, you mean?

DR: Yes, absolutely, and buy a catalogue – buy more than one catalogue!

PJM: Thanks David!

(The NICHE project is open until early August at 90 – 92 Regent Street, and features works by undergraduate and graduate students of Cambridge School of Art.)

15th – 22nd December 2010

Light and Shadow
Group exhibition curated by Changing Spaces curator Anji Jackson-Main in the shop on Jesus Lane showing sculpture and installation by students from Cambridge School of Art and Camberwell College of Art London.

Private View:
Tuesday, 14th Dec. 2010
6 – 8 pm
The Shop, XVIII Jesus Lane, Cambridge

16th June 2010
“The Lost Books”
“Adam Kyne-Lilley, Beth Hague, and Russel Taysom investigate the ideas and space surrounding the books in this bookshop and the influence they have on each other. The three artists have developed the exhibition together, each drawing from their own backgrounds as much as the space to create new work which draws the viewer round to explore this exciting alternative space. The work both instructs and asks questions of the viewer, the space and the work itself.”
Opening Event on Wednesday 16th June, 4 – 6pm at Plurabelle Books, Purbeck Rd. Cambridge – map

11th June 2010

The Stories that Follow Black Pictures – a literary exhibtion
Closing Event with wine and reading on Friday, 11th June, 6 -8 pm at Plurabelle Books, Purbeck Rd. Cambridge – map