Well you certainly worked out how to make us read the entire thing ... and I
didn't spot any typos anywhere!! Shall use this little ruse myself sometime.
Cheers
Ronette
-----Original Message-----
From: Simon Mee
Sent: Friday, December 16, 2011 10:44 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: New Online Residency at C4RD
damn missed a couple of typos, apologies to those with fine grammatical
sensibilities- please mentally insert "al" after emotion and a"my" before
drawings in the last bit.
Simon Mee:
________________________________
From: The UK drawing research network mailing list
[[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Centre for Recent Drawing
[[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Friday, 16 December 2011 6:28 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: New Online Residency at C4RD
Simon Mee
During December/January 2011/2012 C4RD presents an Online Residency by
artist Simon Mee, winner of our Royal Academy Watteau prize.
'It has been said that History is a story twice told.
I used to draw second hand objects and toys, these toys seemed to have a
hidden history about which I could speculate. Over time I realized that it
was the secret history and stories contained in or suggested by the objects
that was the crucial element, something like a recycled Rorschach blot test.
My love of traditional techniques and art history (Watteau in particular) is
thus part of this recycling of the pre-loved, not for what they were but as
material that can used in response to my concerns, worries and obsessions.
Historical images, like toys, generate a similar nostalgic impulse. This
impulse to nostalgia is one that can be redirected and be made less safe or
gentrified and become uncanny, dwelling between safe fantasies to suppressed
memory. My imagery is inspired by anything that has a combination of
emotion pull and the haunted. In the past this includes old postcards,
images from books, Google, old movies (Jimmy Stewart in "Harvey"), Schleich
toys or an idea that I have to collage together from images that I can
source from the aforesaid.
I go through obsessive phases about images that explore something that
concerns me. A recurring theme seems to be the tension between humanity and
nature and failed utopian dreams. These obsessions have included (among
others)old time whaling images, flying monkeys, Buck-Minster Fuller Dymaxion
Cars , colonial boys riding goats but the common element is that the image
has to have something in it that elicits an instinctual reaction or idea. In
this I like to explore my own humanity and what I often see as the absurd
and tragic that makes up the pattern of our lives, the less than ideal human
that we can all relate to.
My drawings both acknowledge and tease at my own previous antipathy of all
things Zen and Buddhist. I hope that drawings work more like visual koans-
to puzzle us about our own self importance in regards our place in the world
and in history, a story I'm not sure how many times I've told.'
http://www.c4rd.org.uk/C4RD/Online_Residency.html
Centre for Recent Drawing
2-4 Highbury Station Rd LONDON N1 1SB
www.c4rd.org.uk<http://www.c4rd.org.uk> Charity No.1123530 Thu-Sat 1-6pm
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