Dryden Goodwin
Encyclopedia
Dryden Goodwin is a British artist, known for his intricate drawings, often in combination with photography, film, large-scale, screen-based installations
and soundtracks
.
, desire and emotional distance.
Recent projects include Linear for Art on the Underground, London, 2010 and a commission for the Who am I? gallery at the Science Museum
, London, 2010. Recent solo exhibitions include Cast, Hasselblad Foundation
, Gothenburg, Sweden 2009 and Photographer's Gallery, London, 2008; Flight, at the Chisenhale Gallery, London, 2006 and Sustained Endeavour: Portrait of Sir Steve Redgrave, National Portrait Gallery, London, 2006.
; the majority of the film features a new person on every frame, or every eighteenth of a second. The video Hold considers the nature of memory, exploring the tension between our desire to hold onto experiences against the inevitability of the passing of time.
, made in a provincial general hospital in Italy. The film moves through different areas and departments of the hospital. The complexities of relationships between the range of people in the hospital is explored, also the nature of their physical and mental contact.
and a long distance laser pen Goodwin collapses the spatial distance between the camera's eye and its subject, filming individuals as he simultaneously touched them with a beam of light.
The critical response included:
"Goodwin is stimulated by an unholy appetite for unforeseen, risky encounters on his sleepless wanderings through the city. He aims at catching us off-balance, ambushing our eyes and ears - an important young talent"
Richard Cork
, The Times
, April 17, 2002 on Closer, Tate Britain
, London
changed into the present one. The work explores the continual universal desire to find significance and look constantly for the moment of change. The tripartite emotional structure of each of these events—anticipation, realisation and aftermath—is used by Goodwin as the blueprint to set up a matrix of emotional states.
The critical response included:
"Wait examines the act of looking and being looked at in public spaces, the ennui, the excitement and just the everydayness of spectatorship. The work succeeds because Goodwin is able to exploit the potential for theatre contained in the act of looking, because the viewer begins to devise narratives, seeking to enter the lives of the artist's subjects."
Gayatri Sinha, The Hindu
, Sep 16, 2005, about Wait shown as part of Cross Town Traffic, Apeejay Media Gallery, India
, one of the largest religious buildings in Europe. The screen below centres around Goodwin's secret observations from the pinnacle of the Cathedral's tower filming through an invisible opening down onto the people and activities moving through the floor area known as "the Crossing". The screen above captures the intensely contrasting light that strikes the Cathedral
visitors who glance upwards at the awe-inspiring structure.
The critical response included:
"’Above/Below’ by the British artist Dryden Goodwin, displayed in the Clandestine section of the Arsenale, has a haunting philosophical clarity."
Rachel Campbell-Johnston
, The Times
, June 18, 2003 on Above/Below the 50th Venice Biennale
, Italy
consisting of that many frames. On each of the individual film frames a different person appears, photographed during the massive protest marches against the war in Iraq, in London, in 2003. The installation presents two copies of the same film, the first copy is seen on the projection screen
and the second copy is presented in a light box table; studying the separate frames with a small magnifying loupe
.
, animated intervention and a multi-layered soundtrack
, presented alongside hundreds of small-scale pen and ink drawings, which construct and constitute the animation
. The film element of Flight expands on a short film commissioned by the animate! project, funded by Arts Council England
and Channel 4
Television in the UK.
The critical response included:
"It is this combination of peeping-Tom-style surveillance with a frank intimacy that makes his films so engaging. Flight, Goodwin's new film installation, follows the journey of an unseen protagonist escaping the urban jungle."
Jessica Lack, The Guardian
, January 28, 2006, on Flight at the Chisenhale Gallery, London
"Goodwin fuses the handmade and the digital in a way that feels inherently personal - and more engrossing with each successive view."
Brian Libby, The Oregonian
, June 25, 2007, on Flight at the Feldman Gallery, Portland, USA
"Aided by an eerily layered ambient soundtrack Dryden Goodwin's installation ‘Flight’ has a dream like quality…the drawings used in the animation reinforce the idea that something strange or other worldly has taken place."
