Off Trail
2 - 24 July
AIR Gallery, 30 Grosvenor Road, Altrincham, WA14 1LE
Off Trail invites seven artists to consider our relationship with wild space, how boundaries separate urban from wild, and what it means when this separation is blurred or these boundaries crossed.
Hiking trails create unusual ways of viewing landscapes by forming invisible borders around it’s perimeter, allowing hikers to differentiate themselves from wilderness
Throughout Off Trail, the works are anchored to their relationship with a hiking trail that meanders through the gallery. The trail echoes its real-life counterparts found in National parks, forests, and public lands. Trails simultaneously act as a border and interruption into wild spaces; they become a part of the landscape whilst providing a sense of urban familiarity. The exhibition considers the role trails have in separating private from public, promoting conservation, and in creating an experience of wilderness.
Hikers will discover a variety of artwork surrounding the perimeter of the trail, often leaving the hikers with a choice to venture off trail to view works in detail, or to stay on trail and view the work from afar.
The work on display attempts to form a discussion around the ways in which we perceive these boundaries. They explore notions such as the impact of cinema, fictions, and technology’s role on the way we interact with space, the parallels between physical and invisible borders, and the sensation of encountering animals on trails; a space intended for, and constructed by, humans.
Selected artists: Lydia Brockless, Sam Carvosso, Cara Despain, Richard Hughes, Angus McCrum, Snyder Moreno Martín, Rebecca Moss. Curated by Sam Carvosso.
Photos by Dean Casper.
Supported by Art Council England.
Left to right: 'Far From The Silver Lining', 2018, Richard Dean Hughes, 'Going To Na-Ture', 2021, Lydia Brockless, 'Road Runner', 2020, Cara Despain, 'Hollowing', 2021, Richard Dean Hughes, 'Tracking / Trekking', 2021, Sam Carvosso, 'Arriving Visitor', 2021, Angus McCrum
'Far From The Silver Lining', 2018, Richard Dean Hughes.
'Going To Na-Ture', 2021, Lydia Brockless.
'Road Runner', 2020, Cara Despain.
'Hollowing', 2021, Richard Dean Hughes.
Tracking / Trekking, 2021, Sam Carvosso
'Arriving Visitor', 2021, Angus McCrum
Left to right: 'Lilies', 2021, Angus McCrum, 'Weaving Together', 2021, Snyder Moreno Martín, 'Cairn', 2021, Sam Carvosso, 'The Lines Between', 2021, Sam Carvosso, 'Thick-skinned', 2018, Rebecca Moss.
'Oxygen', 2021, Lydia Brockless.
'Lilies', 2021, Angus McCrum.
'Weaving Together', 2021, Snyder Moreno Martín.
'Cairn', 2021, Sam Carvosso
'The Lines Between', 2021, Sam Carvosso.
'Thick-skinned', 2018, Rebecca Moss.
Lydia Brockless b. 1991
Lydia Brockless is a multidisciplinary visual artist living in Essex. Her work revolves around geomorphological processes and through these, what we can learn about time, growth and resilience; through text and objects she makes new spaces which exist between the real and imaginary, and make links between actions, landscapes, materials and feelings.
Lydia graduated from Leeds College of Art in 2014, and the Royal College of Art with an MA in Sculpture in 2021. Exhibitions include New Contemporaries (2015), ICA, London; The Kiss or Poison Boyfriend or Jesus’ Blood (2017), Kingsgate Project Space, London; These Are The Days My Friends (2019), Kupfer Projects, London. She won the Henry Moore Institute Dissertation Prize 2020, and in 2021 was awarded a micro-commission for Cement Fields’ project This Must Be The Place to research and produce new work for Estuary 2021 arts festival.
Sam Carvosso b.1992
Sam Carvosso is an artist working across sculpture, drawing, video, and installation with a research-led focus, living in London. His practice considers the creation and perception of landscape, with a particular interest in wild spaces. The work often references the collaboration between memory, the media (fictional and factual), on-site research and documentation, and their combined role in creating versions of reality.
He studied Sculpture at the University of Brighton in 2014 followed by the Royal College of Art in 2017. He has been awarded the Gilchrist Fischer Award (2018); Villiers David Travel Award (2017); Gilbert Bayes Sculpture Grant (2016), and has been selected for residencies worldwide including Rendezvous, Grand Teton National Park (2019), Wyoming; Radical Residency III, (2019) London; Restless Practice, (upcoming 2021) Sweden. As part of a two year research project on the perception of wilderness, he used the Villiers David Travel Award to interview Park Rangers, hikers, writers, and National Park staff in Yosemite and Yellowstone National Park (2018-2019). His recent group shows include Always Winter (2020), Brooke Benington, London; Mantel, Monitor, Ledge, (2020) ADAM, London; Radical Residency III (2019), Unit 1 Gallery, London.
