Full Circle

Working collaboratively for the first time, studio member Oliver Ventress and London-based performer Zara Sands present an exhibition responding to lunar rhythms, cyclical structures of time and space and the effects of this on the human body. The installation includes a durational performance by Sands, sound piece, projection and live feed video, alongside new visual work from Ventress. 

10th - 14th January 2024

Zara Sands and Oliver Ventress

Behaviours and physiology in many living, terrestrial beings appear to respond to the lunar cycle, or have a synchrony with moonlight. The moon and its phases have long been relied upon to gauge the passage of time and direction. To this date, scientific research has found no correlation between lunation and human biology, and it is thought that widespread and persistent beliefs about the influence of the moon may depend on illusory correlation – the perception of an association that does not in fact exist. The moon is a symbol for a constant: an unchanging present. We are left uncertain whether the mind and body gives it power, or whether it holds a power over us.

CONSUME

CONSUME is the first solo exhibition from General Practice member Corrupt Vision. Expect to question our current social, political and technological climate through calls for radical change, and unity.

This event is open to all on Friday 8th December 2023 from 6pm until 9pm, with viewings via an appointment possible on Saturday 9th December.

Father, Mother, Daughter

An experiment in thinking from Nottingham based artist Derek Hampson

General Practice, 4th - 18th November 2023

Opening night 4th November: Talk by Derek Hampson 4pm, General Viewing 5-7pm, All Welcome

General Practice is pleased to introduce a solo exhibition by Nottingham based artist Derek Hampson. The origin of this exhibition is a newspaper article, which told a story of family breakdown, drug addiction and violence. The story, and its many ramifications, captured Derek Hampson’s imagination, to such an extent that he felt the need to make art about it, by creating portraits of the newspaper story’s three main protagonists. The father, mother, daughter of the exhibition’s title.

Each portrait is triple, i.e. it consists of three individual painted portraits of its subject. These triple portraits are not triptychs, but series, which result from the operation of adding one portrait after another to a given starting portrait image (not present in the exhibition). Visitors to the exhibition encounter the aftermath of this operation, when the series are experienced as something that forces one to think. This is the outcome of two series being put into communication by an image common to both: an electric fan, a bridge, a hand holding a knife, etc. These images can be interior or exterior to the portraits. Regardless of their location, they circulate between the series, causing a resonance in the one who views. This is the effect of being forced to think, an effect that replicates the ramifications of the original story, from which the artworks originate.

Hampson’s interest in series has grown out of his engagement with the writings of the French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze (1925 - 1995), who, in many of his works seeks to overturn what he considers the dominant force within painting and thinking: representation; the force that seeks to put conceptual limits on things. Representation relies on recognition in order to work, we think we know what something is when we recognise it. Series, on the other hand, create something that is unrecognisable, it is the thing that we find unrecognisable that forces us to think.

Being forced to think is a characteristic of an experiment. This exhibition is experimental in two ways: its arrangement of artworks in series is an experimental approach to the demands of creating an exhibition that rejects the values of representation. The second experiment is the, as yet, unknowable effect that the experience of artworks in series will have on visitors to the exhibition.