Christopher Stewart (artist)

Christopher Stewart (born London 1966) is a visual artist who works with photography and moving image.^{[citation needed]}

Career

Stewart graduated with an MA Photography degree from the Royal College of Art in 1998. He was the recipient of the London Photographers’ Gallery RCA Student Award. The London gallery Gimpel Fils represented him following his graduate exhibition. Work that was developed from an initial series of photographs made whilst at the Royal College went on to be exhibited at the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Bradford, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London,^[1] the Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland, and the Whitechapel Gallery in London as well as other international venues.

American urban theorist Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz, says Stewart’s work articulates “the constitutive ground of our current unease” and that his “photographs detonate our Orwellian anxieties”.^[2]

Art

Stewart’s work is concerned with hierarchies of vision, surveillance and contested territories. From the 1990s to the mid 2000’s he examined the global phenomenon of privatised global security - utilising this modern hyper-industry as a metaphor for analysing global insecurity. Subsequent projects from the mid 2000’s have included Kill House, an analysis of US based disciplinary vernacular structures utilised for the training of private special-forces prior to deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan and Super Border, photographs taken along the route of the newly opened 300 million euro External Integrated Vigilance System on the southern Andalucian coast in Spain.^[3]

Writing in Portfolio, Curator of Photography at the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television Patrick Henry said that “Stewart strips documentary of its didactic function, photographing scenarios which themselves occupy a grey area between reality and fiction” and that his images were a “parody of documentary and its quest to enlighten us about the world”.^[4] Martin Herbert in the October 2006 Art Forum review of Stewart’s 2006 exhibition Observations at Gimpel Fils said that Stewart sidesteps “the potholes of politicized art”.^[5]

Exhibitions

Solo exhibitions include Super Border at Gimpel Fils, London 2009; Observations at Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool 2006; International Sponsorship Program at Art Cologne in 2001; Imago 2000 at the Palacio de Abrantes Salamanca, Spain 2000.^{[citation needed]}

Group exhibitions include Something That I’ll Never Really See (Photography from the Victoria and Albert Museum Collection) at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Dehli 2011; Darkside II curated by Urs Stahel at the Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland 2009; Kill House, Theatres of War, Krakow Photomonth, Poland 2007; Observations at Open Eye Gallery Liverpool 2006; Contemporary Complexities, Martin Z. Marguilies Gift at the Samuel P. Harn Museum, University of Florida 2007; Fabula curated by Patrick Henry at the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, Bradford 2003; Suspendidos at the Canal de Isobel II Gallery in Madrid 2001.^{[citation needed]}

Publications and catalogues

2011 The Critical Dictionary, Black Dog Publishing, ed. David Evans ISBN 978-1907317491
2010 Langford’s Basic Photography Ninth Edition, Focal Press, ISBN 9780240520353
2009 The Photograph as Contemporary Art 2nd ed., Thames & Hudson World of Art Series, ed. by Charlotte Cotton, ISBN 9780500204016
2009 Darkside II, Fotomuseum Winterthur/Steidl Press ISBN 9783865219251
2008 Super Border, Source Photographic Review, UK
2007 Kill House, Krakow Photomonth catalogue
2005 Insecurity, Seesaw Magazine, edited by Aaron Schuman - www.seesawmagazine.com
2004 The Photograph as Contemporary Art, Thames & Hudson World of Art Series edited by Charlotte Cotton, ISBN 0500203806
2004 Portfolio Magazine, essay by Patrick Henry ISSN 1354-4446
2004 Five: curated by GavinTurk – The Labyrinth of the Gaze, ISSN1477-6774
2003 Christopher Stewart, essays by Mike Davis and Joanna Lowry, catalogue published by Centro de Arte de Salamanca, ISBN 849571941X
2003 Fabula exhibition catalogue, National Museum of Photography, Film & Television, ISBN 0948489227
2001 International Sponsorship Programme Art Cologne catalogue ISBN 3929769891
2001 EXIT Magazine #1 ‘Crimes & Misdemeanours’ ISSN 15772721
2000 Imago 2000 catalogue, Salamanca ISBN 8478009248
2000 EAST International catalogue ISBN 1872482228
2000 Big Torino catalogue, Turin, ISBN 8871803000
1999 Portfolio Magazine # 30 ISSN 13544446
1998 Creative Camera Artists’ Pages Oct/Nov ISSN 00110876

Curating and writing

Stewart curated the group exhibition Private at the Hockney Gallery whilst a student at the Royal College of Art in 1997 which included the work of Clare Strand and Maggie Lambert. He curated Infraliminal at Stills Gallery for the Edinburgh Fringe in 2001 which was reviewed in the Guardian Newspaper ^[6] and included the work of Rut Blees Luxemburg, Sophy Rickett and Juan Delgado. He has curated and written exhibition introductions for a number of shows for university galleries including Edition, an exhibition of sixty prototype and dummy books at the University of Brighton during the Brighton Photo Biennial 2006 and a group exhibition at RMIT’s School of Creative Media Project Space in 2008. His most recent catalogue essay was commissioned from the Krackow International Photomonth Festival in Poland in 2010. The Festival’s focus was on British Photography and included exhibitions by John Stezaker and Tony Ray Jones and the focus of Stewart’s essay was an analysis of the last decade of British photography.^{[citation needed]}

Teaching

From 1994, Stewart taught practice, history and theory in London including a short course on the history of photography to MA students at the Royal College of Art covering pre-histories of photography and the history of photographic portraiture in the nineteenth century including the utilisation of photography in science and pseudo-scientific discourses such as eugenics, anthropology and criminology.

After teaching at the University of Westminster and the Kent Institute of Art and Design, he was Principal Lecturer and foundation head of the academic area of Photography, Moving Image and Sound at the University of Brighton until 2008. At the University of Brighton, he was also Director of the MA in Photography.

From 2008, Stewart directed visual art departments in Australia, first at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Melbourne and subsequently at the National Art School in Sydney.^{[citation needed]}

1. ^ Victoria and Albert Museum Collection reference page http://collections.vam.ac.uk/exhibition/3309-something-that-ill-never-really-see-contemporary-photograph/260/
2. ^ Christopher Stewart, essay by Mike Davis published by Centro de Arte de Salamanca 2003, ISBN 84-95719-41-X
3. ^ Source Photographic Review, issue 56 Autumn 2008 http://www.source.ie/archive/issue56/Christopher_Stewart_page_21_52_57_11-01-11.php
4. ^ Patrick Henry, Portfolio Catalogue 39, 2004 pp70 ISSN 1354-4446 2004
5. ^ Martin Herbert Art Forum October 2006 pp280 http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_2_45/ai_n20524999/
6. ^ http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2001/aug/10/art.artsfeatures

1. Victoria and Albert Museum
2. Gimpel Fils
3. Open Eye
4. The Guardian Newspaper
5. Seesaw
6. RMIT University
7. Fotomuseum Winterhur
8. Thames and Hudson
9. Black Dog Publishing
10. Royal College of Art
11. University of Brighton
12. National Media Museum

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Name	Stewart, Christopher
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Date of birth	1966
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