News
Simon Ingram / Senior Lecturer at Elam School of Fine Arts
Simon Ingram will take up the position of Senior Lecturer at Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland, in late January 2008
Simon Ingram joins Gow Langsford Gallery
Simon Ingram has exhibited locally and internationally for over ten years. His work is held in the Gibbs, Chartwell and Fletcher Trust collections, and he was recently awarded a Creative New Zealand New Work Grant. Over the last twelve months his work has featured in four major public gallery exhibitions: Just Painting at the Auckland Art Gallery, Four Times Painting at the Adam Art Gallery, The Secret Life of Paint, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, and PX: A Purposeless Production/A Necessary Praxis currently showing at AUT"s St Paul Street Gallery.
Through its use of DIY technology and self organising systems Ingram's work investigates decision making in painting and the relationship between the machine made and the human or hand made. Painting Assemblage No.6, currently on show at 34 ST Paul St Auckland, consists of a machine constructed from aluminium and Lego painting an abstract image on a 2 x 2 metre linen canvas in thick white oil colour with a brush. The painting produced is pictorially lyrical and dense yet produced entirely by a machine over the course of the exhibition.
These works expose hand-made painterly gesture to a model of painting that is mechanistic and electronic but which maintains dialogue with certain gritty, material and traditional givens in the practice of painting such as makerly thickness, gesture and support. Over the course of a painting’s exhibition and production, the machine appropriates the gallery as studio, to paint an algorithmically generated T-square fractal. Attached to the gallery wall, and clutching a brush, the machine’s “paint head” travels over a raw linen canvas painting each stroke by periodically dipping its brush into a dripping Lego paint pot. Although the format of the fractal is determined by the machine’s software, the sequence of brush strokes and decisions on their length and density are generated on-the-fly and in relation to the moment-to-moment life of the painting, all of which contributes to the complex visual field of the paintings produced.
Simon Ingram, 2008