F r o m W e s t t o T h e E a s t

26 April - 15 May 2010

Occidental Dimensions builds on the commitment of the Faculty to advance and debate new art in tandem with the theme of the Brighton Festival. This year Brian Eno, Festival Creative director has positioned culture as an ecology of ideas, exploring how cycles and the recycling of ideas can sustain the vigor of the arts over time.

Occidental Dimensions offers a Western perspective of art that is getting ready to tour China. Overall the aspirations of the project and artists are cerebral, with a clear preference for artistic germination and insight. They work offers a counter-point to the notion of the excessive artistic ego and irony that has been so prevalent in recent years. Key common threads can be seen to run across the artistic strategies employed in this exhibition. These include evidence of the desire for quiet dialogue through the work rather than loud posturing. There is a predominate use of pure colour, and system based working. Many of the artists use repetition and multiple forms, and also work to generate ongoing series of reflective work. These aspects function to create visual and strategic bridges across many levels of viewer encounter.Despite the deployment of at times strong colour, there is nothing brash about these works and the ego of all the artists is subsumed within a backdrop of a broader and more sustainable set of creative concerns, reflecting key issues from the mid 20^thcentury. There is a dominance of critical space between the work and the act of evidential authoring, creating pieces which both reflect and subvert issues of commodity culture in the post digital age.

The hand cast Silicone Boys multiples of Tom Hackett's over sized children heads, remind us of the idealised archetypes of childhood as found in children's book. Semi translucent in colour, they are soft tactile and evocative of giant jelly sweets. Wider sculptural questions are presented relating to authorship within an aesthetic of apparent manufacture. The non-functional sculptures of Paul Lewthwaite are reminiscent of everyday manufactured objects. Their approximation to the ‘real’ reflects the constructed nature of meaning in our fabricated world. Their high craft production draws us in further to their myth, presenting us with off the shelf, ready to buy, take away and use.

Appropriation of the found image is evident in the Anon intimate paintings of Inge Tong, anonymous collected memories, of found black & white family photos are resurrected with new chromatic life. In Considering Silesia Mik Godley examines identity within cultural memory, displacement and migration. He explores our evolving relationship with the internet and new media focusing on 'virtual expeditions' to his mother's homeland. The flat chromatic uninhabited landscapes of Julie Fagan are both reminiscent of wide-open spaces and the confined monitor of the digital world. Almost too pristineto touch, they evoke a utopian private space, but beneath the surface there are suggestions of a altogether less homely proposition. In Wide ShutEyesArina Gordienko presents a sequence of large monochrome painted heads positioned in an empty place. Their anonymity and lack of spatial context is punctured by the introduction of a vibrant red headdress, to heavily encode the image.

Julian Wild’s sculpture reassigns utilitarian materials to construct playful visual systems which explore the expressive possibilities of a single line and result in deceptively simple units of sensual form far from their banal functional origins. In his2 Line Continuum (CNC acrylic panel) drawings Marek Tobolewski explores strategies of rotating, mirroring and symmetry. Multiple individual forms, emerge from a single repeated structure, building on the success of his recent symmetry painting. Ruth Solomons in the Arrangement series of grid paintings, fragments not only line but structural flow, disorientating our paths of reading with rotations, alternative sequences and placement.