Machine Room: A Blueprint for Painting

website, a publication and a project presentation
Photographic material.
Machine Room: a blueprint for painting is an ongoing collaboration between painters based in Paris and London. Initiated in 2002 as a forum around the practice, contexts and prostheses of painting, it aims to throw into question the mechanisms and technologies of painting. Initial discussion was cited in The Night Shift: Contemporary Magazine 58, 2003. The research focuses on painting as a makeshift, contingent structure, constructed from the interplay and exchange of different histories and working approaches. The website provides the ideal structure for dissemination as a discursive, multi-authored space. Following online discussion, meetings and workshops we were invited to the project space at Crate, Margate: an artist-led organisation funded by Arts Council England South East. It supports contemporary visual artists’ research and practice with a strategic emphasis on the interchange of ideas and practice between UK and France. The project space was expressly conceived to further developmental research and Machine Room were invited by Crate to inaugurate the space with two residencies over summer 2006 supported by UAL and University of Southampton.. The idea of these residencies was developmental, providing the opportunity for the generative exchange of ideas and methods. Questions were raised about authorship, procedure and the open flow of ideas through discussion and practical collaboration. Individual methodologies were reframed and challenged. The residency has so far generated a website, a publication and a project presentation at Crate with an exhibition planned at Galerie 33, Berlin for September 2007.
I exhibited work made directly from Machine Room at Salon Connexions, a group show at Contemporary Art Projects, London in December 2006. More recently Machine Room research questions were discussed in a paper: ‘exposition d’exposition’ given at the Academie Royale, Bruxelles by Tristan Tremeau, a French art historian, art critic and curator who has written extensively on painting/expanded field/collage.