“A person entering the space of non-place is relieved of his usual determinants. He becomes no more than what he does or experiences in the role of passenger, customer, or driver. . . . The space of non-place creates neither singular identity nor relations; only solitude, and similitude” (Auge,1995).
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Non Place Collective are a group of artists who individually respond to a place of transience whilst retaining the authorship of a collective. Collaboration is key for engagement, support and inclusivity.
MEz KERR JONES
Unfrequented Tracks
Series of 9 Monoprints on unbleached paper, 21cm x 29cm
Drawings from the fringes of the world.
Periphery places; isolated, rarely visited and often forgotten. Acting as both viewer and maker, these quiet and sombre scenes of disparate locations are drawn from a distance.
The undesired (place) is dreamt of by the psycho-traveller, traversing images, times and histories and asking:
What is today like there?
What is the weather doing?
How does it feel to be there?
Who calls this home?
Image List:
01 - Wales, Alaska, USA
02 - St. Kilda, Isle of Boreray, Scotland
03 - Murmansk, Russia
04 - Yakutsk, Russia
05 - Pevek, Russia
06 - Tristan da Cunha
07 - Ushuaia, Argentina
08 - Svalbard, Norway
09 - Qaanaaq, Greenland
10 - Lead Image of all prints for website
JEREMY GLUCK
\Charlie Kramer
Binary Lockdown
Binary performance created collaboratively during lockdown, expressing a live performance by digital/binary means by UK conceptual artist Jeremy Gluck @nonceptualism and live coder Northwoods (Charlie Kramer). Translations of texts describing a performance of healing as art converted into binary code live coded into audiovisual output. Aporetic, tensive work addressing issues of machine-mediated communication, digital disembodiment, and non-corporeal existence.
CAMERON LINGS
Passer Byes
Passer Byes is a psychedelic-esque illustration, it depicts our near-miss social interactions that we regularly fail to acknowledge throughout our day-to-day lives.
Presented through hundreds (if not thousands) of individually drawn lines, we see how despite their dense and clustered composition, they fail to intersect and meet. This acts as a diagram, representing how we neglect to interact with individuals that venture around us regularly. We each have starting points, and destinations; yet without recognition, we fail to recognise the journeys of those around us. Yet somehow within this cluster of unique timelines, we can still feel alone.
Johanna Bolton
live:May 23rd 6pm
I TWANG
DIVINE YOUR FUTURE WITH ELASTIC BANDS
Explore the meaning of your found elastic band shape or throw a shape. How far can you stretch your mind?
Identify the shape of your elastic band, click for reading:
https://www.johannabolton.com/i-twang
‘I make and collect open series of objects going through change. They follow a system, sometimes rational and sometimes intuitive, but the series have no natural end – their start, end and the rules that govern their path is as personal and haphazard as any aesthetic or artistic choice may be. I am interested in the awkwardness of systematic investigations where the end point remains elusive.
I spend a long time looking at the same object, hoping that by changing viewpoint, I will eventually discover something new. This new, ‘other,’ that I am hoping to catch, is maybe something akin to Adorno’s Nonidentity – the part of any object that eludes capture by the concept. I want to expose those parts of an object that cannot be communicated via language, to take something familiar and create something of universal strangeness.’
JULIE LANE
Disrupted Intentions
Disrupted Intentions explores the repetitive journey mirrored through the process of painting, framed within the context of the virtual world.
Throughout the day, travelling blindly through a lived experience, each day repeating what has gone before.
ROBERT OROS
came out
came out explores the fine borderline period before openly declaring one’s sexuality or gender identity. The project recreates the intense intervals of disassociation and anonymity that collide with feelings of acceptance and intimacy. Reflecting on such themes as nostalgia, the project is reminiscent of the past meetings and discoveries, episodes of high importance when it comes to self-identity.
