Students on the first year of the prestigious Master of Fine programme at The Glasgow School of Art have unveiled new work in Interim MFA Show 2022 in the impressive setting of the former Florence Street School. The show, which runs from 23 – 28 April, features work by 28 artists from across the globe.
Working in media including sculpture, painting and video the artists interrogate political, historical and social subjects including the early years of AIDS, the history of the Republic of China, the 2019 Lebanese revolution, female trafficking and the longing for home.
Naughty Noo-Noo, Ali Farrelly allows three hoover hoses, extracted from inadequate machines, to harness that same electricity that we rely on them to service us, to simply meander and mosey, wherever they want and as clumsily as they please. Just for the heck of it.
joshua breen-tucci presents cycles per second – an experimental composition generated in real time by four electro-mechanical instruments. in it, rhythm is structured as a hyper-deceleration of pitch, allowing a harmonic stability formed of familiar note relationships to collapse as they drift apart in time.
After the martial law in R.O.C was lifted for 35 years, authoritarian symbols such as the statues of Chiang Kai-Shek and the former president of Chiang Ching-Kuo are still all over Taiwan, but are being removed by The Transitional Justice Commission. Tapei-born artist Chih-Kang Hsu interrogates the the “de-Chiang” atmosphere of contemporary society, with the statues abandoned in the city like ghosts.
Christian Bronstein’s work is based on a mix of archival research from the Lesbian and Gay Newsmedia Archive (LAGNA) in London and interviews of HIV-positive men who have lived through the AIDS epidemic. In GLORY DAYS, he reflects on the tension between an immutable sexual desire and the knowledge of a lethal virus that was ripping through and obliterating a whole generation of my community.
Whilst researching the historic industry of shipbuilding in and around Partick artist Haydn Judd has been frustrated by the difficulty in discovering the historical context in amongst the large-scale redevelopment and transient population now living in the area.
Lebanese artist and architect, Moyna Riachi moved to the UK in 2013. Her work responds to the social-political events occurring in her home country. In The Revolution is Open / It Felt like Love she features newspapers from October 2019, the beginning of the Lebanese Revolution.
South Korean artist, Nanjoo Lee presents a ‘portrait’ of her mother Miae which is the outcome of a journey to acceptance of their differences and loving her.
Indian artist, Ritu Aryd, found ‘Lost Home’ as one of the by-products, when a significant chapter her my life came to a sudden end. Hand sculpted with clay, it’s a story of silent rumination and longing for home, and the incessant search for what it really is – a roof over your head.
Chinese artist Wenyi Pan explores the topic of one trafficked woman in Fairyland, relating it to the countless neglected female victims of rampant trafficking in China throughout the last century, and to modern young women who find it difficult to speak out.
Naomi Garriock’s primary interest is in the imagery of art instruction as found in historical How to Books/ YouTube tutorials and TV show. She presents a painting that is part of an ongoing series depicting imaginary art classrooms, inhabited by figures including friends famous artists and celebrities, who are fully immersed in the act of making their own art.
In the work created for the show Belfast-born artist, Conor Martin-O’Dowd, investigates and focuses on breaking down the ever-constant social stigma surrounding the ‘coming out’ stage in the LGBTQIA+ community.
For full artists details see Notes for Editors
MFA Interim 2022 is supported by Urban Office
Ends
Further information:
Lesley Booth
0779 941 4474
press@gsa.ac.uk
@GSofAMedia
Notes for Editors
ALI FARRELLY
Ali Farrelly is an Irish artist. Since graduating in 2019 with a BA Sculpture and Visual Culture from NCAD, Ali has completed residencies in Poland and Serbia. She has been featured in various exhibitions and live performances nationally and internationally in recognized venues such as Smock Alley Theatre, MART Gallery Dublin, Curator’s LAB Poznan and most recently was showcased in Barcelona at Loop Festival. Ali maintained a vibrant studio practice at La Catedral Studios in 2020-2021, where she explored a comedic collaborative practice with Aoife Ward with whom she continues to collaborate. Ali and Aoife have carried out a project commissioned by Dublin Airport and a long-term project with artists Jack Massing and Chip Lord. Since commencing the Master of Fine Arts at the Glasgow School of Art in 2021, Ali has exhibited work within the university and currently organises monthly exhibitions with fellow artists on the programme.
Ali Farrelly delights in gifting personal agency to subpar electrical everyday objects, the sense that they are the ones who are causing their own actions. Concerned with the barrier between us and animal consciousness, Ali finds links between our treatment of and relationships with our domestic pets, and treatment of and relationship with our domestic machines.
