Author: Tom Jeffreys
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The Beast is not only the Tiger
The top floor of a modernist apartment block seems an unlikely location for the studio of an artist best-known for his engagement with botany. Nonetheless this is where we find Alberto Baraya, one of Colombia’s most prominent contemporary artists: his working environment not the cavernous white-walled spaces favoured by Bogotá’s other leading practitioners, but a…
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New Wine, Old Pots
When it comes to starting afresh, sometimes it helps to acknowledge a lack of control. That’s the thought that begins to crystallise while visiting the headquarters of De Martino, one of Chile’s most innovative winemakers. We’re standing in a large, bare, warehouse, just south of Santiago, among rows of several hundred clay amphorae. It’s like…
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Fungiculture
This summer sees the launch of a brand new academic journal: Fungiculture. Subtitled “A Journal for Psychedelic Culture Studies” Fungiculture was conceived over the past six months or so by a group of course-mates from Goldsmiths in order to provide, in their words, “a space for the experimental and playful cultivation of ideas and practices,…
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Touching Wood
Rarely do curators at large public museums co-ordinate concurrent exhibitions to complement each other. But by chance or design, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (MAC) in Santiago, Chile, is bucking the trend. Of the half-dozen or so solo exhibitions currently on show, there are three which share a common material interest: wood. They form, if…
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The Dogs of El Chalten
The village of El Chalten is a service settlement. Located in the Parque Nacional los Glaciares in Patagonia, southern Argentina, the village is a four-hour walk to a network of ancient blue-white glaciers and the sharp, serrated peaks of Fitz Roy, Cerro Torre and Cerro Chalten. Thousands of tourists come to El Chalten each year,…
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Objects in the Field
Collaboration between the arts and the sciences is both increasingly prominent and, perhaps as a consequence, increasingly problematic. Projects and practices describing themselves as interdisciplinary collaborations are on the rise, in part as a result of funding availability. But it’s also more complex than that: art is always drawn to power, and few institutions in…
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To Leave a Light Impression
An exhibition of large-scale landscape photographs of ethereal beauty opens today at the Bermondsey Street outpost of White Cube. Darren Almond’s latest work follows on from his last solo show with the gallery, 2008’s Moons of the Iapetus Ocean, and includes images taken as far afield as Patagonia, Tasmania and Cape Verde. The heart of…
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London Art Fair 2014
There’s something reassuring about London Art Fair. The last couple of years have been a particularly turbulent time for London’s galleries. As the big names continue to multiply (Pace, Victoria Miro, David Zwirner etc), some of London’s most consistently innovative spaces have shuddered to a halt. All the while London Art Fair continues, offering up…
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Anais Tondeur – I.55
Or, the girl who swallowed the remnants of a forest. “A century ago, a young girl swallowed a pencil.” So begins I.55, a beguiling new book by contemporary artist Anaïs Tondeur, which had its official launch at GV Art in December. Tondeur is not an artist who does things by halves, and the book’s launch…
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PYG
Toby is one influential pig. As the very first learned pig to turn his tricks upon the stage, he provided a template for countless subsequent acts at fairs and festivals throughout the nineteenth century, and following this proliferation, a richly evocative motif for poets and sundry satirists. He is also, of course, the inspiration for…
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Shorelines Festival 2013
The perennial danger of the small town literary festival is that it takes place solely within the confines of a conference centre / tent / town hall or other academic / municipal space. However well-advertised, accessible (geographically, financially) and welcoming, there is always then a potential for division between inside and outside. This becomes pronounced…