Library
CSM library images
Paul K
29/09/19
"Born in 1985 in Cambridge, UK. He graduated with distinction 2004 Art Foundation at Cambridge Regional College before studying Fine Art, Chelsea College of Art & Design, University of the Arts, London (BA Hons, 2009).
Selected Solo Exhibitions include: Ship of Fools, SKIP Gallery, Selfridges, London (2019); Fake Fairy Fantasies, Belmacz, London (2018); Narrator, Relator & Stimulator Belmacz, London (2017); #TheBritishAreCumming, Kunstschlager, Reykjavik (2014); #ExtremeDream Makeover, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham (2014); The Men of 73 & Friends, Centre For Recent Drawing, London (2011); Rooms, Corpus Christi Library, Cambridge (2011); She wanted his soul, but he could only give her his blood, Transition Gallery, London (2009). Recent Group Exhibitions include: Lignes de vies – une exposition de légendes,MACVAL, Paris (2019); Orlando… at the present time, The Wolfson Gallery, Charleston, Lewes (2018); DRAG, Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, London (2018); Salon 63, Galitzine, London (2018); If I Was Your Girlfriend: A Jam, Belmacz, London (2018); In some far off place many light years in space I’ll wait for you, Cubitt, London (2018); Creative Rage, The Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent (2018); Machiavellian Mary, Kingsgate Project Space, London (2018); Episode 9: Other Worlds Already Exist/ Arika, Tramway, Glasgow (2017); Mad Cow (Life is Random, Why Not All The Rest?), SCAG Contemporary, Vienna (2017); Creative Rage, The Gallery, Liverpool (2017); New Material, A.P.T. Gallery, London (2017); Liberate yourself from my vice like grip, Islington Mill, Salford (2016); Lotusland Estates, Art Language Location at Elan, Cambridge (2016); Recasting, Museum of Classical Archeology, Cambridge (2016); Costermongering, Belmacz, London (2016); Ill Meat, La Fonderie, Geneva (2016); Coming Into Being, Stockholms Universitet, Stockholm (2016); Chateau Double Wide, Glasgow International, Glasgow (2016); What art you laughing at?, Guest Project Space, London (2016); The Conformist (also as curator), Belmacz, London (2016).
He was Artist in Residence at Guest Project Space, London (2016); Unilever, London (2015); Cill Rialaig Arts Centre, Ballingskelligs, County Kerry (2014); The Beach Lookout, Alderburgh, Suffolk (2014); Judge, Angelika Open Art (2015). In 2009 he was awarded The Transition Gallery Prize. Paul currently lives and works London, UK."
http://belmacz.com/artists/paul-kindersley/
He was also part of an exhibition based on gender.
Paul K
29/09/19
"A ‘standup comedian, makeup artist and idiot’, Kindersley is a master of disruptive, chaotic storytelling
Notes
Notes from Paul.
Today whilst Paul was explaining about his work I took some notes on the things that stood out the most. I really liked how he said that we should never stop "translating existing ideas into different ones in different ways".
Also I really liked how he talked about how I should interact with my work and vice versa. Also the layering of his work made me think of how I can develop my ideas in that way as well.
Soundsuit
Nick Cave's Soundsuits
30/09/19
"Artist Nick Cave “is like a rock star in the art world,” said his primary dealer Jack Shainman, in a phone interview with artnet News. “When I see people starting to ask my artists for autograph, that changes into a different realm.”
Boosted by major museum shows, public performances, and substantial exposure at art fairs in recent years, Cave’s most famous works—his signature Soundsuits—have become wildly popular. And it’s not hard to see why. Though the styles, themes and materials vary widely, they all tend to be dazzlingly elaborate and fantastic sculptural forms based on the scale of the artist’s body."
The Soundsuits “camouflage the body, masking and creating a second skin that conceals race, gender, and class, forcing the viewer to look without judgment,” according to a description on Jack Shainman Gallery‘s website.
The artist is currently working on a massive installation for MASS MoCAtitled “Until” that will open October 16. Shainman was hard-pressed to describe the details of the monumental project except to say he understands that it will be “immersive” and that the artist has described it as “being on the inside of a Soundsuit.”
For the past two and a half decades—Cave created his first Soundsuit in 1992, as a response to the LAPD beating of Rodney King and the ensuing riots—interest in the Soundsuits has been building slowly and steadily, though it seems to have hit a tipping point of late.
“There is not a day that people aren’t calling about buying his work or museums interested in putting on shows,” says Shainman, adding, “I think it’s what’s called a ‘luxury problem’ but we’ve been having to turn down museum shows.”
Along with intense demand for Soundsuits on the primary market—the Seattle Museum of Art is among a recent buyer, said Shainman—some Soundsuits have been turning up at auction in recent years as well.
According to the artnet Price Database, there are just 16 results at auction for Cave. Nine of these works are Soundsuits."
https://news.artnet.com/market/nick-caves-soundsuits-made-art-world-rock-star-485522
https://youtu.be/BpNcmh3rxko
The Girl In The Looking Glass
Why was I born an obstacle?
Why is being a woman, considered as one?
For I can learn and I am capable
Yet none of it matters, for I am not a son
If you truly need more soldiers
Please just take me instead
My father knows no limits, but I do
Just treat me as one of your men
I will fulfill my role as a soldier
I am a female and a fighter
I am a woman and a warrior
I may not be perfect
But I will fight for her
The girl in the looking glass
Who has failed as a daughter
She will fulfill her role as a soldier
She is a woman, she is a warrior
She is the girl worth fighting for
Gender and children
How does gender identity development in children?
Gender identity typically develops in stages:
-
Around age two: Children become conscious of the physical differences between boys and girls.
-
Before their third birthday: Most children can easily label themselves as either a boy or a girl.
-
By age four: Most children have a stable sense of their gender identity.
During this same time of life, children learn gender role behavior—that is, doing "things that boys do" or "things that girls do." However, cross-gender preferences and play are a normal part of gender development and exploration regardless of their future gender identity.
Gender fluid dolls
"The population of young people who identify as gender-nonbinary is growing. Though no large surveys have been done of kids younger than 10, a recent study by the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that 27% of California teens identify as gender-nonconforming. And a 2018 Pew study found 35% of Gen Z-ers (born 1995 to 2015) say they personally know someone who uses gender-neutral pronouns like they and them, compared with just 16% of Gen X-ers (born 1965 to 1980). The patterns are projected to continue with Generation Alpha, born in 2010 and later. Those kids, along with boys who want to play with dolls and girls who identify as “tomboys” and don’t gravitate toward fashion doll play, are an untapped demographic. Mattel currently has 19% market share in the $8 billion doll industry; gaining just 1 more point could translate into $80 million in revenue for the company."
https://time.com/5684822/mattel-gender-neutral-doll/
I personally don't agree with these dolls because all they do is confuse the younger generation about what gender/gender identity really is about. I think first of all children don't necessarily understand the importance of gender, and because the percentage of nonbinary has been rising in the past couple of years, it only teaches the new generation that gender is not that important. But again, as a Mormon, I have a very strong idea of why we should only have 2 genders. We have something called the plan of salvation and it explains, long story short, about how we got here on earth and the reason we are here but it also talks about the importance of childbirth and the relationship between man and woman.
Elder David A. Bednar of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles:“[Gender] in large measure defines who we are, why we are here upon the earth, and what we are to do and become. For divine purposes, male and female spirits are different, distinctive, and complementary. … The unique combination of spiritual, physical, mental, and emotional capacities of both males and females were needed to implement the plan of happiness
LDS on gender
This is my opinion about gender in a video by my church (the church of Jesus Christ of latter days saints).
