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Joe Bloom
Commemorations -
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Highlights and CollectionsIn 2022, Joe Bloom was the artist in residency at Sicily Artist Programme. In 2020-2021 Bloom received the Artist in Residence Painting Placement from Platform Southwark in London, UK. Furthermore, Bloom received the Artist in Residence in the Country Studio of Antony Gormley in 2017 where he produced the film JC, Be included in Whitechapel Galleries opening screening in 2019. Bloom is also highly regarded for his work in film, chosen by Museum of London to direct a new documentary about greyhound racing an featured in the Guardian for his social media film series ‘A View From A Bridge’. His film Living Proof was selected for the BAFTA qualifying awards in 2021. Previously, Bloom’s film Ahmed Serhani, a portrait presented at 2017 Screen-test film festival was nominated for the committee’s choice award.
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The paintings in this series, however, are connected not only by the orbs they depict but also by an undercurrent of violence that arises through a tension between the fragility and futility of the glass object and the action within or surrounding it. For instance, But Wasn’t It Beautiful? depicts the careful restoration and handling of a stained-glass orb that illustrates the explosion of an atomic bomb. Again, there is irony to the way in which the work of the restorers recalls the assemblage of the bomb itself but also to the memorialisation of a destructive force in an object that is itself breakable. Elsewhere, in works such as Blokes and What Seems to Be the Problem the sense of threat – or suppressed violent energy – is more subtly conveyed through the precarious suspension of the object in space and the ambiguous work of the figures depicted. In the former, a group of muscular men pull at string to lower or raise the orb which itself depicts strong, Grecian-like figures holding hands while the latter invokes two different kinds of procedures or rituals that may be harmful or healing depending on our perspective.A collection of smaller-scale paintings, meanwhile, offers a more concentrated perspective of the stained glass as a material that is both other-worldly and prosaic. In these works, the orbs appear within hyperreal spaces that are reflective of the imagery they portray but also absent of figures. The orb in A Quick Shared Glimpse, for instance, depicts a busy train carriage that is simultaneously reminiscent of and detached from the empty space in which it hangs. This is largely due to style: the imagery in the orb is fractured, evoking the craft of stained glass, while the setting in which it hangs is seamless to the point of appearing almost like a blurred photograph.For Bloom, commemoration is inextricably tied up with image-making: it is the prism through which we understand and communicate the world around us on both a personal and collective level. Whether an event, a memory, an aspiration or a world view, what we choose to commemorate, the artist suggests, reveals as much about what we think about as who we are and want to be.
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Joe Bloom: Commemorations
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