Autoerotica
Works by Gareth Schweitzer
Private View – Friday 11 July, 5:30 – 8 PM
Friday 11 July, 4 – 8 PM
Saturday 12 July, 12 – 6 PM
Sunday 13 July, 12 – 6 PM
Friday 18 July, 12 – 6 PM
Saturday 19 July, 12 – 6 PM
Sunday 20 July, 12 – 6 PM
Collage, painting and drawing
Gareth Schweitzer is a London based artist and educator.
Born in South Africa, Gareth did a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at Rhodes University, majoring in Painting, History of art and English literature.
He teachers a weekly class called Imagination in Art at a London adult education college, where he manages an art department, while maintaining a consistent art practice in his spare time.
Insta: @Gareth.Schweitzer
Tumblr: mnemotechnicstoo.tumblr.com
Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet – Audre Lorde wrote that the Erotic is ‘the nurturer and nursemaid of all our deepest knowledge.’
Not salacious, but a source of wisdom and deep self-awareness. This feels right to me. The light bulb moment, illumination as turn-on.
The creative worker explores this territory. Working alone and in private, the artist seeks out wisdom and pleasure in attractions, shapes, representations, prototypes, colours, perfect forms, strange combinations and electrifying graphic surprises.
In anti-patriarchal terms, this means exploring the world through what feels right to us, sweetly revolutionary, unconstrained by received norms and forms.
Whatever turns you on, I hope you discover something here that is sexy, beautiful or strange. These works are made from images and objects I am drawn to, or intrigued by, these seemingly-random things I collect, both funky and workaday.
More than 100 years ago, the Spiritualists and Theosophists believed they were revealing ‘the unseen’. While not preoccupied with the spiritual in quite the same way, I explore many of the automatic techniques deployed by heroes of the time, like Laure Pigeon and Madge Gill. I work quickly, opening up automatic and unconscious processes, to explore unknown and expanding territories, following what feels right, without map or plan – editing, sampling, remixing, cutting, overlaying – until we stick, literally with glue, having arrived somewhere pleasing and new.
The works
There are three main sections.
1. A collaboration with the artist Steve Lovett, based in New Zealand
Steve and I started chatting on Tumblr and discovered we had a lot of crossover – both gay men working in collage and in education. We each sent the other a pack of papers in the post, to incorporate into our collage works. So Steve gave me a new collection of papers and also encouraged me to address some of the elements of my personal practice that had stalled, primarily using all the offcuts and fragments I’ve been collecting for years, while also incorporating more overtly sexy stuff.
Insta: @stevelovettnz
2. An extension of teaching practice
Many of the works use techniques explored with my students, including fumage, decalomania, collage weaving, drawing onto pictures, snowflake doily collages (inspired by the 1960s feminist May Wilson) and shredded collages (inspired by Czech artist Jiri Kolar). I’m grateful to the learners who help me open up new territories.
I recently joined a watercolour class, which reinvigorated an interest in painting and observation, while intersecting with random and automatic techniques. Some of these new watercolours are included here.
3. Ongoing development of art practice
Part of the beauty of collage is the paper, its sheen, textures and the potential for different types of cuts. My vocabulary of papers and objects is constantly expanding.
I also create digital collages on my phone using the program Brushes Redux whilst travelling to and from work on a commuter train. I print these out and then use them for analogue processes: cutting and sticking.
Collagists are collectors and cataloguers, so many of the works reflect the urge to catalogue and an unrealised quest for order.
Some of the works are inkjet overprints, with one image printed on top of another. Most of these have at least three image layers. This random process allows the unexpected: some things are obscured while others are revealed.