An exhibition of new work created by Richard Penn during his residency at Nirox Foundation in collaboration with Artist Proof Studio. The exhibition held at NIROXprojects, Arts on Main, Johannesburg. 14 October - 24 October 2012

Installation view | Field of View | Richard Penn | 2012

Installation view | Field of View | Richard Penn | 2012

Installation view | Field of View | Richard Penn | 2012

Detail of Section 1 | Ink drawing and watercolour over archival digital print | Richard Penn | 2012

Field of View

At any given time there are numerous telescopes on earth and in orbit around the earth pointing up at the skies. Their field of view is that area of the sky (often extremely small) through which their instruments are concentrated. Depending on which instruments are activated, a kind of mapping takes place whereby what might seem like a flat, black and white piece of sky to the naked eye is shown in infra red light or x-ray wavelengths to be a complex of ‘invisible’ gas and swirling energies. Doppler shifts to the red or the blue end of the spectrum tell us which of these galaxies are furthest away and in which direction they are spinning. Sometimes our most sensitive instruments need to stare at their field of view for hundreds of hours in order to gather enough of the dim light sent forward to us across time and space from the earliest galaxies ever formed, some as young as a couple of hundred million years old after the Big Bang.

The mapping of our sky is a mapping of infinite detail. In a field of view one twentieth the size of the full moon lies a faint red smudge of a galaxy 13.7 billion light years away. This is a real time, constantly changing map of the past, a map that reaches back almost to the origin of our universe 14 billion years ago. This is an impossible map.

The video projection

And while we were searching for our origins, our origins turned up on our doorstep. In 1964 American radio astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered that at least a third of the static noise that we see on an untuned analog television is made up of leftover radiation from the Big Bang. Between SABC2 and SABC3 is a live transmission of the birth of our universe. Unfortunately digital signal is not open to this profound interference and so our experience of the world will become a little more drab as our signal switches from analog to digital.

The 21 squares that provide the format for the video projection is borrowed from the Kepler Space telescope’s image sensor array. This telescope is in heliocentric orbit around the sun and has a static field of view. It’s primary purpose is to search for evidence of extra solar planets within our own galaxy. There are three types of static noise within the array - analog static, digital static and hand drawn static animated from thousands of hand drawn dots.

The Process - 118 monoprints

This large body of monoprints was started at the Nirox Foundation residency in The Cradle of Humankind in June 2012. I was there on a residency for 3 weeks and Bevan de Wet from the Artist Proof Studio joined me for a week armed with a portable printing press and more paper than I felt comfortable with. Earlier in the year I had worked with Bevan on 5 etchings which had generated a large number of process prints and reject prints which we decided to resuscitate for this project by using them as the background over which we would layer some of the 12 new linos that I had cut at Nirox. In addition we embarked on the ambitious task of converting 120 pieces of cut paper into unique monoprints. Our week at Nirox turned out to be only the very beginning of a collaborative process which continued through July, August and September with some prints making their way through the printing press up to six times. The challenge was to maintain a complexity of depth and mark making within the unforgiving confines of the lino plate designs without overworking them. When I cut the plates I had only a very vague idea about how the layers would interact and so each stage was filled with surprising discoveries and limp disappointment. Remarkably, I only remember two occasions where the result was such an affront to our aesthetic sensibilities that we felt we owed it to our friends and families to tear up the print.

Special thanks to Bevan de Wet, Janet Watt, Artist Proof Studio, Anthony Schmidt and Benji Liebmann

