This month we have run a summer exhibition of any artist that had submitted for the RA summer show in the last five years and was NOT selected.
We celebrate you!
Each year since 1769, the RA has held a summer exhibition with over 16,000 submissions.
Every year the majority of submissions are rejected.
over on the gallery pages, you will find work related to this open call. Here this month you will our usual mix of poetry, short stories, and critique about the art and creative world and how we navigate this…
Artist name - Carl Rowe
Website - www.carlrowe.co.uk
Social media links - @carlroweart
Bio
Carl Rowe is an artist living and working in the East of England. His visual practice is based at OUTPOST studios in Norwich, and he works part-time as a Senior Research Fellow at Norwich University of the Arts. Rowe has engaged with creative and academic projects widely in the UK and in Germany, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Canada, the US, Estonia, Japan, Malaysia, and Egypt. In addition to studio production, he works on public art initiatives including billboards, print portfolios, and commissions. In 2018 he was invited by the charity Hospital Rooms to make work for Woodlands Mental Health Unit at Ipswich Hospital and again in 2019 for the Northside House Forensic Mental Health Unit. Recent creative workshops have been devised for Hospital Rooms, HMP Norwich, Clear Channel, and the Change Minds charity. Rowe is a member of OUTPOST Gallery and Studios, East Anglia Art Fund, and the Printmakers Council, and a trustee of Norfolk Contemporary Arts Society.
Abstract
This very short piece of writing takes a short drive around the inner ring road of Norwich as a prompt for a poetic analysis of electrostatic interference. Following the model of Barthes' Mythologies, the piece combines the macro with the micro, the universal with the autobiographical. Radio Interference
Radio Interference
Grapes Hill is not particularly steep, but like anywhere in Norfolk, an incline has a name. It was a bright sunny morning in May and the Peugeot van cruised the final section of Grapes Hill, towards the traffic lights. The radio was tuned to BBC Radio 3 and the presenter was providing a preamble to the next piece of music, Jonathan Dove’s ‘Vast Ocean of Light’, performed by the choir of Westminster Abbey. Dove’s contemporary piece is inspired by Phineas Fletcher’s 17thC poem Vast Ocean of Light, which starts,
Vast Ocean of light, whose rayes surround
The Universe, who know'st nor ebb, nor shore,
It is prosaic to mention this, but just at the bottom of Grapes Hill, for whatever reason, the radio in the van struggles to pick up a good signal. Crackles of interference perforate the choral opening and continue through the first bars with electronic flaps, pops, and crumples. I remember hearing that radio interference contains static from the afterglow of the Big Bang. That thought came into my mind and I have to say I was struck by the happenchance conflation of static on the van radio with that of ethereal choral music itself responding to the magnitude of the universe.
Let us think of the Big Bang as a podcast, where cosmic microwave background serves as reruns of the original broadcast. Did anyone pick up these radio signals before the invention of the radio? Ten thousand years ago did anyone touch an acid-bearing fruit to a copper-rich mineral deposit and taste the weak signal of quantum fluctuations and then look up to the stars? Strange to think of those signals bouncing through the expanding universe like erratic projectiles in a pinball machine, occasionally finding a receiver and flapping, popping, and crumpling as the score goes up and up and up.
My grandfather was an amateur radio enthusiast at the turn of the last century, at first building simple crystal sets and then progressing to valves and then transistors as technology advanced. Numbed for life by the horror of the First World War, he found solace in constructing mechanisms that could amplify the distant calls from other countries. In about 1970 he gave me a small transistor radio that he had purchased at a discount through some kind of breakfast cereal promotion. It was the size of a pack of butter, with a simple lateral tuning dial and a small ariel that clipped neatly to the top of the set. To switch it on you scrolled the rotating on/off button, which doubled as volume control. There was a gentle resistance as the reed mechanism of the switch advanced to the on position, followed by a softened click (more a donk), which was accompanied by an unruly cackle of static, like audible sleepy dust cracking from early morning eyelids. There was no way of avoiding this abrasive awakening, no matter how one turned that switch. I took the transistor radio set to school with me, showed it to friends in the playground, and then into the assembly at the end of the day. In the middle of the assembly, I pulled the radio from my pocket and edged the milled on/off/volume disc downwards with my thumbnail until the donk and then the crackle, and then the eyes of everyone looking for the source of the offending broadcast. I avoided detection, avoided confiscation of the radio, but on the way home dunked it into a deep puddle of water, Mott the Hoople drowning and spluttering and eventually silenced. The radio dried out but never worked after that.
