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EXHIBITING
ARTISTS:
Beth Harland
Richard Layzell
Caroline List
Chris Meigh-Andrews
Jacqueline Morreau
Mario Rossi
Mare Tralla
The exhibition the fourth in a series of exhibitions at LSHTM,
ran from 10 December 2002 to 14 Feb 2003. The opening night included
a performance, Caught for Breath, by Richard Layzell, one of Britain’s
leading performance artists.
These web pages provide a detailed catalogue of the exhibition.
Curated by: Pam Skelton of Central Saint Martins & Tony Fletcher
of LSHTM
SMOG EXHIBITION OVERVIEW
SMOG, an exhibition inspired by London’s Great
Smog opens at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
exactly 50 years to the week that saw the capital devastated by
one of the greatest environmental disasters in history. For a whole
week in 1952, beginning on 4 December, London suffered its worst
ever smog when levels of sulphur and particulates reached lethal
concentrations, leading to the deaths of up to 12,000 people. Half
a century later, the event remains a reference point around the
world for researchers and teachers in public health and epidemiology.
Although pea-soup fogs seldom occur in London these days, their
almost romantic association with the city, and with clandestine
happenings, changing identities and nostalgic vistas, are still
part of London’s global image. Many works by artists and
writers as diverse as James Abbot McNeil Whistler, Claude Monet,
Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle
have been inspired by fog and smog and have helped to create that
sense of the uncanny that underlies the spectre of 19th and early
20th century London. At the beginning of a new Century, air pollution
in our cities is mainly of the invisible photochemical variety
and, pervasive though it is, it no longer inspires art or urban
spectacle: yet the spectre of the ‘fog’ continues to
fascinate and intrigue.
In Smog seven
artist’s present new work that
reflects their responses, impressions and fears related to fog,
smog, pollution, suffocation and reduced visibility. In their
artworks scientific fact may appear to be diffused, concealed
or transformed
in order to reveal other kinds of insights and meanings. The
meanings and feelings that these works evoke are surely complex,
suggesting
positions and visions perhaps peripheral to scientific enquiry
yet provoking fresh readings and intersections between science,
art and life.
ARTISTS' WORK:
Beth Harland’s work focuses on the properties
of smog and the physical and psychological impact of its invasive
contamination. Her paintings include glimpses of interiors photographed
in Pompeii as well as images that suggest suffocation and extreme
fragmentation.
Richard Layzell presents two new works: Caught
for breath is a performance that explores memory and visible
air,
the body bellows and the mouth gasps; Obfuscation is an installation
about visibility, light and fear - the window as an opening to
the
world outside and the vulnerability within: "Look out, it's
coming in."
Caroline List has made, Souvenir, a series of interconnecting
paintings that begin with photographic images she has taken of the
Thames and the Grand Union Canal. Creating a shifting scale of colour,
light and form these images recall the atmosphere of the great waterways
in which bargeloads of coal were transported to London.
Chris Meigh–Andrews uses a video monitor
as a receptacle to display a vintage television on which he shows
a silent and continuous cycle of images and objects that emerge,
re-emerge and dissolve. Making use of documentary photographs and
film images from the 50s he creates a pattern of ghostly and ephemeral
images from the past.
Mario Rossi uses the space opened up by the anxiety
induced by reduced visibility and disorientation. Collectively titled
Le bout de souffle this new work takes eyewitness accounts of real
events as a starting point to develop a series of paintings that
spin a web of connections between the lived, recollected and imagined.
Jacqueline Morreau contrasts the beguiling,
seductive killer fog with the ‘killer in the fog’,
that long frightened and intrigued the public as well as crime
writers. Morreau depicts
the threat and the beauty of the yellow fog, and reveals some
of the components that made it so.
Mare Tralla installs a sound work that evokes
being ‘lost in the fog’. The sounds of trains and
factory machines eerily mingle with the sounds of a person struggling
to
breath, suggesting the concealed and perhaps suffocating human
presence.
The background image on these pages is taken from a high resolution
scanning electron microscope image showing aggregates of particles,
mainly soot from diesel and coal combustion particles in the
air of the 1952 smog episode. These very fine particles, each
less than a tenth of micrometer across, were found in an archived
lung tissue sample from someone who sadly died of respiratory
failure during the 1952 smog.
Acknowledgements to the research team who took this image: Abraham
JL, Berry CL, Hunt A, Judson B; State University of New York
Upstate Medical University, Syracuse and Queen Mary and Westfield
College, London.
last updated
27.11.2003 | designed and maintained by Adrian
Cousins
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