New Works: Pavilion Commissions 2008 closed on 25 January 2009. For details of our current exhibitions, take a look at our what’s on page.
Exploring extraordinarily varied subjects, this exhibition featured five new bodies of work by emerging photographers.
Pavilion collaborates with artists to produce new bodies of work using photography and digital media. In 2008 Pavilion worked with five outstanding UK emerging photographers.
The exhibition featured five new bodies of work by Peter Ainsworth, Tess Hurrell, Jo Longhurst, Moira Lovell and Kevin Newark. The projects explored extraordinarily varied subjects, demonstrating the range of exciting talent working in the UK today.
Peter Ainsworth collaborated with Pavilion on a series of narrative-based photographic works, addressing society’s attitudes to waste and sites located on the edge of the urban sprawl. Inspired by the processes and ethos of ‘guerrilla’ gardening, the work encompassed issues surrounding social designation of space and action in public sites, drawing upon historical references in the enactment and realisation of idealistic, participatory acts.
Tess Hurrell created a series of constructed light abstractions, representing an imagined space within a realist framework. Hurrell’s work represented a considered move away from pictorial photographic traditions, towards abstraction and process, incorporating chance and the alchemical magic of photography.
Jo Longhurst collaborated with Pavilion to create An A-Z of Gymnastics, an installation of hundreds of individual editorial sports photographs, sourced from commercial, museum, and individual archives. This visual taxonomy explored the subject of perfection in both photography and gymnastics. It drew attention to specific individuals, histories, nationalities and photographic media, emphasising the visual language on which the discipline is built.
Moira Lovell’s work further pursued the artist’s exploration of feminist debates, questioning gender politics within so-called ‘manly’ sports, working with the Doncaster Rover Belles women’s football team. Lovell’s confrontational camera studies tackled the relationship between player and manager, bearing witness to a renegotiation of gender dynamics.
Kevin Newark was awarded a Pavilion Commission to document the occurrence of aircraft exhaust and condensation trails in order to explore their environmental aesthetics. Newark travelled to locations where he could view and photograph congested high-altitude traffic, with the knowledge and theory from this study allowing him to enter a critical dialogue between the contradictory aesthetics of pollution, the scenic beauty of the sky, and philosophy of the picturesque.