In Naughty Noo-Noo, Ali allows three hoover hoses, extracted from inadequate machines, to harness that same electricity that we rely on them to service us, to simply meander and mosey, wherever they want and as clumsily as they please. Just for the heck of it.
AGUSTINA QUILES
Born in 1985, La Plata, Argentina.
Visual artist graduated from the School of Fine Arts, National University of La Plata. In 2016 she participated in the Artist Program at Torcuato Di Tella University advised by Mónica Girón and in 2015 she received a grant from the National Endowment for The Arts in Buenos Aires. She studied Contemporary dance with Ivan Haidar, Lucas Condró and Diana Szeinblum. Workshops and Crit session with Silvia Gurfein, Diego Bianchi, Andrés Sobrino and Juan Sebastian Bruno.
She has participated in national and international solo and group exhibitions and obtained awards and honorable mentions in multiple institutions in Argentina. She participated in the residencies Lademoen Kunstnerverksteder, Trondheim, Norway, 2019; Laboratorio Proa 21 at Proa Foundation, Buenos Aires, 2018 and Vermont Studio Center, USA, 2017. Currently she is attending an MFA at The Glasgow School of Art.
My practice takes place mainly in the field of painting and performance. Through installations, that involve large pictorial objects and video performances in which the main idea is the presence of the body and the movement, my intention is to stage a physical tension, displaying an action that seeps through the space.
In my work there is a tension between coexisting opposite forces, a potency that emerges from something fragile, and in which time has intercepted. I am particularly interested in how the insistence of a reiterated action results in an accumulation of work and time that load an object, highlighting all the action behind it.
In my paintings there is a state of permanent fragility and a concurrent sense of resistance. I am attracted by the idea of a body that experiences changes as a consequence of certain forces.
JOSHUA BREEN-TUCCI
joshua breen-tucci (b. 1991) is an intermedia artist based in glasgow, scotland, originally from occupied ute, arapahoe and cheyenne territory. he holds a bfa in fine-art and music technology from california institute of the arts and is an mfa candidate at glasgow school of art. josh has previously shown work in los angeles, ca. san pedro, ca., santa clarita, ca. denver, co., wakefield, ri. and glasgow, scotland.
joshua breen-tucci is an intermedia artist working principally with kinetic-sculpture and sound. josh’s work is routinely centered around building systems and situations which are allowed to run independently of himself; in this way, his work is self-generative and co-authored both by time and an observing audience.
cycles per second is an experimental composition generated in real time by four electro-mechanical instruments. in it, rhythm is structured as a hyper-deceleration of pitch, allowing a harmonic stability formed of familiar note relationships to collapse as they drift apart in time. as it unfolds over the duration of the exhibition, the entirety of the performance is left incomprehensible to any single observer. instead, each is imparted with a distinct fragment orchestrated by their unique positioning within space and time.
CHIH-KANG HSU
Chih-Kang Hsu was born in Taipei, Taiwan, in 1988. He received his B.A. in Architecture. In the early days, he focused on creating video works with urban space as the material, devoted himself to civic movement and local research, and raised awareness of social and environmental issues in the city with a series of short films. Recently, Hsu restarted to think about the role and the power of images in society. He is experimenting with the relationship between image and medium by photography and installation. His works often incorporate urban modernology. Through his life experience, Hsu puts his own geopolitical and political environment into his works to reflect the contemporary social contexts. Hsu mainly worked in the art department of the film industry in Taiwan from 2014 to 2021. Currently, he is a freelancer as a set designer, photographer, and director.
After the martial law in R.O.C was lifted for 35 years, authoritarian symbols such as the statues of Chiang Kai-Shek and the former president of Chiang Ching-Kuo are still all over Taiwan. The Transitional Justice Commission (TJC), an independent government agency of the R.O.C, is responsible for the investigation of incidents during the martial law period. One of its core missions is to remove symbols of authoritarianism including two Chiang statues. According to TJC’s inventory, there are a total of 1,235 memorials such as statues and posthumous portraits of the two Chiangs in various parts of Taiwan. There are 579 memorial spaces named after the two Chiangs, totalling 1,814. On average, there is one symbol of authority for every 20 square kilometres in Taiwan.
When shooting statues of Chiang Kai-Shek, most of the descriptions or inscriptions on the bases of statues were specially covered and smeared, making them unrecognizable. While asked passers-by about the history of the statue, I often got vague and indeterminate answers, sometimes even without knowing who the object is. These figure statues of Chiang Kai-Shek, scattered all over Taiwan, present a state of presence and absence under the “de-Chiang” atmosphere of contemporary society, abandoned in the city like ghosts.