Helen Sumpter, Time Out, Feb 15 – 22 2006 on Flight, Chisenhale Gallery, London
of the drawings played in rapid succession. The video animation accumulates the artist's draughtsmanship into a single, intense moving image, creating a kinetic portrait of Britain's greatest ever Olympic
athlete.
with photography
in a range of ways.
The critical response included:
"He draws strange patterns and structures onto the peoples' faces: webs of white are scratched into the surfaces of the black and white pictures (photographs) to invent inner forms within heads, so it is as if you can see a diagram of the skull and the brain within the portrait, although it is a spiritual rather than a scientific discovery he's nudging towards. In his colour pictures, rivers of red heighten the sense that we're looking into the organic inner space of the person - he is imagining an encounter with the warm red stuff of another person's life...Goodwin achieves something both sweetly simple and massively original. It is an explosion of the heart in the cold medium of the camera...If you think there's no imagination, soul or talent in contemporary British art, this journey through the streets of London will make you change your mind."
Jonathan Jones
, Guardian.co.uk, October 8, 2008, on Cast at the Photographers' Gallery
, London
social portrait of this community of workers. The drawings are displayed on poster sites across the London Underground
network. The films can be viewed online, offering the opportunity to unlock the creation of each portrait.
The critical response included:
"Ordinary faces look back at you from posters at London Underground stations, drawn in intense black lines, almost like forests of wiring. There is a hum of represssed energy, as if you were approaching power lines on a wasteland. There is also a solitude, a silence in the portraits that reach out, with their eyes, to you the stranger ... and then you've moved on, carried by the crowd, the connection is lost...........They're engaged, emotional, hardworking sketches."
Jonathan Jones
, Guardian.co.uk, February 8, 2010, on Linear, Art on the Underground
Installation art
Installation art describes an artistic genre of three-dimensional works that are often site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space. Generally, the term is applied to interior spaces, whereas exterior interventions are often called Land art; however, the boundaries between...
and soundtracks
Soundtracks
Soundtracks may refer to:* The plural of soundtrack* Soundtracks * Soundtracks , an album by Tony Banks of Genesis...
.
Selected works
Central to Dryden Goodwin's practice is a fascination with drawing. However, the ways in which he explores this age-old practice are anything but traditional. He is engaged with time as well as line, and with the sculptural potential of two-dimensional images. Other concerns in his art are also strongly contemporary: the city, ideas of public and private, voyeurismVoyeurism
In clinical psychology, voyeurism is the sexual interest in or practice of spying on people engaged in intimate behaviors, such as undressing, sexual activity, or other activity usually considered to be of a private nature....
, desire and emotional distance.
Recent projects include Linear for Art on the Underground, London, 2010 and a commission for the Who am I? gallery at the Science Museum
Science museum
A science museum or a science centre is a museum devoted primarily to science. Older science museums tended to concentrate on static displays of objects related to natural history, paleontology, geology, industry and industrial machinery, etc. Modern trends in museology have broadened the range of...
, London, 2010. Recent solo exhibitions include Cast, Hasselblad Foundation
Hasselblad Foundation
The Erna and Victor Hasselblad Foundation, established in 1979, is a fully independent, not-for-profit foundation. The main aim of the Foundation is to promote research and academic teaching in the natural sciences and photography. The Foundation also presents an annual international award in...
, Gothenburg, Sweden 2009 and Photographer's Gallery, London, 2008; Flight, at the Chisenhale Gallery, London, 2006 and Sustained Endeavour: Portrait of Sir Steve Redgrave, National Portrait Gallery, London, 2006.
Hold (1996)
Hold exploits the fact that film is made up of separate framesFilm frame
In filmmaking, video production, animation, and related fields, a film frame or video frame is one of the many still images which compose the complete moving picture...
; the majority of the film features a new person on every frame, or every eighteenth of a second. The video Hold considers the nature of memory, exploring the tension between our desire to hold onto experiences against the inevitability of the passing of time.
Ospedale (1997)
Ospedale is an experimental documentary filmDocumentary film
Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...
, made in a provincial general hospital in Italy. The film moves through different areas and departments of the hospital. The complexities of relationships between the range of people in the hospital is explored, also the nature of their physical and mental contact.
