This is an email from Signified , a newsletter by Signifier.
Nov 1, 2021
Mushroom Musings, Marble Angels, Memories of Mother, and Our Melting World
Announcing the November Exhibition at . signifier . six . shot . gallery .
Darren Neave on roadkilllandfillgoodwillmother
The local environment is shaped by food and fuel production, agricultural techniques, private estates and small communities clinging on to make ends meet. Miscanthus and maize sit adjacent to fields of wheat and rapeseed. The panorama feels cinematic at times, the clear skies and mostly flat perspectives are fringed with enticing woodlands, dirt tracks, bridle ways and blackbird-nesting brambly hedgerows. Mammalian desire-lines visible through edge land grasses and secluded woody copses. This idyll is not all what it seems…
continue reading and see the art at . Six . Shot . Gallery .
Signifier’s Six Shot is an online gallery that showcases just six images linked by aesthetics, techniques, processes, philosophies, formal or conceptual elements. The accompanying statement by the artist may not necessarily explain the work but will help build a deeper and more meaningful engagement with it.
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Recently published in Signifier:
The Melting World
To coincide with COP26, a plethora of environmentally aware arts and activism events are scheduled in and around the host city of Glasgow, Scotland …and beyond. After all, it’s a global issue being discussed. This has become a tradition, for artists and collectives to add their passion and poetic responses to the statistical-wrangling, fact-selecting, platitudes, and, to quote Greta Thunberg, the blah-blah-blah, within the conference centre. One of the most ambitious and eloquent of those past responses was by the Icelandic artist, Olafur Eliasson. For the first iteration of Ice Watch, in 2014, he organised the transport of 12 huge blocks of glacial ice...
Jacob and his Angels
Epstein’s sculpture of Jacob and the Angel is a larger-than-life depiction of Jacob’s all-night struggle with an unknown assailant who finally revealed himself in the morning as an Angel of God, blessing Jacob for his courage and resistance, giving Jacob a new name: Israel — ‘one who struggles with God’. There’s no doubt that this Bible story, from the book of Genesis, resonated deeply with Epstein. Not least because his own first name was Jacob, and he was a Jew. The two-tonne sculpture, completed in 1940, documents Epstein’s continued fascination with Biblical tales and how they related to contemporary events…
Potter’s Field Studies
A country walk in the Northern Hemisphere at this time of year reveals an abundance of mushrooms. Fungi’s fruiting bodies, which appear so swiftly and mysteriously, have long fed (when foraged with knowledge and care to avoid poisoning and death!) and offered ‘mystic experiences’ for humans. The first drawing of mushrooms dates back to an Algerian cave paintings made 9,000 years ago, which depict a shaman festooned with fungi and clasping mushrooms in both hands. In the late nineteenth century, mushrooms began to fascinate a young woman, who studied and painted meticulous illustrations of fungi still consulted by mycologists today. Her name was Beatrix Potter…
From the archives of Signifier, November 2019:
“I Like America and America Likes Me” — but where’s the Art?
Joseph Beuys was flown into the USA from Germany. Upon his arrival, he was wrapped in felt and carried from the plane on a stretcher into an awaiting ambulance that delivered him to the warehouse that was to become the René Block Gallery, in New York. Here, he was gurneyed to a room on the second floor where a cage had been constructed, the floor lined with straw and copies of The Wall Street Journal. Beuys shared this cage with a wild coyote for three days. On the fourth day, he was once again wrapped in felt and ambulanced back to the airport to be carried onto his departure flight...
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