Things Obliterate And Take Form @ Stour Space

Opening event:
Sunday 9th July 4pm-9pm
Music & A/V performance from Albert E. Dean & Benjamin Sammon: 7pm

Exhibition Runs: Sunday 9th to Monday 17th of July

James Usill & Sara Goodman bring their vibrant and cutting edge collaborative artworks to London for the first time...

'Things Obliterate And Take Form', running from Sunday 9th to Monday 17th of July at Stour Space Hackney Wick, London UK, is a summation of two years of collaborative exchange between graphic designer James Usill and new media artist Sara Goodman across multiple social media platforms using various glitch art techniques and digital imaging processes. Their joint disposition for bold colours, maximalism, and the abstract brought them together to create expressionist digital pieces which have lived and existed in net spaces until now.
Goodman and Usill, from the USA and UK respectively, met in the digital sphere, being prolific contributors to multiple online experimental art groups including Free the Pixels, N e w A e s t h e t i c and the largest of which: Glitch Artists Collective, a Facebook community of over 55,000 creators, curators and fans of 'glitch art', a catch-all term for a variety of different art techniques revolving around the idea of error. Writing into the code of digital image files, exploiting natural errors in videogames and computer programmes, using Photoshop tools radically incorrectly, distorting and bending analog TV signals with community-created custom built electronics and even opening images as sound files within audio software to apply sound effects to visuals, these artistic communities are at the vanguard of new media visual exploration. Usill and Goodman use these processes to capture abstract explosions of full-spectrum colour and surrealist textural landscapes.

The act of displaying their work pays homage to the way the internet can bring two seeming strangers together from across the ocean. The printed, hung, and displayed work is a testament to the friendship and collaboration of the artists and the deep roots formed in the international Glitch Art community. ‘Things Obliterate and Take Form’ is an exhibition of a body of collaborative works as well as a selection of Goodman and Usill's solo work.

What does it mean to make art with someone whose eyes you’ve never looked into, whose voice you’ve never heard? What does it mean to create worlds with someone who is as abstract as the worlds you make? And what happens when you decide to meet for the very first time in the gallery which will display your work for the local community? And which space is more real? The digital or physical?

The Sunday 9th July opening is not to be missed, featuring an improvised performance from experimental musician Albert E. Dean, who uses overpowering waves of noise and walls of crushing sound in his intense performances and live visuals from video artist Benjamin Sammon, a visual explorer working with antique hardware and an active member of the Tachyons + group online, a community of artists working with equipment created by the company Tachyons + who modify video gear for analog video distortion exploration.

Sara Goodman is a teacher, new media artist, analog video explorer, and poet living in Chicago, Illinois. She graduated from SUNY Purchase with a BA in Poetry and received her MFA in Poetry from Columbia College Chicago. She spends her time collaborating with other artists and dancers in the Chicago/Detroit areas and is an active member of the Glitch Artists Collective, collaborating regularly with glitch aesthetic artists from all over the world. She dabbles in making album art for bands and live visuals for performances— putting on immersive events with other VJs. She teaches video art, film studies, and the literature of the Harlem Renaissance to High School students in Evanston, IL