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Mr Graham Gussin
Slade School of Fine Art
University College London
London
WC1E 6BT
Mr Graham Gussin profile picture
Appointment
  • Associate Professor
  • The Slade School of Fine Art
  • Faculty of Arts & Humanities
Biography

Living and working in London,UK and teaching as a point 4 lecturer at the Slade School of Fine Art, Postgraduate Sculpture, UCL.

Spring 2019 Artwork exhibited at Archipelago Art centre, Azores. A major group museum show with 12 international artists documenting work made during residencies on the island of Sao Miguel. Exhibition of two works: Criminal Ornamentation curated by Yinka Shonibare. Touring Arts Council exhibition.Leicester, Wakefield, Exeter and Southampton.

Summer 2018. Solo exhibition 'The Mary Jane Paintings' opened at Handel Street projects.The work consisted of 12 new paintings that have been developed over a ten year period. They take on subject matter such as the history of painting and its relation to notions of the visionary. A text written by Jonathan P Watts was written to accompany the exhibition. This body of work comes out of research made into Walter Benjamin's 'On Hashish' and Sadie Plant's text 'Writing On Drugs' and it considers ideas about content and agency within artworks.

Solo exhibition of work made during the Azores residency, held at Fonseca Macedo Gallery in the capital, Ponta Delgada, in October 2018.Work from this exhibition purchased by The Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon.

Group exhibitions have included 'Inhabit' and 'Now, Today, Tomorrow and Always' both at the Towner gallery, Eastbourne. Also 'Artist's Voices, poster project for the Porto Underground, Portugal.

Research Themes
Research Summary

Using sculpture, text, photography, moving images and other media my work explores relationships between time and space using both material and immaterial approaches. I am interested in making work which uses location, site and atmosphere with reference to cinematic spaces and narratives in order to cause friction and potential between ideas of the real and the imagined. Alongside this lies an interest in ideas of projection and reception and the flux between the two, using the relationship between the seen and the hidden to reflect on notions of presence and absence and simultaneously distance and proximity.

I am interested in structures and themes which surround our ideas about place, such as utopian and dystopian spaces and I am looking at both the urban and rural aspects of this. For some time now my interest has been centred on a notion of the ‘Terrain Vague’, this has become an umbrella term involving many aspects of my practice - essentially this is a concern with two elements which are place and agency, these elements are constantly being explored and questioned through my research and output. Terrain Vague could be proposed as a productive zone, one which exists geographically and psychologically, I am very interested in the relationship between these two ‘states’ and how they affect our thinking around contemporary issues such as environment and the individual.

I use a very diverse approach in the production of works, my research output uses video, installation, sculpture, text and other media which involves the viewer/reader with a complex  and layered practice, one which shifts its material and means in order to challenge notions of established and given forms. This approach can be seen as essential, my aim is for the output to question notions of the recognisable and the sequenced, it aims, to some extent, to disrupt. I use a wide range of media, including texts, drawings, film, video, sound and installation, to explore the perception of time, space and scale. My artworks frequently appropriate and manipulate images and literary narratives taken from art history, popular culture and, above all, cinema. The deconstruction of cinematic materials reveals a special interest in film language's structural sediment rather than its narrative articulations. The resulting ambiguity engenders a type of deconstruction of the notion of the sublime.

I am currently developing and researching 'Terrain Vague' a research event to be held at SRC, UCL in March 2020. This will be a four day exhibition with a symposium over a two day period, with invited speakers centred around my concerns with territory, agency and landscape. The UCL departments of Human Geography and Architecture will be participating with speakers from those areas.

Teaching Summary

I have a long teaching career beginning in 1993 at Chelsea School of Art, this was a 0.2 appointment teaching on the post graduate sculpture course. While continuing this I took a 0.4  post at Goldsmiths College on the undergraduate programme, this gave me a broad knowledge of teaching approaches and methods. I then took a 0.4 post at Central Saint Martins School, giving up my post at Goldsmiths and reducing my days at Chelsea. Wanting to have more experience directing and heading a department I joined  the Fine Art department at Kent University as a 0.5 post with much more responsibility in the running of the Fine Art area.

In 2011 I began lecturing at the Slade as a Teaching Fellow in the Post Graduate Fine Art Media area, moving on to a 0.4 lecturer in 2012, beginning in the Undergraduate Sculpture area and in 2015 moved to Postgraduate Sculpture.  have introduced and directed cross area symposium based around various themes, for example the subject of love in contemporary practice and a yearly project with Siobhan Davies Dance Studios.

Present: Slade School, UCL. MA/MFA Sculpture. point 4 fte.

Previous:

Slade School, BA/BFA, sculpture, point 4 vt 2012- 2015

Teaching Fellowship, MA/MFA Media Slade School 

of Fine Art, UCL. 2010-2011

Chelsea School of Art. Visiting lecturer. BA  1994- present

Goldsmiths College. Visiting lecturer. BA   1995-1998

Central St Martins Visiting lecturer MA (PT) 1999-2002

Central  St Martins. Visiting  lecturer  BA       2006-2008

Kent University. 0.4 BA/MA   2008-2010

Phd Assessment  RCA photography         2007

Phd Tutor. Suki Chan, Chelsea.   2005-2008

Mentor, Naheed Raza, Wellcome Trust Arts Award Scheme   2008

Writing and running ‘Text, Performance  and Digital Media’Four day  course for BA students CSM. 2011

Kingston Art School. Visiting lecturer, one day 2011 (Photography  course)

Appointments
25-SEP-2011 Visiting lecturer Fine Art Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, United Kingdom
22-SEP-2010 – 01-JUL-2011 Teaching Fellow Fine Art Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, United Kingdom
01-SEP-2009 – 01-JUL-2010 Course co-leader Fine Art University of Kent, United Kingdom
01-SEP-2006 – 01-JUL-2008 Visiting lecturer Fine Art, 4D pathway Central Saint Martins School of Art, United Kingdom
01-SEP-1999 – 01-JUL-2002 Visiting lecturer Fine Art Central Saint Martins School of Art, United Kingdom
01-SEP-1995 – 01-JUL-1999 Visiting lecturer Fine Art Goldsmiths College, London, United Kingdom
01-SEP-1993 Visiting lecturer Fine Art Chelsea School of Art, UAL, United Kingdom
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