20three » Outsider http://www.20three.com Fri, 30 Jul 2010 13:10:14 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 Museum of Everything http://www.20three.com/2009/12/museum-of-everything/ http://www.20three.com/2009/12/museum-of-everything/#comments Thu, 03 Dec 2009 17:51:02 +0000 Lamont http://www.20three.com/?p=440 Took a trip to Chalk Farm on Saturday to have a look at the Museum of Everything, a wide collection of outsider art from the last 60 years, and I can honestly say it is the best collection of anything I have ever seen and urge you to visit. Yes you, we’ve not met but I’m sure we’d be friends, right?


The collection is housed in what used to be a recording studio and the location sits very well with the objects and images, small rooms linked by smaller corridors opening into a larger room, filled floor to ceiling with the most obsessive imagery I’ve ever seen. The collection is selected by artists, musicians and writers but don’t let that spoli it, you might like David Byrne. Each curator has written a small text explaining their choices. Some of these are very annoying, some are better. Nick Cave managed to get to the nub of it for me with the text ‘Louis Wain is my favourite painter ever’. Fair enough eh?

There are some truly startling paintings, illustrations and installations on view here, the product of a persons obsessions and compulsions. This is not art made for the consideration by others, this is true art, made because the artist has no other choice but to get it out of their head. Highlights for me were the Aleksander P Lobanov collection and the Henry Darger panels, a twisted Norman Rockwell of adolescence and fear.

Get up there and see it, don’t think it’s going to be on for much longer.

dl

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]]> http://www.20three.com/2009/12/museum-of-everything/feed/ 0 Photographer: Nhung Dang http://www.20three.com/2009/03/photographer-nhung-dang/ http://www.20three.com/2009/03/photographer-nhung-dang/#comments Fri, 27 Mar 2009 14:00:00 +0000 Owen http://www.20three.com/?p=133 I have always been an acolyte of handmade tools, deliberate restrictions, dogmas and other self imposed limitations that can stimulate the creative process. This might sound contradictory but a self imposed restrictive methodology can produce interesting results that could have never come about any other way. The manifesto of Dogme 95 and the cut-up technique (also called fishbowling for some weird reason) used by Bowie and William  Burroughs are two examples of a self imposed set of rules or a tightly defined working process used for creative purposes.

badger

..So all this brings me onto the photography of Nhung Dang. Nhung is a prolific photographer, but I am particularly inspired by her pinhole photography. There is something nostalgic and timeless to her photography, in both subject matter and appearance, almost like looking at an alternative past through the warm fug of memory.

milady

Nhung makes her own cameras and her obvious skill with them has produced some amazing atmospheric imagery. There is something of the outsider (art-brut) in the idea of handmade implements, whether this is my romantic notion of the ideal of ‘craft’ or a celebration of the rejection of technology, who knows, but when I look at Nhung’s photos I want to make cameras out of biscuit tins and take photos of butchers…

I have chosen a couple of images for this post but please check out the following links to see more of Nhung’s work.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nhungsta/

Nhung’s ‘The Lost Promenade’ project – “Starting with the pieces around the edges…”

A short interview with Nhung Dang

op

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