Exhibition Review: Tom Williams & Rincen Caravacci
Exhibition Review: Tom Williams & Rincen Caravacci
Exhibition Review
Tom Williams & Rincen Caravacci
The Dirty Old Gallery
Until 1st August 2021
Hastings and St. Leonard’s are buzzing with artists. Since moving into the neighbourhood 3 months ago, I have been making a foray into the independent arts scene, and one of my most delightful discoveries is The Dirty Old Gallery in Hastings Old Town. Its intimate gallery space is coupled with an art shop, selling art materials, original ceramics, and limited-edition prints. I hadn’t heard of Tom Williams, but I was immediately drawn to purchasing an A4 postcard sized edition entitled Selfies (2020). It’s the subject of our times, living in the age of neo-narcissism, passively gazing on the endless perfected and finely tuned 4k selfies that algorithmically appear on our Instagram search suggestions.
The print is an apt introduction to Tom Williams work, which alas isn’t featured in the exhibition. Williams is currently a printmaker and has been working in this medium since 2015. This exhibition is a swan song as he feels he has come to the end of an artistic chapter in his life and will return back to painting. His particular technique featured here is that of linocut. Williams draws incredibly intricate subjects on lino which are then painstakingly carved out with linoleum cutters. An early work featured is a portrait of the great American writer Charles Bukowski, an author and poet who redeemed the low-life, the vulgar, alcohol raddled-rough-neck American. It’s a charming yet straightforward portrait of the writer, looking aside holding a smouldering cigarette but it is also a good entry point into Williams’ more detailed, wilder, carnivalesque, macabre works that resound with Bukowski’s own observations of people and his interactions with conventional and unconventional subjects – online strippers, queer cabaret acts, filmic references, solitary lonely figures, lit noir-like by a cigarette, or of a figure in a room head in hand, despairing.
The series of etchings that I found most compelling are in the same vein as Selfies. Referencing contemporary online digital art, Williams punctures this unreal world by glitching the surfaces and texture, a homage to analogue technology, such as the VHS video cassette that gradually deteriorates, the subjects distort like an old CRT TV with a dodgy aerial, they break up, decay and degrade, much like life compared to the eternal digitised artifice.
Rincen Caravacci hand sewn embroideries, displayed in the gallery shop, echo a tradition of embroidery from pre-20th century culture. The flora depicted in her uncluttered style aren’t recognisable, they are thorny and alien looking, they appear stigmata like on the cloth. Interestingly Caravacci is also a tattoo artist, creating stark black non-figurative tattoos similar to the embroideries on display.
All the works are highly affordable, so when you’re hanging out in the Old Town, George Street take a little detour round the back on West Street, and have a look.
Manick Govinda is a freelance arts consultant, curator, artists mentor and writer, living in Hastings. Follow him on Instagram and Authory.