Closer (2001)
Goodwin's short film Closer investigates the encounters we have with strangers in public places. Using a zoom lensZoom lens
A zoom lens is a mechanical assembly of lens elements for which the focal length can be varied, as opposed to a fixed focal length lens...
and a long distance laser pen Goodwin collapses the spatial distance between the camera's eye and its subject, filming individuals as he simultaneously touched them with a beam of light.
The critical response included:
"Goodwin is stimulated by an unholy appetite for unforeseen, risky encounters on his sleepless wanderings through the city. He aims at catching us off-balance, ambushing our eyes and ears - an important young talent"
Richard Cork
Richard Cork
Dr Richard Cork is a British art historian, editor, critic, broadcaster and exhibition curator. He has been an art critic for the Evening Standard, The Listener, The Times and the New Statesman. Cork was also editor for Studio International. He is a past Turner Prize judge.-Life and work:Richard...
, The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
, April 17, 2002 on Closer, Tate Britain
Tate Britain
Tate Britain is an art gallery situated on Millbank in London, and part of the Tate gallery network in Britain, with Tate Modern, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives. It is the oldest gallery in the network, opening in 1897. It houses a substantial collection of the works of J. M. W. Turner.-History:It...
, London
Wait (2000)
The multi-screen video installation Wait takes as its starting point the dramatic tension that surrounds the build up towards the moments when the last millenniumMillennium
A millennium is a period of time equal to one thousand years —from the Latin phrase , thousand, and , year—often but not necessarily related numerically to a particular dating system....
changed into the present one. The work explores the continual universal desire to find significance and look constantly for the moment of change. The tripartite emotional structure of each of these events—anticipation, realisation and aftermath—is used by Goodwin as the blueprint to set up a matrix of emotional states.
The critical response included:
"Wait examines the act of looking and being looked at in public spaces, the ennui, the excitement and just the everydayness of spectatorship. The work succeeds because Goodwin is able to exploit the potential for theatre contained in the act of looking, because the viewer begins to devise narratives, seeking to enter the lives of the artist's subjects."
Gayatri Sinha, The Hindu
The Hindu
The Hindu is an Indian English-language daily newspaper founded and continuously published in Chennai since 1878. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, it has a circulation of 1.46 million copies as of December 2009. The enterprise employed over 1,600 workers and gross income reached $40...
, Sep 16, 2005, about Wait shown as part of Cross Town Traffic, Apeejay Media Gallery, India
Above/Below (2003)
Above/Below evokes the relationship between public space and private visual encounter. The two screens, positioned horizontally at the top and bottom of the raised platform, project images filmed in Durham CathedralDurham Cathedral
The Cathedral Church of Christ, Blessed Mary the Virgin and St Cuthbert of Durham is a cathedral in the city of Durham, England, the seat of the Anglican Bishop of Durham. The Bishopric dates from 995, with the present cathedral being founded in AD 1093...
, one of the largest religious buildings in Europe. The screen below centres around Goodwin's secret observations from the pinnacle of the Cathedral's tower filming through an invisible opening down onto the people and activities moving through the floor area known as "the Crossing". The screen above captures the intensely contrasting light that strikes the Cathedral
Cathedral
A cathedral is a Christian church that contains the seat of a bishop...
visitors who glance upwards at the awe-inspiring structure.
The critical response included:
"’Above/Below’ by the British artist Dryden Goodwin, displayed in the Clandestine section of the Arsenale, has a haunting philosophical clarity."
Rachel Campbell-Johnston
Rachel Campbell-Johnston
Rachel Campbell-Johnston is The Times newspaper's chief art critic.Appointed to her post in 2002, she has also been her newspaper's poetry editor, leader writer, deputy comment editor, obituary writer and deputy books editor....
, The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
, June 18, 2003 on Above/Below the 50th Venice Biennale
Venice Biennale
The Venice Biennale is a major contemporary art exhibition that takes place once every two years in Venice, Italy. The Venice Film Festival is part of it. So too is the Venice Biennale of Architecture, which is held in even years...