“They won’t resist, only people will.” It’s an easy task to remove all the statues, but after they disappear, have the historical conflicts and pain behind them really been reconciled? Reality will eventually become ashes, but then it will be recalled by the image repeatedly.
CHRISTIAN BRONSTEIN
Christian Bronstein is a contemporary artist from a diverse international background who grew up between Germany and the UK. His work concentrates on exploring trauma by creating high-definition digital artefacts, exploring the body and sexual identity as sources of cultural abjection whilst exploring the immaterial nature of digital work in relationship to corporeal experience.
He won the Cordwainers Datuk Jimmy Choo MA Award during his time on the MA Fashion Artefact at the London College of Fashion in 2020/21 for the craftsmanship of his digital work and was shortlisted for the Procter & Gamble Better Lives MSc/MA Award in the same year for his master’s thesis that focused on mental health and the consumption of luxury fashion items.
His sculptural fashion works were selected for the LCFBA19 press catwalk show, where he was one of the only two individuals selected to represent the Graduate Diploma in Fashion Design Technology course.
I primarily create high-definition digital artefacts and animations, although my practice has spanned across sculpture, fashion, and painting.
My work is motivated by prodding and examining trauma – a topic that is both frequently guarded from public discussion and pertinent to my own experiences. My previous work has examined trauma linked to mental health, consumption, and
sexuality. I am currently continuing to explore the last topic through use of the body in a digital medium based on archival research and theory.
I feel a strong pull towards Julia Kristeva’s concept of ‘the abject’ and a desire to explore the threats that bodies can pose to society, which are the common threads linking all my work. I am currently focusing on exploring the semiotics of the gay man’s body, emphasising the AIDS epidemic of the 80s/90s as a case study for how the gay man’s body acts as a source of cultural abjection. My work is based on a mix of archival research from the Lesbian and Gay Newsmedia Archive (LAGNA) in London and interviews of HIV-positive men who have lived through the AIDS epidemic.
In GLORY DAYS, I reflect on the tension between an immutable sexual desire and the knowledge of a lethal virus that was ripping through and obliterating a whole generation of my community.
For those that might be less knowledgeable surrounding the AIDS epidemic, the acronyms that the tongues are spelling out in the work are five very common opportunistic infections and complications related to AIDS.
ELENA NJOABUZIA ONWOCHEI-GARCIA
Elena Njoabuzia Onwochei-Garcia (Spanish/British, b.1996) is a figurative painter. Whilst earning a BA in History and Art History at Durham University, she also undertook a diploma in figurative oil painting during her study abroad in Rome. Elena produces large scale installations of oil paintings that intertwine and revise narratives drawn from art history, history, current events, and her personal history being of Spanish, German and Nigerian descent. A recurring focus of her work is on identities as they are defined through what appears to be real and the possibilities of fiction. Her practice draws from the installations of Richard Serra and the paintings of Goya, Velázquez and Paula Rego. In 2021 she was commissioned by English Heritage as part of the national exhibition, Painting our Past: The African Diaspora in England. Elena’s work is part of the Royal British Society of Artists’ exhibition Rising Stars of 2022 in London.
Growing up between cultural identities (dual ethnicity and nationality) orientated my focus on how identities are defined by what appears to be real and the possibilities of fiction. Having studied euro-centric history and art history and been instructed in the techniques of the Old Masters, I am interested in scrutinising their underlying presumptions, taking apart images, stories, and formats. In my research I consider the interconnections between author, character, and audience, animating ideas by playing them out between them and questioning who is in control? What caricatures are being fabricated and whose identity does that idea silence? Who and how could they see this? In this work I am drawing from Wole Soyinka’s The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite and playing around with the nature of frescos, turning the painting into a structure in-itself, to explore these questions. In manipulating the viewing space, I wanted to reflect on the privilege of having distance from an experience in contrast to being confronted with it so closely and consistently that it dominates one’s being/representation and it doesn’t allow one to hide, distinguish oneself from it or self-define. I want my practice to contribute to building a conscious way of seeing and figurative oil painting, which is inextricably part of imperial history, seemed like the appropriate medium for challenging the visibilities of our histories. The washi paper creates a translucent painting surface that as light refracts through it, like history, exposes and hides its stories.
GREGORY NACHMANOVITCH
Gregory Nachmanovitch is an artist and game designer working with 3D animation, drawing, and sculpture. He was raised in Charlottesville, Virginia, and moved to Brooklyn in 2015 to study sculpture at the Pratt Institute. He has since participated in exhibitions at Lubov Gallery, Lower Cavity, 77 Mulberry and Second Street Gallery, published work with Do Not Research and TXTbooks, and has performed at the New Museum as a part of the group COMPUSA:Live.Nachmanovitch is currently based in Scotland, where he is an MFA candidate at the Glasgow School of Art.
