5,282 research outputs found
Nick Fox: New Paintings and Unveiled
No full textThis two-site exhibition enabled Fox to present a new body of work and to make a site-specific installation for the Museum of Contemporary Art, London. The programme within which Fox was selected to exhibit aims to couple younger artists with historical or established artists, in this instance Fox’s work was presented in counterpoint with Picabia’s ‘Femmee aux Perles’, and enabled comparison between the hetero-erotic content of Picabia and the homo-erotic of Fox’s imagery.
The exhibition represented Fox’s concerns with eroticism and desire, using contemporary notions of the historical Arcadian narrative painting as the platform for this body of work. Moving away from the more literally phallic imagery that had been the focus of his work in the previous two years, these paintings investigated how a more subtle use of imagery could amplify the eroticism suggested in the painting. Referencing historical narrative painting, Victorian photography and other more contemporary erotic outputs this work explores a decorative painterly tradition and investigates how the more familiar platform of everyday domestic objects can be read in relation to more traditional two-dimensional painting. These three-dimensional ‘paintings’ are made of reproduction Edwardian tables covered with a ‘tablecloth’ of acrylic paint featuring decoupage and drawn and painted surfaces. Further pieces made for the show were ‘Tableau’, an 18ft long single skin of paint, made directly for the space. This site-specific piece drew parallels with Picabia’s work by duplicating the seductive surface patination and mirrored its narrative content while investigating connecting decorative codes and symbols.
Funded by the Royal Academy of Arts, MOCA London, St James Homes and Futurecity, this exhibition has resulted in initial discussions with The Michaelis Collection, Cape Town (The National Gallery of South Africa) in developing a body of work in response to their permanent Flemish collection
interview with Nick Crowe
No full text"The Futurology" book will explore the subject of culture-led regeneration, through critical writing, and the documentation of the project, Futurology: The Black Country 2024. This project was concerned with exploring the relationship between socially engaged art practice and culture-led regeneration. In Futurology: The Black Country 2024, artists and young people were teamed up to examine the current social, economic and political conditions of the Black Country in order to imagine their future. This book includes interviews with the artists: Barby Asante, Dave Beech, Nick Crowe and Ian Rawlinson, Becky Shaw, Simon Poulter and partners; The New Art Gallery Walsall, Creative Partnerships, Black Country Consortium, Black Country Tourism, Regen West Midlands, Walsall MBC; and transcriptions of public talks by Rasheed Araeen, Dr Malcolm Miles, Dr Tim Butler, Charles Landry, Claire Fox. It is published to accompany the exhibition Futurology: The Black Country 2024 at The New Art Gallery Walsall, July - September 2004
Data for: ABC-Draco
No full textABC-Draco is a GLTF Draco conversion of the NYU ABC-Dataset. "Each model is a collection of explicitly parametrized curves and surfaces, providing ground truth for differential quantities, patch segmentation, geometric feature detection, and shape reconstruction. Sampling the parametric descriptions of surfaces and curves allows generating data in different formats and resolutions, enabling fair comparisons for a wide range of geometric learning algorithms." (Sebastian Koch et al. 2019) The collection contains 751,407 dense point clouds with normals; using lossy Draco compression, the total file size is approximately two orders of magnitude smaller than the original, which makes this version useful in more resource-constrained environments. License terms are identical to the original dataset
Phantasieblume Nick Fox, A survey of the work of Nick Fox
No full textNick Fox’s ACE funded research project, Phantasieblume, explores romantic idealisation, personal histories and representations of desire, longing and loss through a delicate interweaving of both appropriated symbols and myths from the past as well as mages drawn from contemporary culture. These comprise of complex interrelations between paintings, drawings craft objects, cultural artefacts and sub cultural symbology. This body of work, and the associated exhibitions and commissioned writings were documented in Fox\u27s first monograph, published in 2010. The launch of Fox’s Artist Monograph Limited Edition Monograph, Phantasieblume, coincided with the exhibition of the same name at Vane gallery, Newcastle. The monographs received funding and support from Arts Council England, Newcastle University, National Glass Centre, Vanguard Court, Sundeland University, Vane Gallery, Culture lab and Sunderland University. The books are hard-back clothbound editions with full colour illustration and feature Essay and text contributions are by significant commentators in the field of Art and design, including internationally recognised cultural commentator Philip Austander. Other contributors include Stephanie Brown, Paul Stone, Andrew Hewish, George Chakravarthi, Matthew Hearn, and Clive Jennings. The book was published by AEN and C4RD under the prestigious Documents for Recent Drawing Monograph Series. There are two versions of the monograph, a red version with an edition of 650 (ISBN 978-1-907226-04-5) and a blue limited edition Artist of 50 (ISBN 978-1-907226-03-8)
Practical Sociology: Sociology graduates are ideally placed to solve our practical problems.
