Thursday, April 28, 2011

Miles Thurlow: "Chris Hawtin/Miles Thurlow" Malgras|Naudet, Manchester, UK


Image: 'Figure with Wardrobes' 2010, Miles Thurlow, Resin, PU Foam, Polystyrene, Wardrobes. courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery

CHRIS HAWTIN /
MILES THURLOW
29th April – 21st May 2011
Preview 28th April 2011 6 – 8pm

Malgras|Naudet is a new space for contemporary art, a space in which things might happen....

MALGRAS|NAUDET IS PROUD TO PRESENT ITS INAUGURAL EXHIBITION FEATURING SELECTED WORKS BY CHRIS HAWTIN AND MILES THURLOW. EXHIBITING TOGETHER FOR THE FIRST TIME, THE PAINTINGS OF HAWTIN AND THE SCULPTURES OF THURLOW ARE A REFRESHING DISPLAY OF UNREAL LANDSCAPE AND FAMILIAR OBJECT.

"The exhibition’s heady combination of visceral imagery alongside sculptural minimalism complements each artist aesthetically and thematically and with a sincerity that surpasses expectation. The cybernetic organisms of Hawtin’s canvas seem to come to life in Thurlow’s glutinous monuments and bring together both of their intentions as a questioning of the functionality and location of the real and unreal in art and beyond."

Open Friday – Saturday 12.00 – 18.00hrs or by appointment
Nearest train station: Manchester Piccadilly

Notes for Editors: Chris Hawtin and Miles Thurlow both live and work in the UK. Between them, they have exhibited in London, Stockholm, Lisbon and beyond. For a copy of the press release or more information, please contact Helen Collett on +44 7825 88 47 39 or at questions@malgrasnaudet.com.

+44 7811 26 77 52
things@malgrasnaudet.com
www.malgrasnaudet.com

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Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Darren Banks: "Defective Science" Sala Dogana, Genoa, Italy


DEFECTIVE SCIENCE
curated by Gabriella Arrigoni

Darren Banks
Davide Bertocchi
Cesare Bignotti
Sarah Ciraci
Andrea Dojmi
Jacopo Miliani
Marie Velardi

Sala Dogana, Palazzo Ducale
p.zza Matteotti 9, Genova

23 April - 15 May, Tuesday to Sunday 15.00-20.00
Opening Friday 22 April h 18.00
Free admission
http://www.gg6.comune.genova.it/node/557

Defective Science is a group show featuring video works and installations focusing on the relationship between science and pseudo-science. Seven artists have been invited to elaborate the fake documentation of a number of different phenomena, somehow based on scientific postulates. At the same time, their real possibility of existence is into question and eludes any appropriate scientific methodology. Among the topics present in the works on show: extraterrestrial life, teletransportation, the 2012 catastrophic prophecy, life hidden in inanimate objects and theories about the nature itself of our own Universe. The project aims to investigate how contemporary society relates to scientific knowledge, a complex relationship hang in the balance between absolute trust toward the progress and a mystic attraction for the mysterious and the unexplainable, with the result of an unexpected association of science with the magic and the irrational.

image:
Darren Banks
Phantom Sock, 2006
Umbro Sock, Orbit Building System, Wool
50 x 30 x 19 cm
(DB0024)
Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery
   

Paul Merrick: "Remade and Readymade " Constantine Gallery, Teesside University, UK


Remade and Readymade

Tony Charles
Greg Cox
Paul Merrick
Lewis Robinson

Private View 6 - 8pm Wednesday 27th April 2011
26th April - 20th May 2011
Opening Times: 9am - 4pm Mon - Friday
Closed on Weekends and Bank Holidays

Constantine Gallery,
Teesside University
Middlesborough,
TS1 3BA

"Home is no longer a dwelling but the untold story of a life being lived"_ John Berger

The work in this exhibition alludes to the domestic environment in one form or another. Each artist works with the domestic image to a greater or lesser extent to convey individual concerns. The use of found or discarded material is also another characteristic of the work whether it be metal rust filings or reconstituted furniture. The process of making exists somewhere on the threshold between production and destruction.

These artists enjoy the physicality of material and its transformation into the new found imagery. Dislocation, dismemberment, disintegration and distillation are fuel for these works contradicting the culture of 'home neat home.'

"In contrast to the ambivalent-even antagonistic-relationship between domesticity and modernism, the postmodern are witnessed a kind of homecoming in high culture, as artists and designers have (re)turned their attention to domesticity. Specifically the idea of home today is caught between the stasis of nostalgia, historical fantasy and dynamism of activist engagement with the future: on the one hand, the home functions as a potent image or symbol, on the other it exists in all the complexity of daily experience in a three dimensional world."

