‘Mis-IN-FormaTion’

What you see isn’t what you get.

Curated by Diana Ali

A Visual Arts Exhibition.

Are newspapers fair and accurate or do we get off on the scandals? Do they make us take sides? Its function is to predominately tell the society about itself, to be a pollinator of its information. Its role is to inform the citizens, or not as information is gradually travelling down, people became ill-advised, ill-prepared and mis-informed.

The media, personal relationships, bureaucracy and political policies feed us or at least give us the opportunity to contest between comment and fact through the value of communication. Should there be a liberty to mis-inform people? But do people want to know?

To paraphrase the BBC producer who said, “Don’t give the public what they want. They deserve much better than that."

Taking the concept of hidden truths, misquotations, rumour and gossip, artists are now being selected to exhibit their work which investigates this avenue. Art works selected will give the audience the chance to be allured, intrigued, enticed and be flirtatious with its appearance and reality. Artworks will explore ideas of being out of the loop, lying, pseudoscience, factoids and conspiracy theories.

FEATURED ARTISTS:

_{Jeff Pigott & Julia Warin}

(Wiltshire, UK)

‘KIOSK'

Mix media Installation

“Kiosk” re-creates the familiar environment and experience of shopping, but with a provocative and humorous twist. What’s on display is initially seductive and appealing, but on closer examination it is not what it seems and calls into question our love of retail, marketing and the impact of consumerism on our lives. It examines how language, image and design distort our view of the world and of ourselves.

_{Aaron Oldenburg}

(Baltimore, MD, US)

‘Pieces of Jonestown’2010

Running time 3’28.

Video

The video is of the empty field in Guyana that used to be Jonestown, where the Peoples Temple massacre occurred in 1978, as well as the surrounding towns and villages. The audio is composed of selections from interviews conducted nearby with local residents in June, 2010. They discuss their experiences meeting Peoples Temple members, rumors about what took place at the agricultural project, and what happened to the remains of Jonestown.

_{Benjamin Poynter}

(Reno, Nevada, US)

'The Dreamer, You Are Now Part of the Spectacle'

Interactive Indie Video Game, Multimedia Project.

In The Dreamer, you command the avatar of a politician who has lost his ability to reason with a misinformed public, via the certain capitalistic monster he and his colleagues have created. Through consistent behind the scenes discussions not involving the democratic whole in any sense (illustr ated in the computer game's intro cut scene) a revolution against him has ignited at a select, mundane city council hearing. In an act of desperation and possibly genius, the politician drugs himself to sleep at the podium in order to combat the solution for the city's economic dream with a dream of his own. The tables have turned, where as a society once out of loop has placed the responsibility on the politician so he may fix everything before his town defaults and crumbles that midnight. There are heavily thematic expressions regarding information socially constructed and real as well as the definition between reality and fantasy.

More information and media (video, downloadable game, documentals) may be found at :

http://www.benjaminpoynter.com/the-dreamer-you-are-now-part-of-the-spectacle.php.

_{Ilenia Bombardi}

(Fiumana, Italy)

'Downtimes'
Microfilm, collage, projection.

Mis-information is a central interest in my practice. My work in general refers to the gap in between judgments, in between thoughts. Misinterpretation of reality- what we perceive and what is there doesn’t always match or make sense. At the moment I’m working on a large collection of microfilm reels of The Times newspaper that I found in a bin. (Some are dated back to 1935) I’ve been cutting them up and creating new narratives, little white lies with a hint of dark humor.

http://ileniabombardi.com/

_{Bethany Y Milam}

(Basingstoke, UK.)

‘The Impossibility of Putting the Toothpaste Back In the Tube Once Squeezed.’

Mixed Media, Clay and Newspaper

Using a metaphor as a vehicle to explore recent newspaper scandals and libel cases, this work hints at the potential harm scandals and gossip can cause and the impossibility of completely retracting something once it has been said or printed. These stories remain in our memories or subconscious influencing our opinions whether true or not.

www.milamarts.org

_{Raphael Vella}

(Malta)

‘Heros & Villains’ 2012.

Graphite and beeswax on paper, 40 x 40 cm each.

This series of drawings is based on photographs of child actors/actresses in films as well as photographs of politicians taken during their childhood. Contextual details (background, clothes) are eliminated. Each head floats in an empty sheet, accompanied only by a few biographical details that do not reveal the person’s identity. Political fact is mixed with cinematic fiction, heroes with villains. The audience attempts to unscramble truth and illusion,but can they be separated?