, Italy
Two Thousand and Three (2003)
Two Thousand and Three is a filmstripFilmstrip
The filmstrip was a common form of still image instructional multimedia, once commonly used by educators in primary and secondary schools , now overtaken by newer and increasingly lower-cost full-motion videocassettes and DVDs...
consisting of that many frames. On each of the individual film frames a different person appears, photographed during the massive protest marches against the war in Iraq, in London, in 2003. The installation presents two copies of the same film, the first copy is seen on the projection screen
Projection screen
A projection screen is an installation consisting of a surface and a support structure used for displaying a projected image for the view of an audience. Projection screens may be permanently installed, as in a movie theater; painted on the wall; or semi-permanent or mobile, as in a conference room...
and the second copy is presented in a light box table; studying the separate frames with a small magnifying loupe
Loupe
A loupe is a simple, small magnification device used to see small details more closely. Unlike a magnifying glass, a loupe does not have an attached handle, and its focusing lens are contained in an opaque cylinder or cone. Loupes are also called hand lenses .- Optics :Three basic types of loupes...
.
Flight (2006)
Flight is an installation of inter-related elements including a film combining live actionLive action
In filmmaking, video production, and other media, the term live action refers to cinematography, videography not produced using animation...
, animated intervention and a multi-layered soundtrack
Soundtrack
A soundtrack can be recorded music accompanying and synchronized to the images of a motion picture, book, television program or video game; a commercially released soundtrack album of music as featured in the soundtrack of a film or TV show; or the physical area of a film that contains the...
, presented alongside hundreds of small-scale pen and ink drawings, which construct and constitute the animation
Animation
Animation is the rapid display of a sequence of images of 2-D or 3-D artwork or model positions in order to create an illusion of movement. The effect is an optical illusion of motion due to the phenomenon of persistence of vision, and can be created and demonstrated in several ways...
. The film element of Flight expands on a short film commissioned by the animate! project, funded by Arts Council England
Arts Council England
Arts Council England was formed in 1994 when the Arts Council of Great Britain was divided into three separate bodies for England, Scotland and Wales. It is a non-departmental public body of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport...
and Channel 4
Channel 4
Channel 4 is a British public-service television broadcaster which began working on 2 November 1982. Although largely commercially self-funded, it is ultimately publicly owned; originally a subsidiary of the Independent Broadcasting Authority , the station is now owned and operated by the Channel...
Television in the UK.
The critical response included:
"It is this combination of peeping-Tom-style surveillance with a frank intimacy that makes his films so engaging. Flight, Goodwin's new film installation, follows the journey of an unseen protagonist escaping the urban jungle."
Jessica Lack, The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
, January 28, 2006, on Flight at the Chisenhale Gallery, London
"Goodwin fuses the handmade and the digital in a way that feels inherently personal - and more engrossing with each successive view."
Brian Libby, The Oregonian
The Oregonian
The Oregonian is the major daily newspaper in Portland, Oregon, owned by Advance Publications. It is the oldest continuously published newspaper on the U.S. west coast, founded as a weekly by Thomas J. Dryer on December 4, 1850...
, June 25, 2007, on Flight at the Feldman Gallery, Portland, USA
"Aided by an eerily layered ambient soundtrack Dryden Goodwin's installation ‘Flight’ has a dream like quality…the drawings used in the animation reinforce the idea that something strange or other worldly has taken place."
Helen Sumpter, Time Out, Feb 15 – 22 2006 on Flight, Chisenhale Gallery, London
Suspended Animation – 29 Drawings of the Same Photograph (2000)
Second in a series of works the first being Suspended Animation - 26 Drawings of the Same Photograph 1998. The work consists of 29 drawings of the same photograph. The drawings are:- The framed drawings in a long continuous horizontal line around the gallery space.
- As a video animationAnimationAnimation is the rapid display of a sequence of images of 2-D or 3-D artwork or model positions in order to create an illusion of movement. The effect is an optical illusion of motion due to the phenomenon of persistence of vision, and can be created and demonstrated in several ways...
where the 29 drawings are transferred to video, one drawing appearing for one frame and then looped in a continuous animation.