'Not at Home; The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture'
(Thames and Hudson 1996 p23)
Sharon Haar and Christopher Reed

We live in a century where the domestic appears transient and elusive.
Paradoxically, home suggests familiarity, comfort and security and yet it can be a theatre for the absurd, strange and bizarre. Is it a state of mind or a place? These works reflect that uncertainty in uncertain times. We now live in a culture where DIY is cool, the DIY stores reign like cathedrals to the flat-pack and a proliferation of makeover TV shows invade our living space. The discarded, disguised and remade.


Image:

Paul Merrick
Untitled (Chair), 2009
Sterling board, ply wood, aluminium, gloss paint
81 x 48 x 56 cm
(PME0082)

Courtesy the artist and Workplace Gallery

Saturday, April 16, 2011

Catherine Bertola: "To be forever known" Brontë Parsonage Museum, Haworth, UK


To be forever known
Catherine Bertola
16 April - 8 July 2011
Brontë Parsonage Museum, Haworth

To be forever known is a sound installation by artist Catherine Bertola, created in response to the Brontë Parsonage Museum and its collection as part of the museum’s contemporary arts programme. To be forever known is accompanied by a series of photographs, Residual hauntings.

Catherine Bertola creates installations, objects and drawings that respond to particular sites, collections and historic contexts. Her interest in the Brontë Parsonage Museum centres on the contradictions between past and present that lie at the heart of the museum. The house can be seen as a 'period set', a reconstruction of the past onto which we project our own thoughts and feelings. To be forever known attempts to breathe life back into the space and reinstate a sense of the creativity that once filled the air of the house.

Using scientific methods of revealing the resonant harmonies and tones of architectural spaces, Catherine Bertola has sought to capture the sounds of the Parsonage. The artist recorded herself reading aloud extracts of the sisters' letters. These recordings were then played and re-recorded over and over again into the space, until the words become unintelligible whispers and the resonances of the room are revealed; the sisters' thoughts and feelings once again haunting and jarring against the silence.

Residual hauntings is a series of photographs of the artist ‘performing’ domestic rituals and actions described in written records. These simple ghostly vignettes reanimate the spaces of the Parsonage as they once were.

Catherine Bertola was born in Rugby in 1976 and studied Fine Art at Newcastle University. She has created site specific installations for a variety of sites and contexts, for organisations such as Whitworth Art Gallery (Manchester), V&A Museum (London), Millennium Gallery (Sheffield) and the National Trust. Catherine Bertola has work in several public and private collections and is represented by Workplace Gallery, Gateshead and M R Fricke, Berlin.

To hear a brand new podcast that includes an interview with artist Catherine Bertola talking about her artwork and inspirations, download the 'Art Yorkshire' iPhone App from the Apple App Store or visit http://art.yorkshire.com

Conversaziones

As part of To be forever known, Catherine Bertola will curate three 'Conversaziones', a term used by Victorians to describe small social gatherings held in their homes (where people would meet over tea to debate topics of the day). Catherine and a series of invited speakers will discuss themes relating to the exhibition, together with a small audience. The evenings will take place at the Brontë Parsonage Museum after hours, and refreshments will be provided.

Thursday 12 May, 7pm
Radical Women
Lucasta Miller and Jane Robinson discuss the role of radical women, from the original Bluestockings to the 20th Century suffragettes, who like the Brontës, transcended perceived ideas of femininity.
Jane Robinson is author of Bluestockings: The Remarkable Story of the First Women to Fight for an Education.
Lucasta Miller is a writer and critic, and author of The Brontë Myth.

Thursday 16 June, 7pm
Everyday Lives
Ann Dinsdale and Suzanne Fagence Cooper take us through the domestic rituals of an early 19th household, to discover how the Brontë sisters would have occupied their time outside of writing.
Ann Dinsdale is Collections Manager at the Brontë Parsonage Museum.
Suzanne Fagence Cooper is V&A Research Fellow at Buckinghamshire New University, has written several books on Victorian art and culture, and has been a consultant for BBC programmes including What the Victorians Did for Us, and Simon Schama's History of Britain.

Thursday 7 July, 7pm
Between the Lines
Historian and biographer Kathryn Hughes explores how artefacts and historical evidence can help us to access the people and places of the past.
Kathryn Hughes is Professor of Lifewriting at UEA. Her biographies include George Eliot: the Last Victorian and The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton. She is a journalist and critic, regularly writing for The Guardian and appearing on BBC Radio 4.


