AVA’s Artist-in-Residence Christian Newby is going to showcase his latest artworks made in Hong Kong during his residence in AVA since August 2019.
Opening: 3 Oct 2019 (Thu), 5:00 – 8:00pm
Exhibition Period: 3 -11 Oct 2019
Time: 10:00am – 6:00pm
Venue: AVA 212-213, Kai Tak Campus, Academy of Visual Arts, 51 Kwun Tong Road, Kowloon
E-Z 2 MASTER
[The gun: a tool, and a possible means of communicating messages through objects that otherwise might incrementally muffle the fabricator’s voice/body through sumptuous corporate languages, romantic proxies and a network of deputised sharks.]
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What starts as a simple and clandestine formal deviation: the operator adds an extra petal to an ornamental flower, leading to increasingly bolder sets of tweaks and modifications to commercially produced decorative floor coverings.
At first these changes aren’t noticed, not even by fellow operators. The projects issued vary enough from one to the next so nobody catches on to the glacial pace at which these objects are changing. The operator tries to imagine that what we perceive as real time is actually just an intensely protracted sequence running like a film in slow-motion that only they can manoeuver freely within—lithely resetting the axes at which everyone else is bound by and changing the universe, one stitched petal or chevron at a time. A simple detour outside of the pre-scripted design given to each fabricator is nothing more than the flick of the wrist. There’s a very brief feeling of release that comes over the operator, the feeling of doing something you shouldn’t be doing alongside knowing that no one will find out. And the space, the landscape, that largely shapes this idiosyncratic duration is carpet.
Biography
Christian Newby was born in 1979 in Virginia Beach, Virginia and currently works and lives in London. He received his B.A. in Sculpture and Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University in 2002 and then an M.F.A. at the Glasgow School of Art in 2009. He is currently a PhD researcher with the Contemporary Art Research Centre at Kingston University, London. Recent projects and residencies include:’Brick-Wall-Spider-Well-Post-It-Note’, Beers Contemporay, London, 2019; ‘the hOLD’, Stanley Picker Gallery, produced as part of We Are Publication, an experimental publication platform based at Kingston University (2019); ‘Spring Syllabus’ at J Hammond Projects, London (2018); ‘Yo Compro Calidad’ for the residency programme at Matadero Madrid; artist in residence at Arthouse Foundation, Lagos Nigeria; and; Le Club des Sous l’Eau at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Interior 301, Galerie Alain Gutharc, Paris; Art + Chips, MOT Internatioanl Project Space, London; has recently been awarded a Pollock Krasner Foundation grant; Converse/Dazed & Confused Emerging Artist Award shortlist in association with Whitechapel Gallery(2013); Participated in the New Work Scotland Programme with Amelia Bywater at Collective Gallery, Edinburgh; exhibitiona at Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, Space In Between in London and Vitrine Gallery, London. Upcoming exhibitions/projects include inclusion in Thames and Hudson publication 100 Sculptors of Tomorrow.
www.christiannewby.com
Instagram: @newbychrist