Sustained Endeavour (2006)
This newly commissioned portrait of Sir Steve Redgrave consists of 25 meticulous pencil drawings, based on the same photograph, displayed alongside an animated, high-definition videoHigh-definition video
High-definition video or HD video refers to any video system of higher resolution than standard-definition video, and most commonly involves display resolutions of 1,280×720 pixels or 1,920×1,080 pixels...
of the drawings played in rapid succession. The video animation accumulates the artist's draughtsmanship into a single, intense moving image, creating a kinetic portrait of Britain's greatest ever Olympic
Olympic Games
The Olympic Games is a major international event featuring summer and winter sports, in which thousands of athletes participate in a variety of competitions. The Olympic Games have come to be regarded as the world’s foremost sports competition where more than 200 nations participate...
athlete.
Cast (2008)
In this exhibition, Cast, Dryden Goodwin presents five new series of works – Cradle, Shapeshifter, Casting, Caul and Rock. Each series features portraits of strangers captured by the artist as he has travelled through London. All the works in this exhibition combine drawingDrawing
Drawing is a form of visual art that makes use of any number of drawing instruments to mark a two-dimensional medium. Common instruments include graphite pencils, pen and ink, inked brushes, wax color pencils, crayons, charcoal, chalk, pastels, markers, styluses, and various metals .An artist who...
with photography
Photography
Photography is the art, science and practice of creating durable images by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation, either electronically by means of an image sensor or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film...
in a range of ways.
The critical response included:
"He draws strange patterns and structures onto the peoples' faces: webs of white are scratched into the surfaces of the black and white pictures (photographs) to invent inner forms within heads, so it is as if you can see a diagram of the skull and the brain within the portrait, although it is a spiritual rather than a scientific discovery he's nudging towards. In his colour pictures, rivers of red heighten the sense that we're looking into the organic inner space of the person - he is imagining an encounter with the warm red stuff of another person's life...Goodwin achieves something both sweetly simple and massively original. It is an explosion of the heart in the cold medium of the camera...If you think there's no imagination, soul or talent in contemporary British art, this journey through the streets of London will make you change your mind."
Jonathan Jones
Jonathan Jones
Jonathan Jones may refer to:*Jonathan Jones , British journalist and art critic*Jonathan Jones , lead vocalist and keyboardist of We Shot the Moon*Jonathan A. Jones , British physicist...
, Guardian.co.uk, October 8, 2008, on Cast at the Photographers' Gallery
Photographers' Gallery
The Photographers' Gallery was founded in London in 1971, and was the first independent gallery in Britain that was devoted entirely to photography. Exhibitions in the gallery have included showcases of work by André Kertész, Danny Treacy, Taryn Simon, Ori Gersht, Cuny Janssen, and David King. The...
, London
Linear (2010)
Linear is a series of portraits of individuals with different working roles on the Jubilee line. Goodwin drew 60 pencil portraits of staff at work, or at moments of pause in their day, and has created 60 films recording the drawings being made. Together they form an intimate and diverseDiverse
Diverse is an American rapper. An underground hip-hop artist, he has received critical acclaim "from knowledgeable heads worldwide".-Career:...
social portrait of this community of workers. The drawings are displayed on poster sites across the London Underground
London Underground
The London Underground is a rapid transit system serving a large part of Greater London and some parts of Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire and Essex in England...
network. The films can be viewed online, offering the opportunity to unlock the creation of each portrait.
The critical response included:
"Ordinary faces look back at you from posters at London Underground stations, drawn in intense black lines, almost like forests of wiring. There is a hum of represssed energy, as if you were approaching power lines on a wasteland. There is also a solitude, a silence in the portraits that reach out, with their eyes, to you the stranger ... and then you've moved on, carried by the crowd, the connection is lost...........They're engaged, emotional, hardworking sketches."
Jonathan Jones
Jonathan Jones
Jonathan Jones may refer to:*Jonathan Jones , British journalist and art critic*Jonathan Jones , lead vocalist and keyboardist of We Shot the Moon*Jonathan A. Jones , British physicist...
, Guardian.co.uk, February 8, 2010, on Linear, Art on the Underground