Image:
Catherine Bertola
Residual hauntings (detail) 2011
Triptych of Photographic Prints
15.2 x 20.3 cm (Framed)
(CB0092)
Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery

   

Jo Coupe: "A Distance Between Two Points " AirSpace Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent, UK


A Distance Between Two Points

Jo Coupe & Linda Persson

15th April Preview 7-10pm
16th April - 4th June 2011
www.airspacegallery.org
Gallery Open Tuesday - Saturday 11am - 5pm

The phenomena of our experiences, the existence of matter, and its related situations, can be explored through a variety of means. Art, the sciences and philosophy offer propositions that are challenged through a set of criteria and conditions. A Distance Between Two Points, explores crossovers within art, the sciences and philosophy where the artists use materials, images and objects to create positions of experience that explore our understanding of physicality, value and perception. It is within the gaps, between the known and the unknown, where our curiosity can be sparked and open up new dialogues. AirSpace Gallery is delighted to be showing Jo Coupe and Linda Persson together for the first time.

Linda Perssonʼs work takes the form of sculptural installations (using moving image, performance, and sound) to confront and entice the audience into emotional queries on representation, value and the event. How the works are situated, and how the body navigates them, create tension that becomes as important as the space the works occupy. Three newly commissioned pieces are shown here under the collective title of Disappearance of the world, resemblance of the object. In the first of the pieces, Cradle Game (sculptural video installation), conversations about the origins of our development of knowledge, through our understanding of material, and contemplations on our societal use of this knowledge take place. Golden hands appear to play a disembodied game of paper scissors stone, out of sequence and disconnected, systems of value are negotiated through a performative act. In Dark Fossil, (film installation), on one screen we see a fossil fragment being traced back and forth in a dark void, the object continually transitioning between the visible and invisible as it moves. On the other screen a disembodied hand follows the contour on the ruins of the birthplace of Remus and Romolus, in Rome, forming a questioning dialogue of ritual, myth and history. Perssonʼs work can be considered playful and destabilising, where contrasts and contradictions in the actions of parts of the body or phenomena create interesting questions regarding perception and our value systems.

Jo Coupe uses readymade objects and invisible forces to create witty sculptural tensions between the gallery space, the viewer and the object. In Solid Air a series of stepladders appear entrapped in the space by a web of strings, however on closer inspection the strings appear to be floating in mid air. The impression of entrapment and stability immediately becomes more tenuous and the entire structure less stable. Another new piece, Tacky, throws an alchemic proposition at the viewer, as we come across a golden strip of Blu-tack, half unrolled and encrusted with jewels. Crystalline Energy was a temporary sculptural piece in a specially constructed gallery space in the basement of Lynemouth aluminium smelter in Northumberland. The whole space bristled with magnetised keys, coins, jewellery, nails, paperclips...the kind of thing you find in the bottom of your drawers. These stuck together in lines, forming impossible strands, which traced the contours of the magnetic fields. A series of pinhole photographs are here on display; the medium was chosen partly as the magnetic fields prohibited the use of more sophisticated equipment. Here, Coupeʼs interest centred around the powerful electromagnetic fields which are a unique by-product of aluminium production and its ability to produce phenomena (levitating coins, keys sticking rigidly from walls and cameras producing black or distorted images), the kind of things which are, in a different context, seen as evidence of supernatural activity.

Persson and Coupe both work with base material compounds that offer tensions of meaning, stability and value. How we may harness and understand these qualities is at the very core of our cultures and societies. The sciences are often seen as a world of facts and figures, concluding in explanations for phenomena that would ordinarily appear baffling. The artists in this exhibition are interested in how art and the sciences can question through proposition. Not everything we encounter needs to be explained, in cold facts. The form and structure of the works in the exhibition allows us to suspend our rational mind and begin searching for alternative explanations and their consequences. Progress occurs in both success and failure.

Linda Persson was born in Stockholm and graduated from Chelsea College of Art & Design in 2002 and Winchester School of Art in 2005, and have since been living and working in the U.K / Sweden. Persson is the founder of an artist run project XRAY and Xray online which occupy knowledge as a tool to engage and emphasise experimentation in contemporary video / film / performance/ sound and writing. She has forthcoming exhibitions at Liste, Berlin (Normalcy Bias 2), Drawing Room, London and SAGS at Woodmill projects, London. Persson has previously exhibited at Bondi Pavilion Gallery, Sydney, Australia, Studio44, Stockholm, Sweden, Art Container, Tallin, Estonia, Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, U.K, Utsikten Kunstsenter, Kvinesdal, Norway. Perssonʼs work is held in private collections internationally.