No full textIn the States, ‘clinical’ sociologists are frequently hired to address problems within all various organisations and corporations. The UK is still catching up to this, argues Nick Fox. There are some great examples of the use of sociological approaches in public and private sectors, but sociologists interested in applying knowledge to fields of work outside academia need to identify the tools, knowledge and skills needed to address real-life problems
Population pressure, political institutions, and protests:A multilevel analysis of protest events in African cities
No full textWhy do some of Africa’s urban areas experience higher rates of protest incidence than others? Numerous authors have highlighted the role of urbanisation and democratisation in determining cross-national variation in the rates of urban protest. Yet understanding has been hindered by failures to measure mechanisms at the appropriate spatial scale, analyse a sufficiently representative sample of urban centres, de-confound local and country-level factors, and consider what it is about specific urban centres that shapes variation in protest incidence. This paper presents new evidence on the determinants of protests in African urban centres by linking georeferenced data on urban settlements from the Urban Centres Database to the location of protest events taken from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Dataset. Fitting a series of multilevel regression models with cross-level effects, we simultaneously estimate variation in protest incidence as a function of local- and country-level factors and the interactions between them. Our results indicate that variation in protest incidence between urban centres can be explained by a combination of local-specific and country-level contextual factors including population size and growth, regime type, civil society capacity, and whether an urban centre is politically significant. These findings advance our understanding of how political and demographic factors interact and influence protest incidence in urban Africa
Slow culture: an introduction
No full text[Extract] There is a powerful message permeating our social lives today, found in our self-help networks, talkback television and radio shows, and online forums. It is a warning that, through technology and modernisation, our lifestyles have become increasingly hectic, fast, complex and immediate. 'Life', writes online author Leo Babauta (2009, para. 2), 'moves at such a fast pace that it seems to pass us by before we can really enjoy it'. We are encouraged to take a step back, to breathe deeply and 'slow down', in order to recapture the essence of 'real' living. By doing so, we can escape the seemingly endless stresses associated with our multi-tasked, time-compressed and instantaneous speed culture (Tomlinson 2007). This book presents illustrations of how people are beginning to disentangle themselves from a speed culture by embracing slowness. It is not simply a matter of slowing down, as the term implies, but of undertaking changes in the way we do things at an everyday level. Underpinning these transformations is a concern, as Babauta (2009) suggests, with the uniquely stressful lifestyles we are living in contemporary culture
Urbanisation, democracy, and political regime transformations
No full textCities, and the process of urbanisation more broadly, have long been associated with political change – and democratisation in particular. However, there is little cross-country empirical research on the relationship between urbanisation and political change, and a tendency to conflate urbanisation with industrialisation and economic development. This gap is significant for two reasons. First, many of the hypothesised mechanisms linking urbanisation to political change are associated with socioeconomic changes driven by industrialisation and economic development. Second, many low- and middle-income countries have undergone rapid “urbanisation without industrialisation”. What then are the political consequences of urbanisation without industrialisation?To answer this, we draw a key conceptual distinction between urbanisation – the increase in the relative share of a country's population living in urban areas – and urban population scale – the absolute size of urban populations. While much of the literature focuses upon the political implications of urbanisation, we argue that the sheer scale of urban populations may be more consequential for political change. Specifically, we suggest that although the hypothesised associations between urban living and democratic preferences among citizens are weak, urban living facilitates political engagement, and hence large urban populations may stimulate political change.We test this hypothesis with cross-national regressions analysing the determinants of levels of democracy and episodes of political regime transformation since 1960 in 161 countries. We find no association between levels of urbanisation or urban population size and levels of democracy. By contrast, we find a positive and significant association between urban population size and political regime transformations, with a bias towards democratic change. Our study offers important insights into the relationship between urbanisation and political change and the political implications of rapid urbanisation without industrialisation unfolding in many parts of the world today
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