An act of liberation is being challenged by the church, state or the social pressure that is constantly influencing this vulnerable period of uncertainty. In an act of anonymity the subjects are not showing their faces; when they do they seem to metaphorically emerge into a new state; with half of the faces enlightened or their bodies under a thin layer of water.
came out is part of a wider on-going project that documents different queer themes through the use of visual and written documentation. Shoot around different places in Europe, the project takes the form of a journal, personal in its approach and in its depiction.
MARINA IODICE
Birden loop, 2020
diptych video: instagram story and backstage footage
…If we could have a bird in it / Photoshop a bird / Please clean the window / Fuck’s sake / I don't like the zoom, which is true, but if you go with the camera / How come I have to stop writing my fucking piece of music and following your fucking orders it's cos you're a woman, isn't it. I’m just /
Stop! Brilliant / Just a hand / Yeah, because you said. No, I know I said it / What’s wrong with that / And you can't see the tree / But you said a lot / I know. Stop, stop! / Alright, you ready? / Don’t spray yet. Go closer, and / I know, I fucking know! / I know, I'm thinking about it / I should be the one with the camera / Don’t spray yet / It’s too easy / Okay. The birds, maybe now something nice is starting. Go! Spray! / I was doing the apotheosis of my fucking music. Goddamnit. / I like it / This is worse than the guy tying his shoes on Facebook / Beautiful. Oh no! / You ready or what? / Remember I'm small! No! / Are you ready? Or what? / Yes / What? /We have the tree again…
LISA SANDERS
all we have in common
all we have in common is a series of photographs that ponders the obscurity between despair and hope, the ‘other’ place where creativity can begin.
NIKO MITSUKO
Forgotten Places
Once there was life, energy, swirling through every place and every moment that humans passed through. But what happens to the places we forget, those that we lose or no longer care about? The energy stays, but it transforms and is sometimes overtaken by new life. It is this journey of exploration that the ongoing Forgotten Places series focuses on, be it hospitals, manufacturing plants, water parks or asylums. We delve into the places that were once forgotten, lost, or abandoned. Our tireless eyes venture into the small crevasses of the characters’ voyages into their own world of self-discovery, as they make peace with the past and move into a future unknown. First and foremost, this dark and dreamy voyage reveals the ravages of time. If things in our present are left unchecked, if we forget that we are merely guests, all too soon we might become the forgotten, revenants in a living grave.
LUIS TAPIA MUNOZ
Semantics of a Gallery (if Marinetti had his way)
An audio-visual exploration of the transitory nature of symbolic knowledge and the futility of attempts at demarcation. Set in the now empty art galleries and museums of the world.
GARY DUEHR
Terrain Vague
These images are inspired by the French term coined by the Spanish architect Ignasi Solà-Morales Rubió, which describes abandoned areas, undefined and unused, found on the borders of cities.
Here the spaces are blank interiors, empty spaces behind the scenes that suggest a theatrical event about to begin just off camera. The setting is an elevator, the corner of a lobby, a construction site.
Human life is largely absent, and the materials are industrial, anonymous: a factory-made Beckett scene.
江峰 JIANG FENG
LIVE:May 28th at 7.30
Alt-Sex異
The piece is the extension and embodiment of my own somatic practice "Sex and Love" that I am creating now. It explores the sexual/sensual body, enlisting the erotic energy within and discussing the limits of human sexual behaviors and interactions. “Alt-Sex” seeks to address the rigid and detached human sexuality and sexual imagination, the frustrated human/sexual encounters and the reconciliation of desire and ego.
ANDREA ISA
A place to be
Homage to a non-place
For the last few years, I have been interested in urban places that one has to pass over and over again, but which radiate coldness and inhospitality. This railway bridge in Dusseldorf, Germany is such a place. The old, original part of the bridge is actually very aesthetic with its steel construction and the old way of building. On the other hand, the loud inhospitality of this place of passage, which offers no impulse to linger, is overwhelming.
I try to give back beauty to a misunderstood and hostile place to show what it could be. To lift the pearl from the dirt.
