joelryanmcdermott.com/gallery

I work with film and auto-ethnographic writing to explore norms and expectations of male behaviour. Drawing upon personal experience and from dialogues with others, my films consider manifestations and impacts of male violence. Serious themes – spanning domestic violence, PTSD and the importance of male role models – are addressed sensitively but also, at times, with humour. The artists’ contention is that male violence is aggravated by silence and by the societal expectation that men ought to be ‘stoic’.

In articulating my own experiences I intend both to explore causes of violence and emotional stoicism, and to get people talking. Talking about violence and silence is seen as a first step toward challenging cultural myths about masculinity and ameliorating community division stemming from negative ‘masculine’ behaviours. My work is available for gallery exhibition and for use in community or participatory sessions. I am interested in using films to facilitate dialogue and collaboration with groups of other men and boys. If you or your group would like to get involved, or if you would like to comment and contribute to the discussion, please feel free to get in contact.

natalyperez.com

Project financed by Beca Chile Crea 2019, Ministry of Culture, Arts and Heritage, Chile.

I am a Chilean sculptor and textile artist. Most of my practice has been based on the representation of human figures using textile techniques. A key part of my creative process is the use of archival research method as a reference to personal experiences and historical events.

Throughout my MA studies, my artistic practice underwent a significant change due to the civil protests in Chile since October 2019. This process was incredibly challenging, but it became a space of research, learning and an opportunity to explore new visual strategies that allowed me to shape and somehow leave a record of the social-political environment in my homeland.

In this project, I cast objects selected from an archive, created with photographs sent by friends from Chile and collected from online newspapers and social media. I focused my search on those popular manifestations where there was a sense of collectivity and empathy. The actions were represented through domestic objects used by the people during the protests.

The casting process became an essential element in my current practice to embody and articulated ideas around evidence and traces, mainly from the possibility through this medium to hold and contain memory of past actions that the replica can contain.

@alex.walker.art / alexwalkerart.wixsite.com/mysite / artsteps.com/view/5ef3d455ce1b64198bf915ae

My practice explores the human desire to collect the moments we see as worthy of preserving and asks How do we capture time? Is it enough to simply make a record of something we feel is important or is the contextual understanding of an event or moment key to creating a shared history? The advent of photography made the capturing of likenesses and the sharing of memories easier than ever and this became the way in which families defined the perception of themselves, and ensured their perpetuation, meaning their stories would continue to be told for longer than they would physically exist. But is the act of trying to record a memory, whether by taking a photograph, or employing some other method, an acknowledgement of loss and mortality?

I use early photographic techniques to record the passing of daylight hours through empty spaces found in antique photograph albums. Each of the pieces in this series represents an 8-12 hour slice of time, though by looking at them we can’t fully contextualise those seconds, minutes or hours, we don’t know what these pieces witnessed during their exposure, it is something we can’t get back.