Field of View 1 | Monoprint | 45,5 x 34,5cm | Richard Penn | 2012

Field of View 2 | Monoprint | 45,5 x 34,5cm | Richard Penn | 2012

Field of View 3 | Monoprint | 45,5 x 34,5cm | Richard Penn | 2012

i | Monoprint | 35 x 23,5cm | Richard Penn | 2012

ii | Monoprint | 43 x 30,5cm (framed) | Richard Penn | 2012

iii | Monoprint | 35 x 23cm | Richard Penn | 2012

v | Monoprint | 35 x 23,5cm | Richard Penn | 2012

vi | Monoprint | 35 x 23,5cm | Richard Penn | 2012

vii | Monoprint | 23 x 35cm | Richard Penn | 2012

viii | Monoprint | 50 x 39cm | Richard Penn | 2012

x | Monoprint | 34 x 46,5cm | Richard Penn | 2012

xi | Monoprint | 45,5 x 32,5cm | Richard Penn | 2012

xxiii | Monoprint | 46 x 34cm | Richard Penn | 2012

xxviii | Monoprint | 46 x 34cm | Richard Penn | 2012

xxx | Monoprint | 45,5 x 34cm | Richard Penn | 2012

xxxi | Monoprint | 46 x 34cm | Richard Penn | 2012

xxxii | Monoprint | 46 x 34cm | Richard Penn | 2012

xxxv | Monoprint | 35,5 x 23cm | Richard Penn | 2012

xxxix | Monoprint | 36 x 24cm | Richard Penn 2012

xl | Monoprint | 36 x 24cm | Richard Penn | 2012

xlii | Monoprint | 35 x 23,5cm | Richard Penn | 2012

xliii | Monoprint | 42,5 x 30cm (framed) | Richard Penn | 2012

xliv | Monoprint | 30,5 x 23,5cm | Richard Penn | 2012

xlvi | Monoprint | 42 x 23,5cm | Richard Penn | 2012

xlvii | Monoprint | 35 x 23cm | Richard Penn | 2012

xlix | Monoprint | 20,5 x 20,5cm | Richard Penn | 2012

l | Monoprint | 26,5 x 25,5cm | Richard Penn | 2012

li | Monoprint | 31 x 23cm | Richard Penn | 2012

liii | Monoprint | 30,5 x 23,5cm | Richard Penn | 2012

lv | Monoprint | 31 x 24cm | Richard Penn | 2012

lvi | Monoprint | 32,5 x 36cm (framed) | Richard Penn | 2012

lvii | Monoprint | 29 x 23,5cm | Richard Penn | 2012

lviii | Monoprint | 30 x 23cm | Richard Penn | 2012

lix | Monoprint | 31 x 31cm | Richard Penn | 2012

lxiv | Monoprint | 31 x 31cm | Richard Penn | 2012

lxv | Monoprint | 31 x 23cm | Richard Penn | 2012

lxvii | Monoprint | 36 x 28cm (framed) | Richard Penn | 2012

xcv | Monoprint | 31 x 31cm | Richard Penn | 2012

c | Monoprint | 38,5 x 38,5cm (framed) | Richard Penn | 2012

cii | Monoprint | 31 x 31cm | Richard Penn | 2012

ciii | Monoprint | 29 x 29cm | Richard Penn | 2012

cvi | Monoprint | 33,5 x 25cm | Richard Penn | 2012

cvii | Monoprint | 40 x 33cm | Richard Penn | 2012

cix | Monoprint | 30,5 x 23cm | Richard Penn | 2012

Video still from ‘Field of view’ by Richard Penn | editors Bronwen MacKeller and Jurgen Meekel

About the Artist

Richard is a self-taught animator with a Masters Degree in Fine Arts (with distinction) from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. In 1997 he was awarded 3rd place in the PPC Young Concrete Sculptor Award. After completing his honours degree in 1998, majoring in painting with distinction he developed and taught an animation course for 1st, 2nd and 3rd years in the Fine Arts Department at Wits University. In the years leading up to 2004 he has been a finalist in the ABSA Atelier, The Kempton Park Art Competition and The Sasol New Signatures Art Competition. In 2000 he collected and compiled a 2 hour animation programme for the Klein Karoo National Arts Festival and Urban Futures. In 2004 he was awarded the overall winners prize in The Sasol New Signatures Art Competition. In 2002 he accepted the position of Head of Animation at AFDA Johannesburg (The South African School for Motion Picture Medium and Live Performance) and maintained that position until 2009. In 2007 he accepted the position of Vice- Principal of the Learning Department at AFDA but resigned from that position in 2008 to complete his Masters degree and to concentrate on his career as an artist. In 2009 he developed and is facilitating introductory animation courses for school learners. He has co-animated and co-directed 2 short films with Mocke J Van Veuren, and has directed and animated 3 short films of his own. In 2010 he started STRANGE Blue duck, an animation training company which teaches stop frame animation to children from 9 years and up and facilitates corporate animation team-building and creative enrichment workshops.

www.strangeblueduck.co.za

www.richardpenn.co.za

NIROXprojects

Contact Person: Neil Nieuwoudt T: +27 72 350 4326 E: neil.nieuwoudt@gmail.com

Address: 249 Fox Street, cnr of Main Rd, Arts on Main, Maboneng Precinct, Johannesburg. For further directions please visit www.mabonengprecinct.com/contact/directions

Gallery hours:Tuesday – Sunday, 10am – 4pm

www.niroxarts.com

Design and layout: Neil Nieuwoudt