the smoke
ART THOMAS DICKERSON CHARCOAL AND INK ON WAX PAPER, LUKE MCLEAN / ONE OF THE FEATURED ARTISTS ON THE GALLERY’S PRODUCTS
Thom Dickerson is the co-founder & managing director of The Gallery Clothing Company Ltd. Founded in Belfast, the company integrates art and fashion in business, promoting the best young creative in the UK and Ireland. If you could own one artwork, which would you choose? I am not a materialistic person, so there is no one piece that I aspire to own. Art is to be enjoyed; I would feel guilty keeping that enjoyment to myself. That said, if forced to choose, it would have to be a piece by Andy Goldsworthy, whose concept has long influenced my work. What was the defining moment in your life as an artist? There was no single defining moment, but the support and encouragement of my parents set me on the path I’m currently walking today. I particularly remember my mother always encouraging the artist inside me, despite not being creative herself.
FILED:
How do you think art should be written about? Truthfully, and with stated opinions. One of my favourite quotations is: “she never looked nice, she looked like Art, and Art wasn’t supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something” (from the book Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell). Art is emotive and this is what reviews should focus on. If you could occupy a building in London, which building? Having never lived in London I would say that the dream would be just to occupy any building and be part of it all. One day soon, hopefully... Does art have limits? Yes and no. Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror explores the extremes to which art can attempt to justify anything. Creativity has no limits. Art, as the manifestation of creativity, perhaps should. In 6 words imagine a manifesto for the art of the future. Dream, Explore, Challenge, Refine, Imagine, Create
ELLERY FOUTCH
DERS, SIX QUESTIONS
S EDITORS LIZA WEBER
ZA BELTRAMI
DAVID BECK, MVSEVM, 2006, MIXED MEDIA CONSTRUCTION, SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM, GIFT OF THELMA AND MELVIN LENKIN © 2006, DAVID BECK, 2006.8
THOMAS HILLIER FleaFollyArchitects was established by Pascal Bronner and Thomas Hillier in 2012. They are spatial storytellers who use narrative to explore, discover and invent unique architectural propositions translating them into fantastical spaces that surround us. Operating across the fields of architecture, design, fashion, contemporary art and installation, they aim to enhance and blur the thresholds of spatial design, regarding “making” and “crafting” by hand as a key component of their work.
ARCHITECTS
If you could own one artwork, which would you choose? Anything by Chuck Close, he was the first artist I saw in a gallery and it has stuck with me ever since! What was the defining moment in
your life as an artist? I don’t think we have had it yet, and maybe never will! Understanding that architecture is so much more than just bricks and mortar was a big moment for me. How do you think art should be written about? Art can’t be understood through words alone, but through experiencing it! If you could occupy a building in London, which building? The whispering gallery at St Paul’s. Does art have limits? No. In 6 words imagine a manifesto for the art of the future. In a constant state of flux.
Ellery Foutch is a visiting lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art. She researches oil paintings on canvas, natural history models, advertising images, and other carefully constructed artifacts. Although her work is not always about “capital-A Art,” the methods and questions that Art History uses are central to her research: visual analysis, reception studies, and analytical comparisons inform Foutch’s work. If you could own one artwork, which would you choose? I really love David Beck’s MVSEVM, commissioned by the Smithsonian upon the reopening of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2006. This amazing little “cabinet of curiosities” contains small galleries, almost like a dollhouse, with miniature versions of works of art – a sculpture gallery contains tiny versions of Man Ray’s Cadeau, Jasper Johns’s Ballantine Beer Cans, and Elie Nadelman’s dancers, for example. There’s also an amazing Wunderkammer, with miniature starfish and reptiles hanging from the ceiling, as well as optical instruments and even a miniscule Feejee mermaid! So I’d be cheating by claiming this “one” artwork that’s really an entire museum in itself, full of drawers to open and cabinets to explore! What was the defining moment in
your life as an artist? An internship with Nancy Mowll Mathews at the Williams College Museum of Art gave me the chance to work with an excellent mentor and to re-think what kind of objects could be taken seriously; we were working on the exhibition Moving Pictures: American Art and Early Film, 1880-1910, which included mass culture images and artifacts like early films, comics, and movement studies alongside Ashcan School paintings, and I was hooked. How do you think art should be written about? Clearly and engagingly! If you could occupy a building in London, which building? Sir John Soane’s Museum! Does art have limits? Sometimes I think everything that seems cutting edge or new was in fact done in the 18th or 19th centuries. But there are new ways to imagine them and make them even more relevant and exciting to people today. In 6 words imagine a manifesto for the art of the future. Asking good questions trumps having answers. (I want to substitute “thinking you have all the answers,” but that’s too many words!)
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