Nachmanovitch’s work questions how masculinity, agency, and fantasy are intertwined with radical political movements and historical narratives in the landscape of our increasingly virtual world.
Manifesto, film, and literature are repossessed as a means of exploring the condition of the contemporary subject: terminally online, and perpetually saturated with media and games.
The Captive is a film about absence, haunting, and nostalgia.
HAYDEN JUDD
Born and raised in Southampton, Hayden is a multi-disciplinary, research-based artist. Graduating with a BA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art (UAL) in 2020, with an Erasmus period at ArtEZ BEAR in Arnhem, Netherlands, Hayden is currently on the MFA course at Glasgow School of Art.
Since moving to Glasgow, Hayden has been focusing on the historic industry of shipbuilding in and around Partick. Whilst researching the subject Hayden aims to create work in an explorative and immersive way, he is examining a period (mid nineteenth century to early twentieth century) when ships were being mass produced. He aims to focus upon key components of the industry and to utilise some elements in isolation that he finds interesting. With large scale redevelopment currently taking place in the area and an increasingly transient population living in many parts of Glasgow, especially Partick, Hayden has found it difficult and frustrating to discover and understand the historic context of the area. He feels there is a lack of easy access to information about the past, so much of the physical landscape has been altered and landmarks from previous eras flattened or removed entirely. This extinguishes many opportunities for discovery and exploration without previous knowledge or a determination to uncover the past that many people would not possess.
LIJIA ZHU
Lijia Zhu is a queer artist, since the childhood love of Chinese traditional culture, but under the force of the mother to learn the piano, but because of her love, she turned to learn calligraphy and painting, then her remarkable literary work brought her into an advertising company, and became an advertise professional, gradually got in touch with a lot of western cultural and commercial art, slowly her has her own thoughts on the art. Her works have been concerned with women, animal protection, social criticism, self-cognition exploration and other aspects. Her works are colourful and creative. In the future, she will continue to engage in artistic research in feminism, natural environment, animal protection and other directions.
The work is inspired by a well-known Chinese fairy tale, which tells the story of how a child named Nezha is born, goes through childhood rebellion, and is resurrected as a god after life and death. At the beginning, I was interested in the various images of the child in the film and television, not smiling, but crying. I think this is because he experienced the ups and downs of his life at a young age. I can sum up three stages of his life: man, devil and God. I envy this kind of life, otherworldly and costly. It was his story that taught me about friendship, revenge, courage, filial piety, rebellion, choosing your own destiny. He dares to love, dares to hate, dares to struggle with the forces of the powerful. Many directors regard him as the prototype made cartoons and movies, but I want to view him as a god to worship, so my work is a shrine, as one of his locker rooms. I want to merge some of the classic elements in Chinese mythology and Greek mythology, some sacred feeling. Add various colours in modern art to express the kind of story that a new god is coming.
LINGLONG WANG
Long (b.1996, China) is an artist who lives and studies in Glasgow, Scotland. She graduated from the China Academic of Art in 2018 with a BA in Fashion Design, studying MFA at Glasgow School of Art currently. Group exhibitions/workshop include, Hold This Space, Glasgow School of Art, 2021.
Long works with sculpture, drawing, text writing… All works are a series of diary documentation, driven by time and personal narrative, they are research of my memories of bodies, emotions, past events. I draw, I tell, I revisit, the moments are documented in this. Lines, dots, shades, alphabets, strokes are alive under the mutual friction between materials and muscular movements of my body, their union promotes organic growth between them…
MONYA RIACHI
Monya Riachi (b.1990, Khenchara, Lebanon) is an artist and architect. Born and raised in Lebanon, she moved to the United Kingdom in 2013, where she worked in full-time employment until earning ‘passport freedom’ in 2020.
Monya has a BArch in Architecture and is currently on the Master of Fine Art program at Glasgow School of Art. Recent group exhibitions include Do Something (Glasgow, 2022), Rinse (online, 2021) and Open Studios (London, 2019). She has been featured in ASC Makers Spotlight, and has a forthcoming residency with Ashkal Alwan in Beirut, Lebanon.
Working across painting, sculpture, and installation, Monya’s practice is driven by a questioning of inherited narratives of personal and geographical identities. Her work responds to social-political events occurring in her home country Lebanon, mediated through cultural artefacts, and processed through time and distance. She employs a deconstructive sculptural process, exploring the voice of her materials as ‘objects-in-becoming’.
In The Revolution is Open / It Felt like Love, the artist features newspapers from October 2019, the beginning of the Lebanese Revolution. Presented in several states, the newspapers are transformed from time-based media into fragments that operate as tools to continue to write the revolution.
