TUESDAY 19TH MARCH 2019
YORK COLLEGE GALLERY
I decided to go to the York College Gallery as I heard there was a new exhibition taking place there. The information on the photograph below was found on a placard positioned just outside of the gallery. It was the entirety of information provided about the exhibition, there was no guide. I found it interesting the way the exhibition was put across to us as an audience, the emphasis was not on Nick Loaring, the artist who made these prints but instead on what they were made for, this experimental music night 'Sonic Attack' that ran for 5 years in Shipley.
The works were positioned in a distinct format, with equal spacing between each. The prints were works of art in their own right and it was strange that they were being used just as a platform of attraction for people to come to a music event. I liked the fact that they had been organised chronologically because you could tell that Loarings style was becoming increasingly more abstracted towards the end. Initially there is a recurrent theme of brightly coloured, vivid geometric shapes. He played around a lot with different shapes and each poster was definitely unique but later on in the series he uses imagery of eyes etc. The imagery was no longer perfect shapes that were pleasing to the eye, it was now venturing on to imagery that was susceptible to fault. It was strange for me to wrap my head around at first, that this white cube space was being used to present something that when it was produced, had no intention of ever being placed in a gallery space. That the sole purpose for this work was advertisement and yet it was being hung in an art gallery.
The four works above are examples of the more geometric posters he produced. They were made for musical events in both 2014 and 2015. I like the effect of all the colours layering each other, they're definitely vibrant and attention grabbing, perfect for advertisement. He trials a range of typefaces across the four examples. The first three have the same layout: a larger typeface for the band name, positioned left and additional information positioned on the right. The third embraces a new typeface, but by the fourth he had become more experimental about the positioning of the text. Now you have to look closely to search for the information whereas before it was handed to you, very obviously. I prefer the positioning of text in the fourth work, I think it incorporates the required information in to the print rather than segregating it.
The two works above are demonstrations of Loarings developing style. He's using the same colour palette but the imagery he's producing is very new. One thing that I felt about this exhibition was that because the works were being shown off as posters, there wasn't individual placards for each piece, telling you the media or type of print that this piece was. All the information provided on this was: "All the posters were letterpress printed by hand one at a time, using a variety of materials (washers / screws / vintage wood-type / hand-cut lino / laser-cut & engraved hardboard / MDF) in small editions of 30 or fewer. The type was always set by hand, firstly using what was available and then moving into hot-metal in 2014." But no specific information about each piece and the process for that work in particular.
The latter of his works was very abstract, demonstrated by the two works above. It got to a point where the information that was being given by the poster was barely legible. This I found interesting, as the sole reason that the artwork was being produced was as an advertisement, to put out information and to attract a crowd. With this reason in mind, the text was the most vital element but Loaring has distorted it to beyond recognition. I still can't fully make out what the poster (left above) reads. The works here seem to have hugely less emphasis on the information they're meant to provide and much more of a focus on the artistic effects he was creating through print. The work (right above), has a bombardment of colour and shape and pattern that is quite transfixing but the text is covered by the print so you have to really look in close to find dates etc.
On reflection, I think I definitely am more in favour of the initial imagery, I found the colours and shapes visually pleasing and the overlaying worked well to give more depth to the shapes, bringing forward even more colour. The second style was still interesting but there was not that perfection that was present in the first batch. There was more of the artist in there, more demonstrations of human irregular or imprecise moments. The third batch were the most 'art-like' for me because of that decline in interest to put out the music event information in a clear, bold way, the intention behind the piece had changed. This was an interesting realisation for me, the more of himself that he put in his work and the more experimental he became, the less I liked it. I definitely preferred the simpler imagery of the earlier years.