IVANA PUSKAs
LIVE:May 24th 6pm
Chasing Ghosts
The impact of the female voice as contemporary art and conflict representations. Puskas presents a narrative to her experience of a search of identity, through exposure to the complexity of war and loss.
Non place as a theme is relatable to the idea of displacement and to the research into the
fragile category of belonging and the quest for identity as someone who originates from the
social context of Yugoslavia, a country that no longer exists.
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ARTISTS \
Gary DUEHR
Gary Duehr has been chosen as a Best Emerging Artist in New England by the International Association of Art Critics, and he has received an Artist Grant in photography from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. His work has been featured in museums and galleries including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; MOMA PS 1, New York, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; and Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana, Cuba, as well as exhibitions in Tokyo, Venice, Stockholm, London and Barcelona.
His public artworks include a video artwork for the Canadian subway system; a photo installation funded by the Visible Republic program of New England Foundation for the Arts, and a commission from the MBTA (Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority) for a permanent photo installation at North Station.
Duehr has written about the arts for journals including ArtScope, Art New England, Art on Paper, Communication Arts, Frieze, and Public Culture. Currently he manages Bromfield Gallery in Boston's South End.
Andrea ISA
‘I myself am interested rather in that kind of urban space that has suffered neglect, has lost its attraction or necessity. Places which radiate coldness and inhospitality, which one cannot avoid and passes again
and again on one`s way through the city.’
Mez Kerr JONES
Mez’s practice explores the connections between power and spatiality, place, profit and ownership, and blurs the line between art and societal critique.
She explores personal and communal feelings about place; How places are represented, geographical identity, changes within environments, memory and experience, and aims to understand the relationships formed between a place and its inhabitants. In this way her site-specific and site-responsive works consider not only a place, but a social and political context, where the realisations of questions and ideas are articulated through actions and materials.
#mezkerrjones
Cameron Lings
Cameron Lings is a contemporary artist, specialising in sculptural and/or drawing-based mediums. His practice highlights and records, our conscious and subconscious means of perceiving the topic of 'Time' within our society. Research is a key aspect of his work, which surface as an underlying context, concept or ideology within an art piece. Layering of symbolism is consistent throughout both his 2D and 3D practice, which allows his work to speak on varying contextual levels. This relates often to external topics, concerning the forever-imbalance of our natural and industrial environment. Ultimately, his combination and realisation of data and themes, presents how our understanding of time and setting, can be forever be brought into question.
Luis Tapia MUNOZ
‘My art practice usually consists of mixed-media installation, looking at themes of semiotics and the everyday. For a while I’ve been interested in the relationship between an observer and their immediate surroundings – the language and narratives we use to make sense of our position in the world.
The idea of a non-place appeals as it can be used to communicate a state of transience, of existing in between two positions, not firmly in either. Whether
this is between two physical locations, between body and circumstance, or between object and comprehension, the various dualisms that arise can be
clearly articulated and understood as non-places. The overarching metaphor of existing between two states is a subject I’m closely engaged with at the moment
and hope to explore further. I’m a London based artist, currently studying MA Critical Practice at the Royal
College of Art.’
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\CURATORS
Lisa SANDERS
Lisa Sanders is an artist based in Wales, working predominantly in photography and installation. Her work explores themes of displacement and the failings of socio-political class systems, through placing authorship on everyday situations created directly (or indirectly) by the public. Sanders has a fascination with accumulations of stuff, mostly that of failed objects: from badly designed packaging, to the endless possibilities of the tip and all the empty spaces in-between.
Marina Iodice
Marina Iodice (Naples, 1985) practice grows from the dialogue between the isolated individual and the social group. She works predominately through installation art, incorporating a range of media from the analogue to the digital. Her research lies in the themes of language, identity, physicality, femininity, innocence and sin, utilising the motifs of fragmentation and repetition. Her over-arching mission is to build a new perception of the world, following the teaching of French philosopher Jacques Derrida and his ‘déconstruction’ theory. It is this particular notion that has been pushed further in her recent work, investigating the relationship between language and meaning.
