art mashups

The art I get most excited about these days seems to mostly be ‘mashups’ – crossing genres, breaking up classifications, creating a jolt of interest.

Out of Ice, by Elizabeth Ogilvie, currently on at the massive underground gallery of Ambika P3 in London, creates a kind of surround-world experience, including water itself, photographs, and video. I’m amazed at the depth of Ogilvie’s investigations: she looks at the science, the culture, the aesthetics. Her obsession is with water, not art; so she uses methods across genre too: this makes her a true conceptual artist, I think, like Lindsay Seers who I wrote about here.

from Elizabeth Ogilvie’s ‘Out of Ice’ at ambika p3 in London

I love the word defined on the image: nuannarpoq – to take extravagant pleasure in being alive. It shows how genre-crossing can find things to surprise and delight us as humans, not intellectual point-scorers. Like in Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow or Shaun of the Dead, the genre framework sneaks deeper insights past our prejudices and expectations (maybe I should mention Pride and Prejudice with Zombies here, although Lost in Austen‘s a better work).

Amy Cutler’s blog pointed me to some upcoming events in academia. I don’t really know enough to know what genre’s being busted in cultural geography circles, but British Waters and Beyond: the cultural significance of the sea sounds really interesting in any case!

mashup in ceramics

I’ve been looking at mashups in ceramics – sometimes digital-analogue, like the digital flip-flop, and
certainly mashups of poetry and pots. I’m currently working on animations of plate-stacks – more next week, I hope, on this.

Any ideas or links for other kinds of mashups?