Ed Fornieles’ new Associations series together images based on formal and conceptual associations. Using various internet search tools, Fornieles relates his process to ‘the zone’ or ‘flow state’ – a mental state connected both to the creative act as well as compulsive behaviour – which many social media companies aim to provoke in the user as a form of captivating their attention and making them pliable to suggestion and direction. The associations reveal fragments of an inner psyche and the unclear distinctions between its fundamental drives and the social forces that have shaped it. At times conscious and considered, at others trance-like, intuitive, and unthinking, the strings of association speak at once of subjectivities, individual and collective, the networked condition of contemporary images, and the inseparability of the two.

This work is from an ongoing series of drawings by Stuart Middleton, based on photographs taken by the artist. They are rendered smoothly in coloured pencil and depict cattle being exhibited at a county show. The young handler twists her charges’ head to present the animal’s best side to the judge. Stiffly dressed in formal clothes, her attention is focussed away from the viewer, as she struggles to hold the cattle still. The cattle are judged on criteria including musculature for meat, udder proportion, skeletal structure for bearing calves. The tender way these beasts are curried and dressed contrasts with the violence implied by judging, capturing the tension of husbandry; of living stock.

For his upcoming exhibition at Carlos/Ishikawa, opening July 2021, Stuart Middleton will present a new body of drawings which originated last year, during the artist’s residency in Tigre, Buenos Aires. The artist has a particular interest in situations where people are economically dependent on animals, having previously worked with ideas around agriculture, livestock and domesticity. Middleton met with a professional dog walker (paseador de perros) Guillermo a number of times; he followed Guillermo as he collected dogs from various homes. He was concerned to capture the distinct power dynamic between Guillermo and the dogs, his gentle dominance. Focusing on the system of leads, clips and strapping that connected all the dogs together and bound them to Guillermo as well as the gaoler-like bunch of keys that he used to get the dogs from the yards and kennels of the houses, the resulting work illustrates the chain of submission, and a portrait of Guillermo in a job considered precarious and poorly paid. These works also attempt to capture the particular colours that the artist encounterd in Tigre during the spring, the shiny red oxide, dirty pink pavement and the blinding brightness of the light.

On 19 December 1977 a drawing of the little bear Misha by children’s book illustrator Victor Chizhikov was selected to give life and shape to the mascot of the XXII Olympic Games in Moscow 1980. Misha – a brown bear belted at the waist by the five Olympic circles – would become the first mascot in the history of sporting events to achieve such enormous commercial success. The first icon of a major international event to become a product, a symbolic object, an advertisement on the one hand and a beloved popular figure on the other. [...] For Standard Ballad, Steve Bishop edited sequences from the closing ceremony of the Moscow 1980 Olympics, in which a huge inflatable reproduction of Misha is choreographically paraded into the center of the event, before it is abandoned to the skies of Moscow, while the crowd gathered at the stadium cries in communal recognition of that which the entire nation had come to share as an ideal, a reflection of the self [...] There are few examples in life, in which we are shown how and in what way objects can become symbols and references, how shapes and shared stories can be used to recognize our ideals and hopes. –Francesco Garutti, ICON, 2017