NANJOO LEE
Nanjoo Lee (b.1994), born in South Korea, graduated Photography from Chung-Ang University in South Korea and currently studying at Glasgow School of Arts. She is a multi-disciplinary artist whose research interests place on psychoanalysis and feminism. Within the practice, she looks for interactions between herself and her surroundings and puts them into her work, primarily as installation and sculpting with untraditional materials like soap, sugar and gelatine capsules.
My mom, Miae, born in 1967, has a very similar look but has different characteristics from mine. From the moment I remember, we always had different opinions about everything and could not get along very well. For a long time, she was the person who was the closest to me but who I never could understand.
It is the portrait of mom and the outcome of a journey from accepting the differences and loving her. In the beginning, I started to make duck feet that symbolize my mom’s life moment from my perspective. But then, I soon realized that there was no mutual perception between us about who she was and how she should be represented, even though I tried to do it with good intentions. My work consists of a kinetic sculpture with duck feet and an audio piece with transcribed text both in English and Korean.
<Miae 1967>, a sculpture, present my point of view towards mom; more specifically, how the symbol in my mind, which refers to her, has disappeared. <I don’t want to be an animal>, an audio piece, and a text <I don’t want to be an animal (Mother tongue version)>, both are based on my mom’s voice. It combines the voice of reciting the poem we wrote together, and the voice collected from the facetime conversation. It abstractly shows a spontaneous reaction from mom to my artwork. Through the process, I tried to contain the process of portraying her with love and constant interactions despite the impossibility of making a perfect portrait.
RITU ARYA
Currently based in Glasgow, Ritu Arya [b. 1991] is multidisciplinary artist from India. A textile design graduate, she worked in the lifestyle & music industry [as a creative director & content creator] for about a decade before joining the MFA programme at The Glasgow School of Art. Her work revolves around loss, pain, longing & suchlike sentiments with a constant emphasis on the sufferings that unhealed trauma creates. Ritu has exhibited at art events & group shows in Cologne and Glasgow over the past couple of years.
With human emotions & sentiments as the focal point of my practice, I constantly take note of how our fragile minds, and subsequently our bodies, are affected by a myriad of sources around; be it the social-cultural conditioning, the unceasing prejudices and biases in the society, political upheavals, the incessant religious violence and most of all – our own personal battles. Carrying fragments of my own agitation, my work is an attempt to vocalise the vehement commotion inside, as well as an effort to comfort a few in the process.
I found ‘Lost Home’ as one of the by-products, while a significant chapter in my life came to a sudden end. Hand sculpted with clay, it’s a story of silent rumination & longing for home, and the incessant search for what it really is – a roof over your head, these imposed frontiers, another person, or you yourself?
ROSE NICHOLAS
Rose Nicholas (b.1993) is a multi-disciplinary artist from Bristol. She moved to London to study for her BA in Fine Art Painting at Wimbledon College of Art, UAL. Whilst there she got shortlisted for the Indigo Painting Prize and the Art Retreat Prize and went on to do the Feral Space Residency at Kinsley Hall in London.
After leaving university she gained a studio at Block 336 Gallery where she also participated in the running of the gallery. She’s exhibited in group shows including ‘Find the Start’, Copeland Gallery, Peckham (2016); ‘Prop Me Up’, Bankley Gallery, Manchester (2018); ‘Eat Fresh. Start with your Neighbours’, Art Lacuna, Clapham (2019) and ‘Service’, Stow Building, Glasgow (2021). She was also commissioned by Blast Skates to make work for the skate film Blokes (2018) and has been featured in KALTBLUT Magazine (2019).
Suggestive anthropomorphisms, uncontrollable cycles, and surreal domesticity lie at the core of Rose’s practice. Working with found objects that she takes out of their natural habitat and introduces to a new environment, testing their functionality. Her work mixes everyday objects with the less familiar, they can consist of unsympathetic mechanical components such as motors, pumps, and industrial equipment which are then integrated with submissive objects like net curtains, plates and mattresses. From exploring the incongruity of these groups, the work possesses a humorous tone and commands the space as something terribly important, yet it is seemingly useless.
In more current work Rose has become concerned with agriculture equipment and its utilitarian form; how when function dictates form it can create a brutal compassionless object. When looking at these objects it conjures up feelings of horror, trepidation, and savagery. Her work clearly considers these feelings with comparisons to our everyday lives. At the heart of The Everyday is consumption.
CHARLIE HODGSON
Charlie Hodgson (b.1996, London) is a British artist based in Glasgow. He graduated with a BA Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2018, and has shown work in London and Hamburg. His exhibition (…) opens May 5th at Limbo, London.