Nostalgia is stupefying, I know, and it is aging. But I do harbour a fondness for the vagaries of analogue systems. I sort of get the ‘warmth of vinyl’ thing, but more stirring than that is the sound of medium wave, long wave, and, especially, short wave radio transmissions. The wow and flutter the hiss, the mournful whistling, the phantoms, the music from the desert, the rapid morse code that blips throughout the night. These are my wireless Proustian triggers. Radio enthusiasts give poetic names to the various types of interference such as spurious emissions, fundamental overload, and harmonics. There is something enchanting about the thought of short-wave transmissions bouncing off the stratosphere, being influenced by cloud formations, tall buildings, and flocks of migrating birds. Head under the blankets and radio set tuned deliberately between stations, these enigmatic transmissions assumed an exotic guise, radio oasis, whispers from beyond, messages from deep space, the chattering of satellites.
The notion of interference can be viewed from the perspective of reduction as well as addition. Signal loss, data loss, corruption, obliteration, and jamming. This is beautifully expressed in Katie Paterson’s artwork Earth-Moon-Earth, whereby Paterson uses a transmitting technique known as ‘moon bounce’ to relay Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata in Morse code from Earth to the moon and back to Earth. When received back on earth, the relayed data is translated into musical notation, which then plays autonomously on a grand piano. Some of the data is lost in the process, deflected by atmospheric conditions resulting in a rendition of Moonlight Sonata with some notes missing. It is left to us to imagine where those notes have gone. Perhaps absorbed into the water droplets of clouds in the stratosphere, to fall as gentle precipitation around Bonn.
The thing is, digital transmission has no hinterland, no in-between or un-intended. It is of course a stream of binary data that can only corrupt itself. Glitch is the poetics of digital transmission. But glitch so often causes defective language that yields no reading. The DAB radio has nothing between channels and the digital LCD television will not oblige the viewing of anything other than a received channel. Digital transmissions are on, or they are off. If they glitch, there is an informative pop-up text notifying you of this.
My van does not have a DAB radio. I take the slip road off St Crispins and turn into Upper Green Lane, where the studios are situated. The four-story red brick building that houses OUTPOST studios dwarfs the van and as always happens, Radio 3 is mostly lost in the shadow of spurious emissions, fundamental overload, and harmonics.
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This work is Piotr, first work in English, I have left it as it was written, so they can get the feedback they need for this. I do hope you enjoy it.
Artist name
PIOTR NALEWAJKA
Website
https://www.piotrnalewajkaphotography.com/
Social media links
https://monovisions.com/piotr-nalewajka-interview/
Bio
PIOTR NALEWAJKA, born in Poland, settled in Limerick (Ireland).
Photographer (professional member of Visual Artists Ireland since 2019) and Philosopher (PhD) exploring the human condition mainly through abstract and documentary photography although remaining open in all photographic directions. Author of several individual and collective exhibitions (Ireland, Italy).
Summary: a short fiction story about what the modern world needs the most
This is their first literary debut in English,
Scorpio
A mischievous flare appeared in his eyes as he took another sip of bourbon. He then spoke through his teeth with the calmness of a sheet of ice: You, the creature being mistakenly called a man, do you imagine that I - the proud son of Albion - enjoy listening to your, God forbid, the Polish version of my language? You must polish it more...
- Listen, James - Tomek interrupted him with this, God forbid, Eastern accent, it speaks through you, ignorance, I used to think so too, just like you...
- You're talking nonsense again, If you really are the gentleman you think you are, why don't you let me finish...
James waved his hand and looked around the bar. On Sunday there was peace here after last night's frolics, the heroes of Saturday's Armageddon stayed in their homes in the arms of Morpheus, forgetting about their recent excesses. The bar, which was like many others in this part of London, had only a few guests, mostly men, sad gentlemen of indefinite age, and with an indefinite charm that could only cast a spell on an alien visiting Earth for the first time and enjoying quite literally everything...
- You see - continued Tom - as I said ... I used to think so too ... You see, I wasn't always a plumber, that's what I started doing here, it’s simple: pipes, pressure, time, levels ... just like Freud plus some sensible money...
