O. B. De Alessi

1 -25 JULY 2010 PRIVATE VIEW WED 30 JUNE 6-9PM

Oblong are proud to showcase six artists who, via very different means, truly resonate with Oblongs ethos and view of art. Each artist represents a different aspect of our artistic outlook and here we present them not as a collectively

curated group, but as individual entities who each fulfill their own artistic agendas.

James Anderson creates work that explores magnetism and the way its forces manipulates materials. The artwork’s tactile and functional qualities create an interactive desire, yet we are held back by its new status as an ‘art’ object. By changing the aesthetic qualities of something so familiar we can question the objects intended function. The artist does not have a particular style, nor does he prefer one material or process to another. Rather, he will

seek the most appropriate means and material to find, and make explicit, those connections.

O. B. De Alessi’s work focuses on the creation of new narratives and alternative identities through the use of already existing characters and icons. Working with performance, site -specific installation, drawing, video, internet based projects, and comic writing, De Alessi explores the way iconography, mythology, fiction and pop culture can be blended and used to represent one’s own personal life story. Her alter ego ‘Oscar’ is a character created entirely through cultural references and which lives, therefore, in a world where the icon corresponds to the meaning it stands for. The narrative of her work is often non–linear and wishes, in this sense, to find and re-propose the sameness of an archetypal figure within the fragmentation of a self-dominated by the mass media. Her installations can be seen as stages where a certain story happens, or has already happened. In this way, they can be seen as a single scene from a potentially longer narrative, one whose beginning and end are unknown and can, therefore, be changed continuously.

Richard Ducker explores the representation of obsolescence and nostalgia through the monumental and created artworks by which memory and the present collide. These works coalesce around certain themes which articulate a notion of loss: a sense of displacement; narratives imagined, remembered, or real; the body as an absent presence; and a domestic disquiet. There is a muted quality, where any sense of mobility is associated with instability, and the insecurity of history. To this end, the use of materials combines the weight of concrete with the disposability of the everyday, establishing a dialogue between their formal presence, and associative past. They are made by either covering objects in cement, or incorporating cement within an ensemble of found materials which are at once somber and humorous. He combines the found with the made object to suggest private stories embedded in works which ‘evoke nostalgia, myths soaked in dreams, and fairy-tales gone wrong’.

Simon Ings works in a diverse spectrum of materials including stone, dust, ash, clay and plaster. Simon describes the material as an integral part of every piece he creates and focuses on allowing the natural qualities in everything he works with to be apparent. Dust and ash are inherently transient and fragile -characteristics which he has used to illustrate ideas of trace, brevity and the ephemeral. Stone conveys permanence, and Simon likes to see this as a material which responds as you work with it; there is a balance which must be struck between artist and material and a fine line exists between taking away too much or too little. He states that the work he produces is without a particular theme; the only two factors which links his pieces is that they are all responses to his own mortality, and the way in which he works with the negative in his treatment of the materials. This uncontrived way of working gives the work a sense of simplicity and sincerity.

Anna Kyriacou makes her seductively simple art-works look like the imagery we remember from our childhood. Yet her crude lines and unrestricted language invite us into a dialogue of dualities, taking us on a journey that both messes things up and harmonizes dichotomies. Her work looks at what children do in a way that rejects and simultaneously observes the boundaries that adults often create when dealing with children and their representation. Anna approaches the subject of sexuality with sensitivity, entering a spiritual exploration, journeying through social and religious limitation and tapping into a wider and wiser universal consciousness. Anna does not claim that her work has ‘the answer,’ instead it offers us space to consider, remember and experience the intriguing world of childhood.

Julia Mariscal works in sculpture, installation, photography, video and performance unified through a concern with movement in relation to the musicality of our vision. The dynamism that is presented in the work, evoke the idea of the beginning of a process. Julia gives a priority to the performance that each material has (subjective, no official perspective) as a starting point, to later move into the signifier of the elements used. This process is in a search for opening up to engagement, habit and preconception. Departing from an interest on how the motion of our surroundings is affecting our perception. Mariscal works with fragile subjectivities translated into her sculptures in a search for the viewer to navigate the work through the fragmentations, distortions, transparencies, transitions; states that have a hierarchy on movement.

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