exhib two-copy2

Max Mallender is also a painter now based in The Royal Standard, Liverpool, whose work is “driven by a longstanding relationship with the environment around him”. Similarly to Lucy, his work is a responsive exploration of materials, textures, movements and space, and aims to unlearn typical objects in order to recreate and rethink them to be viewed in a new light. He works a lot through large-scale paintings, often on unframed canvas or found materials, and site specific interventions. Through working in both of these manners, he occupies space to encourage movement across and around the work. Instead of using mark making to explore an object, he’s using it to explore movement and the physical act of creating a large-scale painting, allowing the expressive movements to influence what the painting might end up as. He doesn’t have an idea of what the painting might be when he starts it, and just keeps exploring and experimenting until he feels it came to a natural conclusion.

Max states how he attributes a purpose to everything, an attitude that he claims was influenced by skateboarding and graffiti, and that if something can be used for it’s typical purpose, it could also be painted on. This idea of recontextualising objects is recurring throughout his practice, often using found objects or materials within his work. The objects he uses are common in everyday life, and yet are often ignored. He says that he repurposes and reimagines them to allow us to appreciate the aesthetic value of them alongside their function or purpose, as a way of encouraging people to notice the objects that exist in the environment around them, and engage more with the landscape. (Mallender, M. & The State of the Arts. 2022)

Lucy Archer graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 2016, and is now based in The Royal Standard in Liverpool. She primarily works as a painter, constructing landscapes, interiors, and imagined spaces through her work. She often reacts to specific locations, using found images in her camera roll to form altered environments in her paintings. Rather than trying to recreate images and objects, she works methodically through shapes and motifs, using the repetition of her mark-making to evolve into an object. She uses repetition and development of image a lot throughout her practice, allowing the marks to blend together or sit on top of each other to play with the depth of an image. Although she has a very fluid approach to using paint, she relies heavily on geometry and formal compositions, which is how her pieces become figurative and recognisable. (Archer, L. 2022.)

Speaking to Helayna Lagos for an interview with The State of The Arts, Lucy describes how painting is a very long process for her, and requires a lot of editing and stripping back (I found this interesting as I feel like I’m taking a similar approach to my curation), and purposely keeps her work almost unfinished and abstract, to give the “intonation of complexity” instead of revealing it, so I’m really interested in exploring how this can work within my curatorial framework of purposely trying to make things more blatant and explicit. The visuals of her work shift between objects, interiors, and exteriors, and she uses quite soft colour palettes which adds a sense of delicacy and femininity to the paintings. (Archer, L. & Lagos, H. 2022.)

This exhibition will feature the work of two Liverpool based artists, Lucy Archer and Max Mallender. I’ve specifically chosen these two artists as they’re both painters and I don’t typically work with paintings, so it’s an attempt to push myself out of my comfort zone curatorially. (This is largely because of how I feel personally towards painting - I got to the stage where I felt that if I’d seen one painting, then I’d seen them all, and I just wasn’t feeling stimulated enough by them to want to display them in an exhibition. I tended to favour more conceptual installation work rather than more simpler, traditional mediums.)

I’m purposely choosing to pair these two artists together for this exhibition as I feel there’s definitely some kind of relationship between their work that needs to be realised and unpacked. Both are very concerned with this idea of space and environment, and the contrast between interior and exterior spaces, whilst also working in very similar methods and colour palettes, despite the difference in visual language and scale. I’m hoping that through developing this exhibition, we can really delve into the connections between their work and see how this can evolve into a really solid curatorial concept.

Lucy:

I agree it would be nice to see how exploring our work over email helps develop and track ideas, could even be a consistent way of documenting the process in between meeting up?

I’ve written down a few statements from my notes so far:

•Developing a grey area between opposing interior and exterior relationships with space through overlapping colour pallet, gesture and physicality etc.

• Looking at the same subject with insular versus expansive perspective

• shifting from one focus into the other in the same way that the images are sliding off surfaces and merging etc

I’ve done some v rough sketches of the hanging material idea- I was thinking if this in the context of Vivian Suter and Franz Erhard Walther’s work

I’ve also attached some recent photos I’ve taken and am thinking about

Let me know your thoughts!

Elizabeth:

I think the idea of hanging fabric makes it seem quite fluid and unrestricted, which is quite interesting when you think about how rigid typical canvas paintings / buildings / exteriors are.

Reminded me of the painting Jacqui Hallum did for the JM Painting Prize in 2018

I was also telling someone about what we'd been talking about RE: interior vs exterior, & apparently it could be useful if we define what we mean by like interior / exterior / environment.

It's mad because I keep thinking about your work and focusing on things like structure and like fixed environments, but I think it feels a lot more delicate than that. I think it might just be because you both seem to use quite subtle colour palettes, but something just seems really soft and light to me - it could be interesting to think about how we could use the work to make the space seem a bit like this?

And the idea of the work blending and merging together, could we take this beyond the painting? Actually do stuff directly on the walls, somehow make it fully immersive / installative? (installation-y?)

I don't know why everything seems to have quite soft vibes to me, but i like the contrast when you think about the context of the work.

Jacqui Hallum, "King and Queen of Wands" (2018)

Max:

yo yes i really like some of the exhibition examples you gave, I like the movement of the rooms, they are not regimented and don't feel fixed. and they make use of the floor too.

I saw these in IKEA the other day, they extend nicely and I think they might be interesting to paint on / play with

https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/p/hoppvals-room-darkening-cellular-blind-grey-10386431/

I like that you can display them half closed or fully open, maybe people could play with them too

When I think of the space, it also feels quite soft, it might be nice to have hidden sections, fabric / paintings obscuring the view of the next bit.

it seems to me like we will not have a direct plan for the space but rather create the environment while we are there playing with some of the things we have made.

How long will we have in the space before we open?

I feel like when I think of interiors & exteriors, I think of it very blatantly, like inside and outside. But when you delve a bit further into that, I feel like it's more about the different things / components / objects that make up those spaces, and the different textures that are found in those spaces. Like interiors are typically very soft, clean, comfortable etc., but when you think of exterior, it's more harsh, concrete, and industrial. I think it's a really interesting contrast between the two, which I think is quite similar to the contrast between both of your work.

I love the idea of it being a built environment, and using fabric to influence the movement and interaction within the space. The idea of using the blinds could be cool, especially if you're thinking about obscuring the views of things. This also got me thinking about windows and doors and walls, and how they're sort of like the weird space between indoors and outdoors. They all have two different sides to them, two different spaces/environments, two different purposes. Like you'd put hanging baskets on your outside walls but not your inside walls, mirrors on the inside and not the outside, etc. - and then this drew me back to how you used that roof material for those paintings Max. I'm really interested in thinking about how we could explore the boundaries of like inside/outside objects.

I think we've got the space from around 13th-15th June to maybe the 20th?