Cara Despain b.1983
Cara Despain is an artist working in film and video, sculpture, photography and installation addressing issues of land use and ownership, climate change, visualising the Anthropocene and the problematics of frontierism. She was born in Salt Lake City, Utah and currently lives in Miami, Florida and works between the two. She has received numerous awards and grants including the Salt Lake City Mayor’s Award in visual arts, the South Florida Consortium Fellowship and will complete a public art commission with Miami-Dade County this year. She has been Art Director on two feature films including “The Strongest Man” (Sundance Film Festival selection 2015). Writing and research play a major role in all of her creative work, and she often works very site-specifically— researching, casting objects and collecting material or writing in the field. Recent residencies include Anderson Ranch in Snowmass Colorado, Feminist Summer Camp at Birch Creek Ranch in central Utah (which she co-facilitates), and Signal Fire Wide Open Studios field research program in the four corners area.
Richard Dean Hughes b. 1987
The work of Richard Dean Hughes describes the slippery relationship between the real and hypothetical. Hughes often revisits and describes a personal and internal space, taking artifacts, feelings and ‘visuals’ from imagined scenarios, bringing them into real time through the manipulation of material and collisional objects. His sculptures question the idea of plausibility, they question their own existence, acting as a representational display of the space in which Hughes is trying to describe.
Richard lives and works in Manchester. His recent solo and group exhibitions include Subliminal Thaw (2021), Night time Story, Los Angeles, When Shit Hits The Fan (2020), Guts Gallery, London, and No Cigar (2018), Goldtapped, Newcastle upon Tyne.
Angus McCrum b.1987
‘An artwork, in this instance, does not start with the artist as autonomous convenor or arbitrator, but with a prehistory of the materials themselves. This prehistory, as I have come to learn, is one often called forth by the simple act of wandering.
The material histories and cultures of his found objects are re-invoked by McCrum’s treatment, that is, intervention at the level required for assemblage. As such, even its most basic, practical features take on designerly, aesthetic properties; dowel rods, zippers and rubber bands behave as choice elements traversing the plane of the artwork itself. The denouement of these actors is a non-representational account of his findings: the complementarity of inchoate and rudimentary forms that, with degrees of longing and nostalgia, point to bygone times. The achievement of each work is that it suggests, rather than inculcates, a soft-focus vision of the present-past, an enigma which can only ever wholly belong to it.’ - Text written by Elaine Tam, Young Artists in Conversation, 2020.
Angus lives and works in Berlin. He graduated from MA Printmaking, at Camberwell College of Art in 2015. His solo and duo shows include Bleigießen (2019), 17 Addington Road, Margate, Fallow (with Emii Alrai) (2019), The Rectory Projects, London, and The Sorrows (2017), Intercession Gallery, Northampton
Snyder Moreno Martín b.1991
Snyder Moreno Martín is an artist and educator born in Colombia and based in the United Kingdom. His projects have a strong experiential and contextual component, which could emerge from encounters that allow him to reflect on existence and research on environmental, political, affective, and material aspects of contexts. His practice develops in several formats: a series of drawings or texts, continuing with an installation, or a performance, a curatorial or pedagogical project, a socially engaged action, or with a mixture of all of these. He is interested in learning about traditional ways of knowing, spirituality, decolonial theory, and gardening. Most recently, he is interested in how humans relate to other living beings and Mother Earth.
Snyder has presented his work in spaces such as the Art Museum Miguel Urrutia (Colombia, 2018), and The Center for the Less Good Idea (South Africa, 2018), among others. He has participated in artistic residencies in Mexico, Brazil, Canada, and Colombia. He works on the relationship between art, curating, and education, assuming these as fields without defined boundaries and in a constant dialogue. He graduated from MA Sculpture, Royal College of Art in 2021.
Rebecca Moss b. 1991
Rebecca Moss, born in Essex, is an artist whose work critically examines heroic narratives through humorous and absurdist gestures, which can take a wide variety of forms across performance, video and sculpture.
Her work responds to landscapes, including wild, rural and urban, from a feminist perspective. She is especially interested in how humorous interventions can speak to power. This has led to projects with a wide variety of outcomes, including a 14 tonne installation of concrete Baroque lions along an esplanade in Somerset (Lions, 2015) and an artist residency where she became stuck in the Pacific Ocean on a bankrupt container ship off of the coast of Japan (International Waters, 2016.)
An ongoing body of work that she returns to is a series of video performances, where she performs to camera in the landscape. In these videos, she stages actions between her body and its environment, performing with low budget props and costumes. Inspired by slapstick comedy, she wishes to emphasise a dynamic between her body and the world which is open, porous and reciprocal.