_{Susan Francis}

(Salisbury, UK)

‘One Great Lovers’

The world of social media reveals a landscape littered with ambiguity, falsity and lies. With words removed from their digital context and recreated in another guise, will the onlooker be seduced or will they gradually suspect that perhaps these sugar coated declarations of emotion are not to be trusted?

www.susanfrancis.com

_{Amreen Khan}

(Berkshire, UK)

'Hara and Design',
2011, Acrylic Paint and Silkscreen on MDF, 59.4 cm x 42 cm

'Pattern #1'
2011, Drawing (digitally manipulated) on Paper, 30 cm x 21 cm

With every line I make there is something hidden, it neither under the layering of images and paint. Which I'm don't want to except or not ready to except. It's a constant battle with myself to except the reality and myself in to this world which I don't think I belong in.

www.amreenkhan.com

_{Bill Aitchinson}

(Portsmouth, UK)

‘Standard Alert'

Paper Collage

Standard Alert attempts to reveal the mechanisms of fear and fascination in today’s newspaper by making the headlines appear an arbitrary, even comical language game. In this way the obsession with celebrity and sex is challenged and made accountable when elided with the politics that it quite cynically obscures.

_{Peta Lloyd}

(Oxford, UK)

‘Value’

What can you buy for £9000? How do we value anything? Who decides what
things are worth? What are we willing to pay? What do we get for our
money? Make your choice as the text unfolds.
My work is influenced by on-going news and current events. I aim to
question, clarify and re-work the media angles coming through television,
newspapers, radio and advertising.

_{Dawn Cole}

(Margate, UK)

'Men Had Eyes Removed'

Solar plate etch

81.5 x 61cm

Dawn Cole makes work in response to an archive containing the diary and photos of Clarice Spratling, a young woman, posted to France in 1915 as a VAD Nurse where she served throughout WW1.

Photographs in this archive show nurses and hospital staff. Taken by the army, they portray a tranquil view of hospital life during WW1 with the purpose they be sent home with messages that all was well. In stark contrast the words in Clarice’s diary tell the real story.

www.dawncole.co.uk

_{Harriet Bowman}

(Bristol, UK)

'Blind'

Alluminium venetian blind

My practice explores our expectations of the familiar; subverting what we see to create a sense of uneasiness, something is out of place. I am particularly interested in the dawning of realisation, the point in which the viewer becomes aware of the alterations I have made. The readjustments are subtle; a toggle hangs slightly against the force of gravity, or a string hangs at such a tension that it is unnatural.

_{Gemma Cumming}

(Reading, UK)

'Work1:
Title: Greetings from Southwold
Medium: Oil on canvas
Date: 2010
Dimensions: 61 x 91 cm

Work2:
Title: Walberswick Ferry
Medium: Oil on canvas
Date: 2010
Dimensions: 61 x 91 cm

Work3:
Title: Southwold Greetings
Medium: Oil on canvas
Date: 2011

Gemma's work explores the falseness of the postcard image, an image that often shows an idealised version of a place rather than it's reality. She utilises and manipulates these conventions to create giant painted postcards with an ominous twist.

www.gemmacumming.com

_{Ryan Dunn}

(London, UK)

'Lust For Lifestyle'

Collage

Originally trained as an industrial designer, Dunn’s work plays with society’s relationship with material culture, specifically the conflict between the utopian image of lifestyle promoted by contemporary western media and the opposing reality of unattainable perfection faced by the individual. Dunn uses juxtaposed images cut from fashion and lifestyle magazines to create handmade collages that are absurd, beautiful and sinister in equal measure.
www.inanesystems.com <http://www.inanesystems.com>

_{Huw Andrews}

(Wuhan, China)

'He’s Disrupted Many Official Ceremonies'
2011
(SD Video, subtitled, 5 mins 53 secs)

Three tour guides, one in Estonian, one in Russian and one in German, present the sights on Toome Hill, Tartu. These three languages, as well as their countries of origin, likely conflicted during past occupations. While the guides speak, Andrews carries his girlfriend across the hill, performing a local tradition found in their Estonia guidebook. Andrews did not witness this tradition, he cannot verify its truth firsthand. As much of the video captures the ground, only those who have visited Tartu can confirm the existence of the sights on Toome Hill.

www.huwandrews.com

_{Anja Borowicz}

(London, UK)

'Transcriptions'

'Value of Labour'

'Patterns for Living'

I have been recently involved in a research project into colours proposed in domestic products from foods, to cleaning products and cosmetics. Whilst transposing these materials into artistic activity, I began to question distinctions and similarities of domestic, scientific and artistic gestures (grinding, stretching, measuring, injecting, washing etc.). This gave rise to a question: When does an activity become a particular form of engagement and when is it excluded from being coded as such? Is our perception determined through an intention or environment where it is performed / framed / displayed? What is it that I am actually doing when I am active and what is the value of this activity? These questions can be beautifully encapsulated into one as put forward by Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition: “What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing”

http://anjaborowicz.blogspot.co.uk/

_{Lulu Allison}

(Brighton, UK.)

‘JUMKPONES.’

