Hasta La Ideas

Our interview with the Toronto-based artist on the process and progress of his photocopy tapestries

Niall McClelland‘s art may be rooted in the subcultures of graffiti and punk rock, but its roughness has been refined through a well executed artistic process. His highly sought after “Tapestry” series includes large-scale works which are made by folding and wearing down large sheets of paper covered in photocopy toner. Toying with balance between control and chance, McClelland also makes vivid prints by allowing inkjet cartridges to seep into the corners of rugged Japanese papers that have been folded and bound, leaving striking psychedelic stains.

We recently caught up with the Toronto-based artist to ask about his process and his upcoming projects.

You have an obvious affection for cast off common objects—ink cartridges, light bulbs, bed sheets, photocopies, etc. How did this develop? What’s the appeal of these things?

It developed as a practical way of making work. I needed to use affordable material for budget reasons, but it’s also what I’ve been surrounded by forever—used clothes, used furniture, thrift shop or junk pile everything. It seems like a natural, honest starting point for me to make work. Developing an eye for the potential in trash or cheap familiar materials. Being resourceful I think is the appeal, there’s a pride that comes from that.

How much of the process are you able to dictate, and when do you know to just let things happen?

I like the idea of working with material that has had a bit of life to it, something that has existed outside of a studio. I tend to set up scenarios for the work to be created within, so setting up parameters that I’ve pre-determined then letting the material do its own thing within them—anything from weathering canvases on my roof, to folding paper and walking with it in my pocket. As far as when to know when to let go, that’s just experience with the materials and learning restraint. Having an eye for what works and what is shit.

Tell us about how the folded photocopies ended up as the fabric design for Jeremy Laing’s Spring 2012 collection.

Jeremy saw my show last spring at Clint Roenisch gallery and got in touch, but we have a lot of friends in common so it wasn’t a huge stretch. We started getting together to talk about his upcoming collection and compare notes, he’s a sharp guy and we see eye to eye on things, so we just narrowed it down to several directions and I created the work which ended up as his prints for the Spring/Summer 2012 collection. Super simple, we’re friends now. I also have a couple really rad silk scarves coming out with Cast of Vices in the fall. We scanned some of the folded photocopies on this insane NASA scanner, and had them printed on really great silk, pretty badass.

What’s on the horizon?

As far as upcoming projects, I have a solo show opening at Eleanor Harwood Gallery in San Francisco opening 7 April. I’ll be showing with Clint Roenisch at the NADA fair in May (to coincide with the first Frieze Art Fair in New York) alongside buds and great artists Hugh Scott-Douglas and Alexander Hardashnakov, which should be rad. All three of us will also be included in the group exhibit this June “Trans/FORM” at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MOCCA) in Toronto alongside five other artists. Can’t wait for that one too!

Niall McClelland is represented by Clint Roenisch Gallery in Toronto, Envoy Enterprises in New York and Eleanor Harwood Gallery in San Francisco.

It’s that time of year again, when the Art Newspaper looks back at the year that was to provide their annual rankings of most popular, and therefore visited, museums and exhibitions across the world. It’s no surprise in the slightest that the Louvre once again captured the top attendance record, as it has for the past billion years or so. In 2011, they his nearly 8.9 million, an impressive increase of roughly 400,000 over the year prior. The other success stories were from the usual roster, the Met for example, broke “the six million barrier” and stole away the number two spot from the British Museum, with lots of help from one of the world’s most popular exhibitions, “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty.” Perhaps most surprising, and the leading talk of AN‘s coverage, is that the world’s most well-attended exhibition didn’t come from the usual three locales, the US, Europe, or Asia, but from Brazil. The Centro Cultrual Banco do Brasil‘s “The Magical World of Escher” landed this year’s top spot, pulling in close to 575,000 people and nearly 10,000 daily. On the opposite side of such positive numbers were the Tate Modern, who saw a dip, despite popular exhibitions like the well-timed Ai Weiwei sunflowers, and MoMA, who had a slight decrease as well. The Art Newspaper‘s whole breakdown of all the numbers can be found here (pdf).

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A new book, published by Stickit, celebrates the work of street artist Eltono, who has painted his unusual, geometric art on the walls of cities all over the world…

Eltono was born in Paris, but lived in Madrid throughout the 2000s, before moving to Beijing in 2010. The book, titled Line and Surface, gives an overview of his work from the last 12 years. As well as his public art, Elonto’s work has featured in exhibitions at galleries including Tate Modern in London and Fundacion Miró in Barcelona.

Featuring design by Jeroen van Mourik and texts by Javier Abarca and Rafael Schacter, Line and Surface is published in a limited edition of 1,000. Here are some spreads from the book, showing Eltono’s work in situ:

The book also features work Eltono has made for exhibitions, as well as public sculptures, such as those shown below:

Cover of Line and Surface

Line and Surface is available from Stickit, priced 24.95 Euros. More info is here. Eltono’s personal website is at eltono.com, where you can also view videos of him creating his works.