I work in painting, printmaking and photography to explore my wide-ranging interests in visual cultures and art historical contexts. I utilise found images alongside my own photographs, everyday documentation, notes, and drawings, to create a body of work that navigates the complexities of different visual ephemera, and the relationships that can be formed in the collision of these materials.
WENYI PAN
Wenyi Pan is a Chinese artist born in Hangzhou, receiving her Bachelor’s degree in Public Art from China Academy of Art in 2021. Towards the analysis of social phenomena and psychology of modern people, Wenyi’s art works focus on sculptures and installations using a variety of materials, and also touch on moving images. In 2019, Wenyi went to Italy for the International Workshop of Public Sculpture and exhibited her stone sculpture work Dumb Show in Carrara, Italy. In the same year, her sculptures Above 37℃ and Twinswere shown in the Youth Sculpture Group Exhibition held in Hangzhou. Her outdoor public installation work Red Tower was exhibited in Beijing, 2021.
Wenyi Pan’s practice focuses on a feminist critic of the current living situation of specific groups of Chinese women. These women’s’ issues cannot always find a public platform for expression, with the masquerade of superficial progress offering an insidious cover up, to the injustice and pain. Compelled by this motive, Wenyi’s works strive for the balance between direct and illusive, private and public. This influences her choice of materials, which are varied and adapted according to each specific theme. Wenyi is concerned with narratives of individual female trauma, which allude to a more complex collective tragedy for womenkind.
Fairyland, addressed the topic of one trafficked woman, but relates to the countless neglected female victims of rampant trafficking in China throughout the last century, and to modern young women who find it difficult to speak out. By bringing these dimensions together in this work, Wenyi presents this situation to her new Glaswegian audience.
YOLANDA CEBALLOS
(b. Monterrey, México) Studied Architecture at the Technological Institute of Monterrey (ITESM). She worked with the architects Mauricio Rocha in Mexico City and Agustín Landa in Monterrey. Currently a beneficiary of the System for National Creators of Art (SNCA) in sculpture. Received the FONCA Program for Young Creators 2018 -2019 in sculpture. In 2013 and 2017 she received the PECDA fellowship in Nuevo León. Participated in the 5th edition of the Bancomer MACG program.
She is currently exhibiting her solo show: (change of state) (Galería Pequod Co., 2022). Her last solo show was: Cinco de Septiembre de Dos mil Dieciseis (Galeria Hilario Galguera, 2019). She has participated in exhibitions like: Modos de ver, (Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, 2018); XII Bienal FEMSA, Poéticas del decrecimiento, ¿Cómo vivir mejor con menos? and Bienal Nacional de Monterrey (CONARTE, 2016).
Her work forms part of the Phillips/Yuyito Collection and Centro de las Artes Monterrey.
Yolanda Ceballos has been working on a document of displaced time and space since 2013.
She documents transitions in life while making a conscious relationship between body and memory with time and space. The transitions are portrayed in her use of always changing ephemeral like materials.
PHYLLIS MCGOWAN
Phyllis McGowan is a Glaswegian artist; she has a first-class honours degree in Sculpture and Environmental Art from the Glasgow School of Art and is currently engaged on the MFA there. Her sculptures have been exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy and Tatha Gallery in Scotland and at the Cello Factory in London, winning the 2018 Ingram Prize. Her poems have been published by Causeway Cabhsair.
Phyllis McGowan writes alongside reading in a citational practice forming auto fictional narratives to find deeper meaning. She works across forms including film, sound, and text in a diaristic style, using her own thoughts and experiences and those of the theorists she is reading. Her practice draws from her interest and research in writers who are examining the world from a power analysis, her life experience, and her background in community work.
NAOMI GARRIOCK
Naomi Garriock is a Glasgow-based artist who received a BA in Drawing and Painting at Edinburgh College of Art in 2003. Her practice is in painting, printmaking, and participation activity. As well as her solo painting practice, she is Basic Mountain, a gallery and project space. She works internationally across all levels of art education and consultancy, in museum learning and programs.
Recent works exhibited and commissions include Collective Gallery; Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop; Edinburgh Art Festival; Glasgow International; EMBASSY Gallery; New Contemporaries; and the Royal Scottish Academy.
This painting is one of an ongoing series that depicts imaginary art classrooms, inhabited by figures who are fully immersed in the act of making their own art. These mixed groups of adults and children are shown working together in parity, independent of one and other, safe within their own sphere of focus and concentration.
The re-staging of artist friends and acquaintances alongside; former students; promotional studio images of famous artists working; and demonstration photos from old art pedagogy books; opens a space for wider interpretation beyond the first visual impression.
