Debbie Ryan

Debbie Ryan is an established contemporary mosaic artist who creates vibrant and intriguing large-scale contemporary artwork and sculpture for public and private settings. Debbie is constantly striving to innovate and explore new mosaic design methods; materials and processes, working through the development of smaller scale sculptural Maquettes to large-scale pieces. Debbie's exhibition practice aims is to examine ideas exploring the multiplicity of the natural world.

Over the past five years Debbie has worked on a range of high-profile projects including Liverpool's Public Art trails: Go Superlambananas, A Winter's Trail, and 08 for 08. Debbie's artwork was selected for display at the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai, China. The large-scale sculpture proved popular with visitors, and was selected to be permanently included in the collection at the Expo Museum. Debbie's success has firmly established her as one of the North West's leading contemporary mosaic artists. Debbie is available to undertake commissions worldwide.

Ryan Trecartin is at the forefront of a generation of artists using video and digital media to new aesthetic and critical ends. His work borrows from and expertly manipulates the languages and forms of popular culture to create densely layered video narratives presented within highly sculptural and theatrical settings.

Presented in the UK for the first time, Trill-ogy Comp (2009) comprises three works: K-CoreaINC.KSibling Topics (section a), and P.opular S.ky (section ish). Featuring a cast of family and friends (in particular long-time collaborator Lizzie Fitch) and the artist himself, these works are characterised by a feverishly high-pitched, fast-paced style and the constant negotiation of notions of narrative, gender and belonging. Their dominant themes revolve around consumerism, youth culture and the complete fragmentation of identity in a world where personae are continuously multiplied and erased, downloaded and over-written.

The films radiate the kind of wired energy you might feel after a long night surfing the net, and are shaped by the characteristics and aesthetics of the Internet. While each component part is tediously mass-produced, made up of Ikea furniture and TV show one-liners, the possibilities this world presents lie in the non-formulaic. Nothing is fixed, but everything is always re-calibrating into new forms. There is no single point of view. Characters address themselves in the second and third person. Nor is there a singular sense of self. Objects and persons merge, transmogrify and become one another. Identity is performed in situ, as much defined by the scenography as by any inherent character traits. For Touched, the films are presented as immersive installations in the sprawling, labyrinthine basement of a former hardware store (the building, said to have the longest shop front in Britain, runs almost the entire length of a street). Moving through and between the interconnected rooms, viewers become part of the artist’s transitional world.

Trill-ogy Comp doesn’t so much ‘touch’ in the gentle sense as pull you in, shake you up, utterly absorb you, and then set you down, reeling. The works are visually, aurally and emotionally assaulting, leaving our senses disrupted and our thought processes open to new perspectives on the world. 

I absolutely loved this video!! The fast pace, the flashy colours, the fact that you had to strain your ears to make out what whas being said, the over-exaggeration of the body language and attitude! - I love it because it doesn't make sense at first glance even thought it captures and allures you to keep watching! Its abstract videography in a way!

Alfredo Jaar's 'We Wish to Inform You That We Didn't Know

A video installation across three screens, Alfredo Jaar’s We Wish to Inform You That We Didn’t KnowRwandan genocide, it’s a kind of epilogue to The Rwanda Project, a series of artworks developed by Jaar as a response to the genocide and the world’s inaction thereof. is being presented in the dark, derelict environs of what must have been reception area of the old Scandinavian Hotel, with daylight from the basement atmospherically slipping in from underneath through bare rough wooden floorboards. It collects footage from various sources to investigate and ruminate on the

Assuming we join the piece at the beginning, we’re offered a BBC News report from not long after the outrage which provides the context surrounding a visit by then US present Bill Clinton (interesting in its own way for the slow non-sensationalist pace with which it proceeds, a sharp contrast to some of the television reporting which appears now). This is followed by the famous remarks by Clinton in which he apologies for the inaction of those who were in a position to intervene in which he suggests that they didn’t know the scale of what was happening.

There then follows the powerful guts of the piece, testimony from three Rwandans who were directly effected by the action in their state and how they survived through sheer luck, which is too horrible to repeat. At which point, Jaar drops in a tiny interview with Stephen Lewis, the Canadian politician and diplomat, who was appointed to an enquiry into the Rwandan tragedy by the Organization of African Unity (OAU). He passionately and damningly suggests that Clinton did know about what was happening in Rwanda but had his mind on other things “as he so often did”. Lewis has tears in his eyes, the kind of tears only men who stoically won't cry have and we understand because we've heard just some of the testimony which he must have been a daily ritual as part of the panel.
 
However potent that interview was, the film was deeply simplistic in essentially laying the blame on Clinton’s shoulders (Jaar also employs freeze frames to indicate moments in the footage of the former President that might suggest he was being insincere) and that even though he was supposed to be “head of the free world ™” the whole of that world was in theory culpable, especially the UN who were on the ground in a non-partisan capacity.

In hindsight, we can understand that Jaar is pointing his anger in one direction in order to simplify the argument, he’s using Clinton to symbolically represent the failure of all the parties involved (presumably because by making his apology Clinton turned himself into a target). We also concede that Jaar has identified that in a gallery-type setting its impossible to present too complex an argument since its rare that a visitor will sit for the entire duration of a piece and so the artist has to keep repeating the message or theme in a variety of ways, in this case five directly focused movements (the fifth being an effective montage of shots of what must be the memorial the artist has created in Rwanda sixteen years on).

Inspiration for the Upton Workshops

My focus is on the Religious element of the School... Rosary Beads!