- To the point - James interjected.
- How impatient you are, dear sir... You see, I used to be a lecturer in literature at the University…
- Ah, your universities!
- If you interrupt me again, I'll punch you in the face.
- Ah yes, you Poles need to be listened to, even if you have nothing to say or if you don't know how to say it in a civilized way ... Okay, okay, I'm silent.
James paused and reached for his glass.
- Where did I end up ... - continued Tomek - ahh, yes ... as a lecturer of literature with a doctoral degree, I loved my native language, I knew all its nooks, secrets, underground passages ... It seemed to me then that thinking is speaking and speaking is thinking. Circulus are vicious... Tomek dreamed as if he had set foot on land that had not been his land for a long time, but he quickly shook off these atlas longings and continued: but I had a cousin who... he had a language problem anyway, every second word of his was “fuck”, or rather one “fuck” word with short streaks of silence, which was filled with other possibilities of combining letters, additionally he stuttered sometimes, not that he was shy, not at all, in our homeland, the girls even funded him a shrine with a figure cast in cast in plaster, they painted it every Friday, but that’s not what I am on about... well, this boy, after all, I don't know if he wasn't smarter than me and he couldn't talk and I... I... - Tomek started to stutter – I don’t believe in words too much now... but I'm not really talking about that... you see James I've always approached life very individually, because, in fact, life is very individual, anyway, such a belief is philosophical nominalism, which means that only individuals really exist if you know what I'm talking about...
After the last words, Tom looked condescendingly at James, who was staring fixedly into the distance, and as he looked at him, at this James looking for something in the distance, he remembered the words of Ernst Bloch, probably Ernst Bloch: "There must be something in a lie, namely, a real and fulfilled desire they gave..."
After a moment, Tom continued: - What was it I was on... about? Ahhh ... about individuals, so I am individual, let's say you too, even them, those here - Tomek pointed to the regulars of the pub - let's say that they are also individualists. But a man cannot bear such a burden of individualists, because as Dostoyevsky already knew... How did it go again hmm? Ahh yes, now I remember: “What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.” So we have words, basically like tools in my plumbing: leveling, measuring pressure, and so on... but some forgetful people, maybe you're one of them, who knows, they forget that they're just tools.
-What is the point you are trying to convey here? - What is the conclusion of all this? - James asked drowsily.
- What is the conclusion, what is the conclusion - Tomek was offended - you are a practical creature spoiled to the core, well, yes, if it weren't for your conclusions, you wouldn't have conquered so much of the world. Practice is practice but I wouldn't want to trade with you anyway because you see life is to be enjoyed, but it's not what you think I think.
- How do you know what I think?
- All I have to do is look at you - magic trick - and I know. No, I'm kidding, I'm sorry... I just wanted to say that our Polish brains are shaped a little differently, maybe a little more absurd at times, but it makes life richer, you don't know what awaits you on the other side of the street.
- I hate this uncertainty.
- And I screw up your confidence, you know La Fontaine's fairy tale about two dogs? You don’t? Well, I'll tell you, one little dog walks, emaciated, scrawny, and suddenly meets another, you would briefly say: "a good-looking dog": the coat is neatly trimmed, the muscles taut, the eye shine. The dogs talk for a while and then the scrawny one notices that the beany one has something on his neck. What's that? - he asks.
- Ohhh…this? That's nothing, just a collar - replies the other.
A moment of silence in the bar.
That’s enough on the subject James, you understand? - asked Tom.
- What do you mean by that?