Naomi Garriock’s primary interest is in the imagery of art instruction as found in historical How to Books, and in why watching others in the act of making remains as compelling and popular as ever, via YouTube tutorials and TV shows. Each painting is made by Naomi attempting to follow a specific set of instructions from one of these sources. This self-conscious following of others casts her as the life-long learner, which in turn allows Naomi to join-in and paint together with these people she is painting, painting.
HEEJUN CHOI
Heejun Choi currently studies in Master of Fine Art from The Glasgow school of art. She attended Dongguk University in Seoul and received her BA in Paintings.Heejun Choi had solo exhibited at Out of the Box, Seoul (2021), participated in several group exhibitions, including Seoul Arts centre, Seoul (2018), COEX, Seoul (2017), Luda Gallery, Seoul (2017).
Heejun Choi borrows from Heinrich’s Domino theory and expresses the results of issues in the domestic, as drawings. These new works contain a message and warning to those who provided the cause through to the consequences (death) of a family members’ mistakes. In more detail, due to parental carelessness, children suffer from scars and trauma that they will never forget. These children are eventually symbolized via the bodies of dead livestock, those who are unable to communicate that they cannot endure the painful time and choose to die.
JAMES EPPS
James Epps lives and works in Glasgow. Solo exhibitions include, A twist of the Hand, Cambridge Museum of Classical Archaeology, 2021, Off prompt, The Playhouse, Norwich, 2019, Here on in, exterior wall painting on Eyre Lane, Bloc Projects, Sheffield, 2015, and Just like that, OUTPOST, Norwich, 2014. Group exhibitions include, Service, Glasgow School of Art, 2021, and Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize, UK touring venues, 2018. Epps was Augusta artist in residence at the British School at Rome in 2017 and was awarded Arts Council England, Developing Your Creative Practice Funding in 2020.
James Epps works with drawing, collage, and printmaking. Pointing the viewer towards materials, colour, and language, Epps explores the slippage between text and image. Text sits like disjointed phrases, with a sense of promise to be grasped – it is for the viewer to see and untangle how the elements operate together.
JI YOON LEE
Ji Yoon Lee (b.1992, South Korea) is an artist who lives and studies in Glasgow, Scotland. She graduated BA in Fine art from Dongguk University in Seoul, South Korea. Currently, Ji Yoon is studying for her MFA at Glasgow School of Art. In 2019, she was a resident artist in the creative residency programme <Silence Awareness Existence> at Arteles Creative Centre in Finland. Ji Yoon was also chosen to be the 13th artist for the <Sewoon, The Laboratory for Artist (2019)> project at Space BA Gallery (Seoul, South Korea). Additionally, she has participated in diverse group exhibitions: <Service (2021)>, Glasgow School of Art (Glasgow), <Color 2019>, CICA Museum (South Korea), <Korheart (2016)>, Holiday Inn (London), <The Sculpture (2014)>, Samsung Electronics, (South Korea)
Ji Yoon Lee is a multidisciplinary artist who deals with a wide range of materials such as video art, installation art and musical element. Her research is based on the acceleration in rapid modernisation, a vague transparent boundary between the digital world and the individual and questioning of humanity in the digitalised future. In this Interim show, Ji Yoon is presenting two-channel video artworks. In this project, by highlighting the fact that the body is the material that all human beings are, Ji Yoon is using bodily memory as a method to question the digital-focused life.
ANNA KOUTSAFTI
Anna Koutsafti was born and raised in Athens. Primarily a printmaker, she has a BA from École Nationale Supérieure d’Art de Bourges and is currently working towards her MFA at the Glasgow School of Art. She has participated in numerous exhibitions, mostly in hermother’s living room.
Anna Koutsafti questions the digital realm, the contradictions of popular imagery and sophisticated abstraction. In Who Slips Into My Robot Body And Whispers To My Ghost? the artist is exploring the ghostly aspect of the glitched image, the interruption in the regular flow of high definition images and the insecurity it brings. Juxtaposed with Ghosting, the work is an evocation of what is left unsaid, the spectral aspect of intimacy and autofiction.
JULIA JOHNSTONE
Julia Johnstone is an artist and arts producer based in Glasgow. She most recently directed and produced the Glasgow School of Art Christmas Card short film, The Mouse (2021). Julia has exhibited, performed and produced/curated in various group and solo shows including at Glasgow Film Theatre (2021), Wasps Artist Studios (2021), The Glasgow School of Art Degree Show (2021), Sixfoot Gallery (2021), Saltspace (2020), The Glue Factory (2020), Budapest (2019), Vienna (2019), The Old Hairdressers (2019), GY Open House Festival (2018), The Art School (2017) and Tramway (2017). Julia co-curated, produced and hosted the Interlude Films Festival at SWG3, Transmission and ISO Design (2021). Over 2022 Julia will be showing work at the Glasgow Short Film Festival (including a nomination for Scotland’s Short Film Award). She is a selected artist for the RSA New Contemporaries 2021 in Edinburgh.
