In our final collaboration with The Glasgow School of Art, curators Casual Nexus invite you to ‘YOU LOOK AT A SCORE, YOU DO IT’ an exhibition in the donated gallery space of Skypark 1 Reception.
Sharing interests in self-organisation and collaborative practices Casual Nexus have worked collaboratively, since September 2017. This exhibition of posters provides an introduction to our practice as Casual Nexus and the work produced to date as part of this ongoing project.
As new arrivals to Glasgow (by way of Manchester, London and Bristol) we were both struck by the way many artists in Glasgow were working, ‘live’, fluid, undefined by discipline, keen to collaborate and open to experimentation among their networks. We sought to mirror this in our approach to Casual Nexus, excited to celebrate artists who were working counter to our previous experiences of fragmented arts communities and networks. We aimed to celebrate the social support structures already in place and to reinforce these by creating a mechanism, to facilitate new connections and expand upon what we had identified as an existing ethos within the city. Casual Nexus (a misreading of ‘Causal Nexus’ in our early research stages) borrows ideas from the original term of bonding and links between a cause and its effect, while allowing room for experimentation, trial, test, error and play.
The format of the project stemmed from a discussion event held in January 2018 where a group of artists met to consider collaboration. Conversations on agency and authority in relation to collaborative practice led us to explore these tensions further and resulted in us asking performers to give up their individual ideas, waiving their authority. Each produced a score and instruction for another to work from. These prompts shaped new collaborative performances and this is the format Casual Nexus has continued to use. Artists were matched or mismatched based on their approaches to art making through performance, music, movement, spoken word and written word.
This poster exhibition celebrates the work of these artists, presenting their scores overlaid with images of artists performing their responses to a live audience as part of the project. There are signed and numbered limited editions of each risographed poster. Please feel free to take one.
We are excited to present this exhibition to the community at Skypark. Taking place in a busy area of “Glasgow’s most sociable workplace” we hope these ideas can translate to the working environment. We see parallels between the networks of Skypark and those of our creative circles. We hope to spark conversation around collaboration, to celebrate our mutual networks and to bring these networks even closer together through the sharing of ideas.
With thanks to all the artists who have participated in the project; Aniela Piasecka, Anthony Autumn, Ashanti Harris, Charlotte Arnhold, Colin Herd, Danny Katinsky, Denise Bonetti, Edwin Stevens, Elizabeth Murphy, Estelle Fournier, Greg Thomas, Harry Maberly, Jack Paton, Jamie Bolland, Jane Hartshorn, Jessica Higgins, Joe Evans, Lady Neptune, Lila Matsumoto, Liv Fontaine, Maria Cecilia, Matthew Hamblin, MVB, Puke, Stephanie Black-Daniels and William Joys
Thank you to Skypark, Glasgow School of Art and Sunday’s open access risograph studio for helping us realise this exhibition.