Jo Coupe was born in Stoke-on-Trent in 1975 and graduated with a BA in Fine Art from Newcastle University in 1998. After 12 years as a practicing artist, studying for an MA at Goldsmiths College, living for a time in New Orleans and London, she now works out of a converted post office in Gateshead, consulting experts in fields as diverse as jewellery, botany, and electronics. Recent projects have included a residency with global aluminium producer Alcan, a commission for Tatton Park Biennial and a solo show at Workplace Gallery, Gateshead. Jo Coupe is represented by Workplace Gallery, Gateshead and her work is held in public and private collections internationally.

Image:

Jo Coupe
Solid Air, 2011
Stepladders, String, Magnetic Field
height 12.5 cm
height 4 7/8 in
(JCP0083)
Courtesy the artist and Workplace Gallery
   

Thursday, April 07, 2011

Darren Banks: "Drawing 2011 Biennial Fundraiser " Drawing Room, London, UK


Drawing 2011 Biennial Fundraiser
Darren Banks

Silent Auction
18 May 18:30 pm
Exhibition
7 April - 18 May 2011
Tues - Sun 12:00 - 18:00



Drawing Room was initiated by curators Mary Doyle, Kate Macfarlane and Katharine Stout to provide the major European resource for contemporary drawing.  It has delivered an ambitious international programme of solo and group exhibitions that have included established, emerging and historical artists.  Many of these exhibitions have toured to galleries and museums throughout the UK and beyond.  Their scope, interpretation and dissemination have been broadened through partnerships with individuals and institutions that have generated publications, a programme of in-conversations and symposia and learning projects.

Those who have contributed to the Biennial Fundraiser include established artists - Jake and Dinos Chapman, Michael Craig Martin, Tracey Emin, Douglas Gordon, Liam Gillick, Antony Gormley, Mona Hatoum, Damien Hirst, Michael Landy, Paula Rego, Gavin Turk, Cerith Wyn Evans - alongside many other key artists at different stages in their careers.


Drawing Room
Tannery Arts
Brunswick Wharf
55 Laburnum Street
London E2 8BD
Tel 020 7729 5333
Fax 020 7729 8008
www.drawingroom.org.uk
mail@drawingroom.org.uk

Friday, April 01, 2011

Cath Campbell & Miles Thurlow: "NATURAL LANGUAGE[nach-er-uhl lang-gwij]" Vitrine Gallery, London


Natural language (nach-er-uhl lang-gwij)

Friday 1 - Tuesday 26 April 2011. Daily 24-hour. FREE.

Artists: Nicole Bachman; Cath Campbell and Miles Thurlow; Johanna Hallsten; Chris Grieves and Richard Battersby; Adrian Lee; Cary Leibowitz; Ant Macari; Linda Persson; Chris Shaw.

'Natural language(nach-er-uhl lang-gwij)' picks at the intrinsic tendencies of language through an exhibition of works that incorporate text, verbal, and visual mediums. Emerging from the idea of language as a malleable system of complex registers - particularly correlations between written, aural and visual forms, works have been brought together in order to speculate the subtle 'vice-versa' current between these common affinities.

Featuring audio, 3D, 2D, 4D, performance and published material, works collectively explore the abstract and often irradicable nature of the ways that language immerse into and transpire from narrative structure- in its widest sense. Artists have been invited to participate in the exhibition for their own investigations into language cross-hybridisations.

The process by which artists engage with language based material will also be explored, whether as a structural strategy; as an instructive aspect or as a means to develop forms of deviance arising from socio/political discourse. Works presented in this exhibition have a link with fiction, autobiographies, political discourse/activity, critical theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis and music. In tandem with with the work in the gallery, guest speakers have been invited to talk formally around ensuing themes from the exhibition. We will also host a screening of artists moving image.
Curated by Natasha Rees.
.................................
Opening event and preview: with a screening (in the cinema, at 7pm) of the last in a series of seasonal video works by Chris Grieves & Richard Battersby, independently published materials by artists and curators including El Von Brown of X marks the Bokship; VERSUCH from Gil Leung and me and my friends - a continuing project by Nicole Bachman; performances by Enda Deburka, Fred Gehrig, and Benedict Seymour; Natasha Rees & Josephine Wood will play a dubplate recording and Dean Kenning compiles a thematically tailored DJ set.
.................................
Talk, screenings and performance: Date April 9 2011 4pm - 6pm FREE. A discussion around the transpiring themes from the exhibition and language structures within contemporary creative practice. Various moving image works; and an audio work by Johanna Hallsten. Event introduced by Natasha Rees with guest speakers. Full details to follow. RSVP Michael@vitrinegallery.co.uk.