Julia Johnstone is a Glasgow based artist who graduated with a BA(Hons) Painting and Printmaking in 2021 and is currently studying for her MFA at the Glasgow School of Art. Her practice is informed by performance art documentation and the different methods ofrecording live art. Her work discusses themes of liveness, documentation, moving image and looks to question how an audience might encounter performance art. Her most recent work looks to investigate the relationship between performance, painting and filmmaking, and questions the “act of recording” as a key component of these material processes. She is interested in layered perspectives, the space and durational aspects within art making and looks to explore how an audience might experience artworks involving different material processes.
KATE POWER
Kate Power is an artist and writer from Tarntanya (Adelaide) in Australia. Kate completed a BA in Fine Art at the South Australian School of Art in 2014 and is currently undertaking an MFA at the Glasgow School of Art. She has presented work widely in Australia and inSeoul, New York City, and Reykjavik. She has undertaken residencies at The British School in Rome, NARS Foundation in Brooklyn, and SIM in Reykjavik, Iceland. Kate is a 2020 recipient of the Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Art Scholarship.
Kate Power’s practice embraces video, performance, textiles, sculpture, text and installation to observe coexistence and enforced social structures that can complicate the way people relate to one another. She seeks to elaborate the gaps between language and gesture, and the performative and the social to think about how seemingly insignificant moments affect us psychologically and physiologically.
The ways that power can be used subtly in relationships to reinforce dominance is the focus of her recent work. Pleasure in the domain of resistance proposes deviation and plasticity as a form of refusal.
CONOR MARTIN-O’DOWD
Conor Martin-O’Dowd is a 23-year-old Contemporary Irish artist from Belfast (Northern Ireland) living in Glasgow. His practice is a combination of both sculpture, Photography and Digital media. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Fine Art from the University of Brighton (2021) where he spent three years specialising, learning, and practicing the traditional techniques of printmaking. Throughout his time there, he had over several public and private exhibitions which led him to curate a solo show earlier this year. (Comheadana Fisiuil’). He is currently enrolled on the MFA programme at the Glasgow School of Art and is engaging in both a combination of ethnographic and active research working closely with the local LGBTQ+ community in Glasgow to fuel his current practice and research.
Conor Martin-O’Dowd’s practice explores various subthemes within the spectrum of Queer Theory. These include Language and the study of Queer Etymology, Queer Coding, and the existence of Queer temporalities alongside highlighting the modern and contextual significance of ‘the Queer Body’ and how its position within contemporary art and society is both interpreted and presented.
His preferred mediums for his practice include a combination of both photography, sculpture, and digital media. He uses these to challenge and highlight his interest in the artistic boundaries that surround Queer identity within our heteronormative society.
This piece investigates and focuses on breaking down the ever-constant social stigma surrounding the ‘coming out’ stage in the LGBTQIA+ community. Through aspects of his findings, he uses both a combination of self-driven research which examines hidden Queer Coding within Children’s literature and ethnographic research to echo his artistic influences and direction on a practical level.
Through redesigning the structure of a wardrobe drastically to create a sculpture, he is not only attempting to provoke conversation and highlight the poignancy and emotional significance of this widely shared experience but also trying to create a new perspective for his audience – to view this experience through a positive lens in terms of the deconstruction of existing heteronormative social constructs that are typically associated with sexuality, gender, and identity. Martin-O’Dowd designed this piece for his audience as both a practical and social experiment in attempt to highlight his interest in the relationship between both materiality and space through the emergence of queer theory within the contemporary artworld.
OLIVER CANESSA
Oliver Canessa (born 1994, Gibraltar) is a multidisciplinary artist who works across text, sculpture, sound, video, installation and print. His work explores problems of knowledge, dishonest signalling, acting in bad faith, psycho-geography and the virtualisation of relationships. Canessa studied a BA in Psychological & Behavioural Sciences at the University of Cambridge (2014–2018) and in 2020 he was shortlisted for the Aesthetica Art Prize for his piece Invitation to Untitled.
This installation seeks to bring relationships out of black mirrors, reflect on what technology does to our emotional lives, and interrupt the naturalised ‘swipe logic’ in our age of cultural narcissism. By considering the casualties of the attention economy, the archiving and storying of memory, and how the digital world changes behaviour, Title holds forth as an unchanging, forced contemplation.