The inside of The Hello Cube is beamed to a big screen – a still is also sent back to the Twitter user who initiated the particular combination of colours and patterns

Hellicar & Lewis unveiled their latest digital installation, The Hello Cube, at Tate Modern earlier today as part of a series of events centred around the gallery’s Yayoi Kusama exhibition. Visitors can tweet @thehellocube to dictate the patterns and shapes which appear on a huge screen, and you can even do it (and see your efforts) remotely…

The Hello Cube at Tate Modern on the Turbine Hall bridge

The duo won the pitch to create a piece of work for Tate Collectives‘ Infinite Kasuma weekend in December and the project came out of several workshops conducted with youth teams organised via the REcreative initiative. The Hello Cube, situated on the Turbine Hall bridge from today until Sunday, is the result.

Pete Hellicar and Joel Gethin Lewis formed their practice in 2008 (subscribers can read Eliza’s profile on them from CR July 09, here). Since then they have been working with technology to create interactive art and design projects which, while at the forefront of digital exploration, are often rooted in the physical world. They are now respresented by Nexus Interactive Arts.

The Hello Cube is a direct response to Kusama’s work but it reacts to both social media (Twitter) and physical activity around the cube itself (via microphones). Essentially it is a “Twitterable object”, as Gethin Lewis calls it, containing a screen set within a series of mirrors. Visitors to the Tate, and indeed anyone on Twitter, can tweet ‘commands’ to @thehellocube and the Cube will turn these into short animations.

There are three levels of command terms: firstly, ‘scenes’ such as ‘drawn’, ‘texture’, ‘cells’ and ‘spots’; then ‘effects’ like ‘bigger’, ‘smaller’, ‘flip’, ‘reflect’, ‘ripple’, ‘shake’, ‘pixelate’, or ‘swirl’; followed by sixty different colours in the software. So tweeting “purple texture shatter green pixellate swirls” will result in, well, you’ll have to try it and find out.

A camera situated within the cube films the animation (based on the latest commands given) which is then projected onto a large screen on the Turbine Hall bridge. As you can see in some of the shots below, various holes in the side of the cube allow Tate visitors to stick hands and arms in through the structure, adding to the kaleidoscopic madness (and also messing with the sense of scale).

“When you tweet your commands the camera also takes a snapshot of that space and sends it back to you,” says Hellicar. “We get excited by not being able to predict what will come out of it,” adds Gethin Lewis, “you can essentially interact with the cube from anywhere in the world.”

While clearly a result of their digital know-how, The Hello Cube also comes out Hellicar & Lewis’ interest in “analogue toys and stage craft”, the kinds of elements that have for centuries kept people entranced in front of spectacle.

It’s part of a desire to bring a sense of enchantment into digital projects, with the audience often having equal input in the creation of a piece of work. “We don’t create narratives, we create systems,” says Gethin Lewis. “When people interact with them they create their own narrative.”

Sure, there’s a hefty amount of technology behind The Hello Cube. But strip it back and it seems that, as with much of Kusama’s art on the gallery’s fourth floor, there’s a real love of simple enchantment in their work. “It’s a magical joy machine,” says Gethin Lewis, summing up their Twitter-fed, mirrored-cube-projector very nicely indeed.

To start interacting with The Hello Cube, tweet @thehellocube with a series of the commands listed above. Yayoi Kasuma is on at Tate Modern until June 5. Infinite Kasuma is a partnership with Tate Collectives, REcreative and the Louis Vuitton Arts Project.

One of CR’s attempts sent remotely and helped in some small way by an unidentified gallery-goer’s arms

Numen/For Use has unveiled a new installation in a church in Pula in Croatia. Tuft, a construction made from tape and lined with red tufted carpet, is suspended four metres in the air and by all accounts is pretty soft and bouncy inside…

Known for their huge web-like tape installations that have appeared in Germany, Australia and Serbia, Croatian-Austrian design collective Numen/For Use has created something rather more sensual for the former church building in western Croatia.

Tape is also the starting point for NFU’s trumpet-like structure and forms the initial shape of the Tuft installation. Produced in the Regeneracjira factory, the rough underside of a bright red carpet forms the outside of the ‘room’, serving as a counterpoint to the soft “carnal interior”. Viewed from the inside, the space looks to resemble some sort of enormous ear canal.

Tuft on show in Zurich last year:

“After the initial caution,” write NFU on their website, “the user starts perceiving the functional aspect of the installation, utilising the softness and sound isolation of the installation and using it as an inward facing collective sofa.”

NFU has a large selection images of the project at numen.eu, including several making-of photographs (four are shown at the bottom of this post).

Making of images: