Kunsthaus Zurich

At the end of my ski-ing trip in Switzerland I was pleasantly surprised by my Dad telling me about a Picasso exhibition in Zurich, of which works have come from the world's most renowned collections! The timing was very convenient too as we were flying back to Manchester from Zurich, so it wasn't as opportunity to miss. It was such a massive art gallery, but the Picasso exhibition itself wasn't that big. It was just enough to keep me interested, and as an artist I'm interested in I looked at his paintings and drawings in fine detail, staring at every little section. It was also helpful listening to the handheld phone narration as it explained all about his 'Pink' & 'Blue' periods, his Cubism period and his lead onto Surrealism. He also painted many different portraits of his lover Marie-Therese Walter, and looking at the way his paintings progressed, it's interesting to see the sexual imagery involved in his work, and realizing that he really was obsessed with sex. I like the way he sees things differently, like at first, in one of his paintings that looked just like random cylinders of stone, it was actually a nude posing in a very erotic position with her bosoms erect.... As shown above ^^^
It was good to see his sculpture work as well as his drawings- (which also included a comic strip), and a few paintings which didn't seem Picasso style at all...

The rest of the art gallery was quite substantial in size, and what I was surprised about was how empty it was. I didn't realize how many famous artworks were in the gallery- like I didn't realize how well known this gallery was; and I'd never even heard about it! For example there were works by Klimt, Matisse, Kandinsky, Van Gogh, Monet, Chagall, Dali, Breton and Giacommetti who I studied particularly close to at A-Level. In the end though it all got a bit too much, like all art galleries do- I get very tired from concentrating and trawling round an art gallery for 3 hours. But nevertheless, it was a particularly impressive art gallery, and I'm very glad I managed to visit it as part of my travels!

Van Gogh

Marc Chagall

Andre Breton

Claude Monet

Alberto Giacommetti

Paul Cezanne

Unknown

Valerie Belin

Sculpture in Zurich train station!

Ice Bar

 This is my first experience of an Ice Bar/Hotel in Switzerland which you could also stay the night, with your beds covered in animal skin! At first glance it just looks like an igloo, and I didn't realise it was open until a woman came out and invited us in. This has definitely persuaded me to check out the big ice hotel in Sweden, as this place utterly blew me away. It's design was flawless. Absolutely incredible what you can do with snow & ice; I mean as if I could love snow even more! :)
Here's the website for the Swedish Ice hotel... WOW...http://www.icehotel.com/

Blank Media Collective

I created a Blank Media Collective portfolio a few months back because my sister's boyfriend Neil said I should create a portfolio as he's friends with a guy called Dan English who is the Communications Co-ordinator of Blank Media Collective and also a DJ at Joshua Brooks' nights such as Micron. Dan is now a friend of mine and introduced me to the guy who runs the whole thing (who, if I remember is called Mark?) at an exhibition at the Green Room about 3 months ago which was advertising the whole 'Blank Weekend', that BMC were organising round Manchester. He said that they were opening a space for artists to exhibit their work-any artists, and Mark said that he saw my portfolio online and said that the work I uploaded was good which is awesome to hear from someone I've just met, let alone a guy who is quite high up artiscally. I need to contact him again and see if I can get my own exhibition as he said I could get my own space... many images running through my mind of free drinks, talking to artists and most of all showing off my work! I just need to get going with it really as I have been slacking with it all.
Anyway, I have uploaded new photos on the website so check it out here >>> http://www.blankmediacollective.org/portfolios/alexcussons/

Mid Year Review Show

Carrying on from the 'Shelter' project I decided to kinda carry it on with the whole distortion of identity idea. So I got a few cut outs of faces and bodies from magazines and swapped them to make them look weird & mis-matched. I did the same with facial features of different sizes and shapes which reminded me of an artist who did a similar thing who I have looked at before called Sara... something.. I know it's terrible but I can't remember her name for the life of me! Well I decided to carry this on but with photos instead.. the first one didn't work so well, but it was all photo-shop experiments.. I actually ended up using Photoshop to how I wanted to.. It was all testing and trying different tools to see which ones worked. I placed my friends' features onto one face so they all collided.. I thought this was a lot of fun, and a lot of them got awfully creeped out by these images, which is the reaction I wanted. I also swapped mine and my sister's features which was very strange to look at as I know, when we were younger we used to get told we looked very alike, so I thought I'd twist it around and see what would happen if we did in fact swap features.. end result.. very strange. I ended up testing the warp tool and the like... was hard to get the desired effects at first, but I kept trying with it and got there in the end. The most fun I had was making myself and my boyfriend into a dog and a cat... and then myself into an owl. I chose those particular animals as it just seemed suited to our personalities.. and for an owl.. I've always thought that if I could be any bird, it would be an owl, as I can see similarities. In the end I decided to go for these 6 images out of all the different images I experimented with as they seemed to go with each other in the exhibition, and seemed to create a pattern in the way I planned them out on the wall. These images are below in no particular order.

After our review I had my presentation with my tutors.. They were actually helpful in where I could take it next. Although they said I need a more sustained practice and the project needs a stronger concept.. I do agree with this, I just need to stay motivated as I really enjoyed this project and I want to take it further so I'm thinking of taking the animal/human theme and creating a stronger idea and hopefully going in to research Greek mythology and human & animal like creatures.. My mother is really interested in the whole Greek mythology stories, and we had a big discussion about it over the Christmas period. I could tell how passionate she was about all the creatures and stories! She lent me a really old book she had from her childhood which was battered to pieces but had such wonderful stories in. I couldn't stop reading it! I would love to take it with me to uni but I can't as my mum is quite fond of it and doesn't want it ruined which is fair enough. 