Mounted Digital Prints

Junkpomes are a service in which junk mail is sent to me and re-formed into a Junkpome. The original solicitation has been subverted (though the signature remain the same, co-opted into new use) - a transaction has been enacted, but not the one intended.

_{Dan Hudson}

(Berlin, Germany)

‘TIME TRAVELLER.’

Looping time-lapse video 03 : 12

Things are real but not real. “Time” is simultaneously stretched and compressed. It is both fast and slow. Movements are in slow motion and yet a year goes by in minutes. We become a tourist, a voyeur, a time traveler standing fixed in space on a sidewalk near an outdoor cafe. Apparitions of day-to-day life drift past. Disembodied voices speculate about the parameters of human existence and the universe around us. The earth goes around the sun. Another year has gone by.

www.danhudson.ca

_{Nick Wood}

(Oxford, UK.)

‘Oh! What a Lovely War.’

My work is about people and if we think that a constellation is a chance arbitrary visual formation of often widely disparate stars, delineated and designated purely by the human mind, then I feel we come close to describing our human relationships. This is what I want to discuss in my work.

_{Paula Kirby}

(Sheffield, UK )

‘Untitled’

My work is concerned with the visual reconstruction of reality, concerning our identity and sub conscious hyper- reality. The reconstruction of 'self' in the glossy pages of magazines questions the hidden truths in the industry. This projection hopes to explore the mis-information we are feed on a daily basis.

_{Alexandra Bodea}

(Berlin, Germany and Cluj Napoca, Romania)

‘ErrorPrint’

Black marker and ink on paper, 246 x 100 cm, 2012

This work makes the apparently imperturbable flow of visual information that piles up in our world to confront with an unexpected, meaningless, and random shaped drop of black ink. The avidly growing amount of information becomes a decorative or indecipherable pattern. A completely void of information (the black ink drop) turns to be the most clear and poignant one. The win is in the error within the system.

_{Marcus Clarke}

(Nottingham, UK)

‘Approval Needed’

40 inches x 32 inches

It is almost impossible to understand British History and Culture without a good understanding of Freemasonry's place in it. I make no apology for informing myself.
When a man takes up the offer to become a Freemason he will most likely have little real understanding of what it is he is undertaking. He will do so for a variety of reasons. One being to gain approval from his Father, Peers, Colleagues and Business Associates. As he progresses through the levels he is like a child being lessoned to graduation. Hence in this work I have placed brand new child alphabet letters on these old English Masonic Aprons. And of each level. Each achieving coherence. Finally the Past Master has Passed. Has arrived and achieved acceptance. Approval. On one level it's simple symbolism.
It is also the custom to seek approval for such related works before exhibition or publication and, while I would not wish to offend or be rude, I am also with this work saying that as an English Artist, in that culture and tradition, that I do not feel I need 'approval' to express myself creatively.

http://www.handsuppuppets.com/html/Puppet_TV_Graffiti.html

_{Lou Hazelwood and The Guerrilla Writers}

_{(Bryan Eccleshall, Madeleine Walton, Julie Swallow, Eva Budweg, Chris Graham & Rachel Smith)}

(Hull & Sheffield, UK)

‘Guerrilla Writing Newsreel’

Format: Audio on Seven Portable Cassette Players.

Warning Signs: Guerrilla Writing Show, Sheffield, 2012

The Guerrilla Writers have taken articles from page 13 of two Broadsheets on May Day 2012 and re-written them under varying instructions from Lou Hazelwood. These re-written articles have been recorded by a newsreader and now play from the artist decorated Personal Cassette Players as an interrupted, negotiated ‘mis-informed’ newsreel.

http://guerrillawriting.blogspot.co.uk/

louisehazelwood@hotmail.com

_{Carrie Reichardt.}

(London, UK)

‘Corporate Slags’

Hand silk screen print 1/1.

‘Mad in England’

Hand silk screen print. Limited edition of 25.

I have always believed our mainstream media is nothing more that propaganda and this work explores the idea that not only do more and more (the 99%) realise this, but that our whole moral compass has been corrupted by media whores.

_{Paul Stanley}

(London, UK)

[Deletia]

If design currently fulfils (massages) desire, how does one create a visual culture that questions existing forms of taste, authority and means of distribution, especially when these questions are knowingly used as part of marketed language, where any ideology is packaged as main stream brand identity? Is it in the material nature of the surface, the level of finish that is in opposition to main stream expectations for a ‘final product’, or is in focusing on the motive, means and process of production?

www.deletia.org.uk

http://boyfromthenorthcountry.blogspot.com/

Diana Ali.

('Mis-In-Formation' Curator.)

www.dianaali.com

With a special thanks to Adrian Worsfold

www.daubsonline.co.uk

Mis-Information

‘Mis-IN-FormaTion’