Non Place Collective would like to take this opportunity to thank the artists involved in our online exhibition. Also, thank you Fringe Arts Bath, for your support throughout.
Johanna BOLTON
‘I want to bounce my ideas against matter, against the human body – the resistance they meet there teach me something new every time. I am interested in how concepts and language affects human understanding of the real life-world out there – and in here. The human body is perhaps the first case of matter that has become self-aware.
I work in many materials; clay, plaster, wood and plastics. The objects tend to be sculptural, human scale and tactile. Arranging the collected series becomes an investigation into the creation of meaning and narratives.’
Jeremy GLUCK
Jeremy Gluck is a neurodiverse digital, performance, and installation artist who mainly works with contemporary strategies. By rejecting an objective truth and global cultural narratives, Gluck creates work in which a fascination with the clarity of content and an uncompromising attitude towards conceptual and minimal art often collides with ambiguity and concealment. The work is aloof and systematic and a cool and neutral imagery is used, obscuring a subtext speaking to process as practice. Currently collaborating with American live coder Northwoods, AKA Charlie Kramer.
江峰 Jiang FENG
江峰 Jiang Feng is a non-gendered and multi-disciplinary artist working across-genres in movement/dance, theatre, performance art, voice, text, modeling, film, photography and theory.
The fundamental inspiration for my work is love, its beauty and complexity, while thematically, my work revolves around questions of gender, sexuality, sex, and race. Further, as an interdisciplinary artist, I turn to the tools offered by multiple media to enrich and deepen my works. I create artwork as a process for healing and questioning. Setting out to disrupt, I always want to create something different from what people have seen before by challenging social norms and our perceptions of them. I am trying to gather energy to create a healing space for people who endure discrimination.
My process as an artist and creator is that I always wait to be inspired in/by life. I am always looking for new and innovative elements. Moreover, I draw on theory from academic and non-academic works and think hard because I expect myself to be not only an artist but also a thinker.
The ideology of my works is "Family-unfriendly."
Niko MITSUKO
Niko Mitsuko is an award winning American photographer, painter, and mixed media artist. She began her artistic career at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, graduating in 2007 with a BFA in Fine Art and Photography and a BA in Film. In the past ten years she has established herself as a professional artist, working primarily with galleries in her long time home of Portland, Oregon as well as across the US, but also exhibiting internationally in Paris, London, and most recently Berlin, where she is now based.
Believing that art is a way to get at the soul of modern society, Niko strives to create photographs with aesthetic, paint-like qualities, bestowing her works with abstract, surrealist, and minimalist properties.
Ivana PUSKAS
Ivana Mancic, born in Ruma, Serbia, is a PhD student in Fine Art, School of Art and Design at Nottingham Trent University, UK. The research she is undergoing in its focus has art practice and it is aimed at the production of multi-disciplinary artworks, videos and
installations the purpose of which is to display the personal narrative. This narrative will address the issues of war, loss and belonging, related to the specificity of the ex-Yugoslav context in order to contribute to developing of the female voice of artists and pacifists in contemporary art. Using autoethnography and site writing as research methods, she explores the movement of people and their displacement by examining the intersection
between past and present events.
Julie LANE
Julie Lane's practice is concerned with exploring the ambiguity of figuration through the process of painting. Her transposition of ordinary household linen, triggers a familiar starting point to a personal narrative. Lane's gestural mark making encourages the audience to unravel motifs; evoking a common understanding of what could be a familiar experience.
www.julielaneartist.wixsite.com
Robert Oros
Robert Oros (b. Romania, 1993) is a photographer/video artist based in Wales. Working predominately with analogue photography and archival materials, Robert’s practice engages in different subjects such as post-soviet identity; the clash between private and public; ways of documenting and presenting fictions and realities.
In his ongoing project he investigates queer culture and history, focusing on the male body and representations of queer identities.