I think gender is an ongoing conversation people have, but I think I have mixed feeling about gender. I believe we have been given the right to choose right or wrong "agency" but gender plays such an important role in God's plan for us. My opinion is that men are men and women and women, but you are not wrong if you are struggling. It is a too complex topic to write about but this is my opinion for now...
"Laws, which govern life, were instituted from before the foundation of the world. They are notbased on social or political considerations. They cannot be changed. No pressure, no protests, nolegislation can alter them"
Paul K
Drag and gender
9/09/19
"In the one-room gallery space dedicated to a show that featured over two dozen artists, curator Vincent Honoré had squeezed in 60 years of drag history. All the greats were present: on a wall of video works, a film of experimental drag legend Leigh Bowery played on loop alongside Paul Kindersley’s early prototypes of the YouTube makeup tutorial, alongside a video by contemporary performance artist Victoria Sin.
Some complained of a lack of focussed curation. But to me, the randomness and the broadness worked. If drag hinges around the subversion of gender norms, traditionally defined as “clothing more conventionally worn by the opposite sex, especially women's clothes worn by a man”, it has become so much more than that in recent years, as the popularisation of drag has spawned more types of it; drag kings, ‘bio queens’, drag girl bands, performance artists pulling elements from drag and the downright weird and abstract. Here, I thought, the full spectrum is truly on display, and importantly, the curation shows us that the multiplicity has always been there."
Kiss my gender
Kiss My Genders, an exhibition on this summer at the Hayward Gallery flips the tired tendency for queer, trans, intersex and gender non-conforming bodies to be viewed as reducible subjects.
“When I first started drag at the age of 19, I experienced a profound fracture. While it liberated me to inhabit a self-constructed feminine alter ego, the process also entailed a sense of splitting. In renouncing my male identity, I simultaneously felt a divorce from my Muslim heritage, as if adopting a queer alter ego severed me from my conservative Middle Eastern upbringing,” Amrou writes in an essay published in the exhibition’s catalog. “In the resulting photograph,” shot using triple exposure, “I attempt to wear a Middle Eastern rug as a dress; yet the mere attempt to create an intersection of my gender identity with my heritage results in a struggle that shatters the self into many different pieces.”
In the image, however, drag becomes a bridging force, a glue that binds the personal, the cultural and the political. “In Glamour, the image’s disjointed nature speaks of the struggles Amrou Al-Kadhi has faced -- but its ultimate unity is a testament to the joy drag has brought to their life,” adds Holly.
"Among the most literal in its employment of performance is Jenkin van Zyl Looners (2019), a cinematic video installation. Mostly filmed in a complex of decaying film sets in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains, the various locations serve as metaphors for purpose-built identities, squatted by Jenkin’s gang of genderless queens and undermined from the inside. “These sets have been continuously mutated to suit a succession of productions,” the artist explains, “and so fortresses, catapults, and temples -- all from awkwardly conflicting civilizations -- jut out from beneath the desert.”
The scenes that play out among them have equal footings in violence, pleasure, and lust, offering a queered take on the typical macho violence you might expect given the Hollywood-ready landscape.“ Looners set out an idea of a kind of love-as-violence and violence-as-love. The film follows a trail of battlefields in which conflicts loop, day after day, without end. In the film, latex inflatables are built and burst by performers, anonymized by silicone masks, bearing weaponized genital accessories. Here, I was partially thinking through the contradictions inherent within masculinist queer spaces and their sites of simultaneous ecstasy and danger.” Running through the symbolic excess and campy horror, however, is a thread of wry humor, something that’s witnessed across much of the work in Kiss My Genders: “When humor is disruptive, it can be a funhouse mirror to project back tensions; it can expose the artificiality of normative identities,” states van Zyl. “Ultimately the film is a tribute to the gang of queens I perform and film within the work, and my hope is that some of the weird joy and playfulness from its making could be infectious."
CSM library research