- Nothing, basically nothing, I think I'm wrong, because of Brexit, I don't know myself ... actually, I want to say the opposite and I contradict myself, what a human creature, a patchwork of contradictions, it's probably Pascal ... Tomek paused for a moment, took a deep breath, then continued calmly: I'll give you another example, please don't interrupt me. Let me tell you a short story that happened to me recently, you know I like to travel, I recently went to Africa, first a short stay in South Africa and then a bus from Cape Town to Windhoek in Namibia, the bus left at 1.30 p.m. I arrived a little ahead of schedule and that's when I saw her for the first time: attractive, but probably not that much. Nervous, energetic, at first glance probably insolent. Again, I'm using damn words, but what else can it be ... Anyway, she was everywhere before she took her place on the bus, she was already talking to a few guys who were trying hard to fawn over her. She had a certain seductive charm about her, so it's no wonder that at every stop - and we had a lot of miles to cover during the nineteen-hour journey - she was surrounded by a group of suitors. I watched with undisguised satisfaction as she turned everyone away after a moment of bullying, for a moment I even wanted to talk to her, but her protectionism... why be nervous... I was just wondering what country she was from... and those labels again in my head... The bus arrived, I didn't bother with the stranger anymore, I didn't seem to have the desire or the opportunity to see her again. So it was quite a big surprise to me when I saw her again very soon. First things first. I found myself in a small, charming town on the west coast of Namibia, where for several days I listened to the lamentations of the local population as a certain German, who has his hand over the entire town, wants to ban the natives from trading in the main square because they allegedly spoil the image of the city. Damn,
I thought this is a perfect example for the adherents of the principle of contradiction: we talk RESPECT out loud and we infuse this word in all forms and in fact we talk just so that we actually do nothing, true respect, well, it usually hurts financially but, I again, am going off topic... So I was looking for a change from these sad local problems and finally decided to take a few hour’s trips around the area. An employee of the tourist agency informed me that it would be just me, the guide, and some girl from Russia... oh, those associations. A knife opened in my pocket right away... The next day I showed up at the agreed place and saw... guess who James, my friend from the bus, actually not mine and not an acquaintance, because I was the only guy who didn't exchange a single word with her on the bus. So my acquaintance stranger is from Russia, and I thought about how I would tell her what I think of all the wickedness done on Ukrainian soil, children raped in front of their mothers, sisters in front of their brothers, and ... long to talk about all possible combinations of cruelty. Finally, I didn't say anything, I introduced myself briefly in the car, I only said that I was from Poland and that for understandable reasons being in her company is not a dream form of spending free time for me. In general, as time went on, I grew more and more fed up with her, it was just the three of us: the driver, her, and me. So contact was inevitable.
I contemptuously watched her tireless efforts to perpetuate her likeness against literally everything surrounding us, snap, snap, smiley, her lips selfish, sinful, innocent, encouraging. Every inch of the world seemed to be made for her ... This is truly a model example of the superiority of tireless initiative over common sense, I thought. My distaste for the venerable traveling companion grew when she condescendingly complained about the lunchtime meal, later stating that in Russia you really don't drink much alcohol, and finally said that on her recent visit to Switzerland, she had fallen so badly on a ski slope that she has severe memory lapses... Some of your countrymen could use such lapses, I thought. Well, how to live here after all this massacre in Bucza, flashed through my head. I wanted to say something, accuse, draw the hardest guns... Maybe Vasily Grosman: "Russia has witnessed many events throughout its thousand-year history, but one thing it has never seen: freedom," or if that were not enough, I was even ready to recall a certain Frenchman who visited Russia two hundred years ago and noted in his epochal work "Letters from Russia": "Whoever sees this country will be glad to live elsewhere, no matter where. It is always good to know that there is a society where happiness is impossible in any form because according to the law of nature, man cannot be happy without freedom”. Yes, James, I wanted to say all this and maybe more, but I remembered Dostoyevsky and his words about this hell... I must have told you that today, James, You said something.
- "hell is suffering that you can't love more", that's how it went and you know what? - Tomek continued - I bit my tongue and didn't say anything to her, and anyway, damn it, I remembered my childhood religion lessons: we are sitting in the catechetical room and a nun tells us about the original sin and I tell her that I am innocent because I wasn't there. These and other thoughts ran chaotically through my head... and you know... later, when we were in the desert, this girl that I denied was human... you know, turned out to be very fine... I was lazily contemplating the Namibian landscape when suddenly the silence was interrupted by her scream: watch out, watch out... She pointed her finger at my leg. It was a poisonous black scorpion, which I was told later was a highly dangerous species...
Thanks to her, I managed to react quickly, knocked the intruder off, and smiled timidly at her for the first time.
- What about all this? James asked laconically.
- What about all this? What about all this? It's all because it's very hard to love you, but maybe that's why life is so interesting... Two glasses for us.
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Artist name
Tiziana Rasile
Website
Social media links
https://www.facebook.com/Tiziana-Rasile-ART-
Bio
Tiziana Rasile was born in Rome where she lives and works. Once she finished the course of studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in sec. Painting, she obtained the Diploma in "Technical Builder in Merchandising Museum" and for a year she dedicated herself to the study of the Restoration of Ancient Paintings. She immediately developed a propensity for abstract art and engraving, always maintaining a strong relationship with the classic technique of nuance and oil veiling. During her career, he has participated in numerous international events and awards. Over the years she began to dedicate herself to a multidisciplinary path that led her to be interested in science, philosophy, anthropy, music... Above all spirituality, the corollary of all his latest production. Her research explores light, through overlays of soft chromatic textures and is focused on the possibility of creating a dialogue between scientific and philosophical realities, and spiritual and artistic insights. Her journey begins with the "Dissolvenze" Collection, where the shape is dematerialized in color, up to other collections such as "Laconic Time" and "Vibrations": the light that vibrates in the space of the picture and modulates time. From 2018 to 2019 she joined the establishment of the Oxford Collective, baptized by Maestro Giampaolo Berto "New Roman Spatialism", whose Artistic Manifesto was presented at the Museo Merulana in Rome. She began to make his own poetic production visible in 2008 by contributing the text and the work "Primordial Ecstasy" to the Artist’s Book taken from the exhibition "The Wonderful Source" held at the Vallicelliana Library in Rome and present in the archives of the Library of the National Museum of Modern Art. In 2018 the text "Dissolvenze di Opposti Echi" was published in the Journal of Art, Culture, and Science of Livorno (Italy). In March 2021 he received the "Prize of Industriousness for Lifetime Achievement", for the last five years of artistic
Reflections on the Journey of art
We begin a journey on art, remembering our origins, and man’s need to create an image before generating word an idea. An imprinted origin ... A matrix that generates vision. Remembering the need that has led us to embed signs in the matter, which although tangible, have opened man to distant worlds, helping him to orient himself in a terrain still unknown that still belongs to us. Thus we rediscover the primordial input, which has created a patrimony of signs rich in symbols and meanings and we realize how much this is still current. Those first images that came to us, like precious graphic ruins, in osmosis with the rough surface of a stone or a harsh and dusty cave, are revealed to us as true works of art. This is because the need to survive and to have behavioural directives, for conscious action, has triggered in man the creative power and the ability to express the imagination through artistic inspiration. Thus the survival instinct has become a vital impulse: the "animus" of creation. Rediscovering all this we reconcile with our natural, physiological need to communicate, in this current era, where the philosopher Luciano Floridi (Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of information at the University of Oxford) has highlighted the term infosphere.A term already proposed by Alvin Toffler in the book "The third wave", to explain the continuous addition of layers of communication to the social system, given by progressive technology. Now let’s look at the information traveling on dimensions that escape the tangible reality, in real virtual spheres. We are in the "Non - place" where the image flows and communicates, but nothing is completely new... If we remember! if we reflect that the contingency of once-expressed communication has the taste of always. What always crosses horizons, surfaces, space...Time! Then we see that the image has never been an end in itself, it has never been an "object", even when it participated in the very matter of nature. It became art with its potential for meaning, with its desire for otherness," of encounter". In fact, he has always traveled in timelessness, even when he was born in symbiosis with nature. Aware of this we can enjoy it without fractures, without intermittences with the past. Art has always been. It has always traveled! exceeding the limits of its two-dimensional nature, of its apparent staticity, in a fixed place and time. The imprinted images go beyond time and space, assuming values and m From this immensity of perspective and meaning, every artist can draw freely without constraints, knowing that the image is a communicating entity, eternally traveling, a source of wealth for humanity. In this diversification of information in electronic, computer, and telematic systems, where each data has its own "three-dimensional space", art, given its "timeless" nature, has a privileged path, being a modular language through the places of history. In this situation, the node highlighted is in the possible confusion of identifying as Floridi says "the decision-making power", the input generator of any data or action. The artist must therefore keep his intentionality firmly, subjective where fundamental is the Prohairesis, the original idea! That’s when you realize there’s a spark, something not clearly visible to the senses, but more real than tangible. The vital drive, the spirit that animates and elevates art to something more than simple communication or social relationship. It is the art that continually creates more from itself through its roots. What still constitutes the wonder and wonder of creation: man’s most hidden and primordial yearning eanings that can always be reinterpreted. They are indelible signs that as such express eternity.
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