Solo Exhibition

This exhibition included a series of 4 Reflective Editors, a smaller vertical-format reflective editor, a series of prints and a site-specific ‘Blind Screen’ piece. These works were designed to echo the two-column space of the gallery. They featured an aperture/frame-like geometry where the proportion of reflected image is greatly reduced in relation to the revealed wall.

The Blind Screen was installed on site incorporating a continuous band of videotape looped around two apertures on the gallery wall, cutting (‘screening’) the space. This material is highly reflective – similar to the cast acrylic sheet – so the blind screens simultaneously intervened in space and reflected the space around the viewer.

This installation was designed to work within the parameters of the exhibition space, which here allowed me to explore a series of ideas across three media: wall-hung reflective editor; the blind screen; and 8 framed screen prints. My main concerns were to further develop ideas of reflection, repetition and serial forms. The prints in particular allowed me to develop a formal ‘language’ underpinning the geometrical development across all media.

The prints became for me a new way of exploring repetition and similarity as a core part of my research. The particular strategy for this show was to work out a way for combining different material approaches within a relatively small exhibition space. All my work demands a highly considered placing within each architectural environment and here I utilised the pillars of the room as a ready-made division.

Douglas Allsop

Research Interests

Minimalism. Conceptual Art. Konkrete Kunst

Current Research

1. My practice is concerned with the nature of perception and of illusion, ways of seeing i.e. what we want to see, why we see what we see, what we don't see, what sees us, etc. I have written: Of what we look at
Of what looks at us
Of what looking blinds us to

2. Work in the studio is a drawing/design/photography based activity which includes small scale maquette or model making.

Each of my exhibitions is treated as a new 'architectural' work responding directly to, and transforming a particular space and each involves extensive, highly detailed research and planning. The notes and exhibition plan is always retained by me in the form of a research portfolio. I work from within the minimalist/formalist tradition but expand the concept of sculptural space through serialism and optics. Thus the space I research is simultaneously real and imaginary; visual but not always accessible. My Reflective works are both editors and objects: one looks through them (to the wall behind), but also at them as both a mirror and a grid and the viewer is encouraged to connect each work as a serial development of the grids themselves.

The 'machine aesthetic' of each work is matched by technical rigour in their installation and by a mathematical integrity of grid ratios across each series.