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16/9/2005

Like It Matters

Centre for Contemporary Arts CCA, Glasgow

Karla Black, Mick Peter, Michael Stumpf

with Bas Jan Ader, Bruce Nauman, Robert Rauschenberg, Carolee Schneemann

CCA is delighted to host "Like It Matters" an exhibition featuring new work by three young Glasgow-based sculptors, Karla Black, Mick Peter and Michael Stumpf. These artists work directly upon a range of everyday materials to produce unsettling objects and situations. Elements of absurdity, bewilderment and a certain humour are evident throughout, alongside the suggestion of fragmentary narratives. The occasionally bizarre sculptural forms constructed by these artists may appear nonsensical, but they produce an immediate if inexplicable response within the viewer.

Karla Black uses materials that are 'uncultured', either intrinsically (Vaseline and eye-shadow) or in terms of treatment (plaster powder thrown on the floor). Her works are as much concerned with the process of their making as with their final form. Each sculpture retains a record of its own creation, and could be described as performance as well as object.

The range and type of materials often employed by Mick Peter are equally broad, unconventional and 'messy': concrete, gaffer tape, cardboard, porcelain, rubber, foam, polystyrene, electric lights. The resultant objects often combine elements of familiarity with unfamiliarity. Individually and in combination we may find it difficult to 'place' them confidently, as if they offer too much and too little at the same time.

Michael Stumpf’s sculptural work employs cinema and literature as points of departure. Denim, plastic, aluminium, paper, pewter and other elements are used to create a material alphabet that functions in the sculptures as part of a broader linguistic system that suggests possible narratives. Fragments of text are also present in the form of posters, animated title sequences or text-based casts. The work aims to capture a moment of an imagined narrative set in a fictional landscape, like a frozen frame in a movie or a torn out page of a book.

An interest in dramatising the various relations between people, objects, materials and space links them to an earlier generation of artists, who are represented in this exhibition by some legendary film and video works. In these vintage pieces by Robert Rauschenberg, Bruce Nauman, Bas Jan Ader and Carolee Schneemann we can see the artists exploring interactions between the human body, objects, space and the force of gravity in highly unconventional ways.

In bringing together work by these two distinct generations of artists - one represented by physical objects, the other by means of projected film - the exhibition hopes to suggest both similarities and differences, and to encourage direct experience as much as mental reflection. Like It Matters invites us to rediscover some of the primal relationships between self and object.

Image: Karla Black, January, 2005

Centre for Contemporary Arts
350 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow

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