I was also thinking of looking into animal habits and how they relate to humans, or just swapping them round like animals doing human activities and humans doing animal activities; I think it could be potentially quite funny too. Because I'm away ski-ing in Switzerland at this present time I would love to put animals on skis as I brought a fancy dress costume with me to ski in (giraffe outfit) so it got me thinking of how weird it would look to humanitse animals on skis. . . That's just a thought for now. However I definately want to carry these ideas through as they are too awesome to miss, so watch this space...

Unspooling

Before Christmas our course did one last thing together, and that was visit the Cornerhouse gallery together to have a look at their most recent exhibitions. 

Unspooling- Artists & Cinema was the exhibition held at the Cornerhouse. This exhibition presents the way particular artists use film and moving images to create something artistically productive. I thought it was a genuinely interesting exhibition as I love to see how artists portray film in different ways. 

One of my favourites was of Michael Borremans's black box which contained a room full of minature sized people watching a film in an exhibition. I just loved the way you could look in and be a spectator yourself but outside of this quiet little world, so you couldn't intervene. 

Another one I particularly loved which I couldn't stop watching was of Stefan Zeyen's video called 'Farewell.' It was of this woman looking at the camera in a convertible car from the back while it drives off. However, it never actually drives away, the woman stays the same distance from the camera except within the short time of this film, her image corrodes until the viewer cannot see her anymore. There is something about this that caught my eye- I think it's the mystery that it holds.. why the woman is staring at the camera and why her image fades- something about it that is beautiful to me. 

One piece of art that I nearly missed in the gallery was Sheena Macrae's Odyssey which was hidden around the corner on the top floor. This was a remix projection of 2001: A Space Odessey reconfigured into scans in between mirrors facing each other so that it was a never ending image of eternity. I liked how this could be played around with my shadows and seeing how many images of myself would extend into the never-ending mirrors. Beautiful. 

There were many still pieces too like photographic images or paintings which looked like photographs or collages etc.There was one I couldn't stop looking at which was Elizabeth McApine's Hyena Stomp. This was a square spiral of film frames of actors who all had their eyes closed- each line being a different colour- which was really fun to look at-trying to recognise the actor or film they have been in. This was a re-rendering of a Frank Stella painting which I had never in fact heard of- so I had a look at his work and discovered that his use of colour and shapes in his works is really unique. So I will definately have a look at him again. 

I really enjoyed this exhibition, there were so many pieces of art to look at, and intently as well. Most exhibitions  I don't look at in too much detail, but every single piece I didn't just try to look at it, but I tried to see. The interesting factor of the way film was used really drew me in. From simple installations such as a pile of televisions with different films going on in each to projections of the skeleton onto the human body- these type of artworks really sucked me in & gave me a hallucinatory effect, like I was stuck in these artworks. This is what I want from an exhibition- to take everything on board, and try and explain to myself of what they signify. This is what I want when people look at my artworks. I think my work has a lot of mystery contained, but a lot of second guessing as well. I want people to approach my artworks the way I approached this exhibition. I see my work as being quite similar to that of Sally Golding's work- in the way that she projects images onto the body so that the person is not recognisable to us. This is what I wanted to acheive from the 'Shelter' project. I wanted to show how we shelter ourselves from society with the use of covering ourselves up- so I showed this through masks. I believe we all feel the need to cover ourselves up from life and so I provided a distortion through beauty and ugliness. 

All in all I thought this exhibition to be be very influential to me, and I think I have a few ideas of where I want to go to next. My only problem now is which one to try out first?!

Michael Borreman's Black Box

Sheena Macrae's Odyssey

Elizabeth McAlpine's Hyena Stomp

Grotto

So after Jermyn gave us the task of researching different ways of screen printing onto various different materials, he introduced us to a new project he and his team were working on which was this shop called 'Grotto' they were going to open for a month in the Northern Quarter in Manchester until December 24th. They managed to get the shop for free from someone they knew so didn't have to pay any rent for the shop, (apart from the use of electricity etc). The aim was to sell artists' work by not ripping them off like most shops would do as they require a certain amount of money to keep their profits up and keep their shop running. Grotto would provide artists with the money they deserve for what they've made.-80% of the final price. So in fact the guys running the shop would get £0 unless they sold something themselves. They based the shop around the idea of Christmas being a little kooky and offbeat with not a typical view of Christmas by artists creating wrapping paper or Christmas cards. And for the final price of this they would give the artist 20%. Jermyn said that we could contribute as little or as much as we wanted to the shop, which was a great way to showcase our work to the public. It was great to visit it and see it running in action, it was like a working dream for them. I really like the idea of not ripping the artists like most shops do, so was fully up for supporting the idea. I produced my own design of Christmas cards for the shop- 2 in fact! I had designed a Christmas card of my mum dressed as Santa Claus and my dog acting like Rudolph 2 years ago while I was doing my art foundation for a project I was doing at the time based on dreams. The other card was based on a Christmas robot that cooked your Christmas dinner in his oven belly, and served it to you. I've added these designs below.