Thursday, February 15, 2007

Darren Banks, Catherine Bertola, Cath Campbell, Peter J Evans and Richard Forster in "The Opposite of Vertigo"



The Opposite of Vertigo

8 February - 18 March 2007
Darren Banks, Catherine Bertola, Cath Campbell, Alex Charrington, Layla Curtis, Graham Dolphin, Peter Evans, Richard Forster.Kevin Mason, Karl Nattress.
A group exhibition of emerging artists based in the North East of England, curated by Jon Bewley, Director, Locus +, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Linking the drawing in this exhibition is an intense physicality, with each work betraying the process of its production.

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Marcus Coates: "Dawn Chorus" at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art



Marcus Coates: Dawn Chorus

Metamorphosis through voice and sound is a state that Coates has long been exploring, and he has established a reputation for producing fascinating films in which the human voice accurately mimics complex and beautiful birdsong. Dawn Chorus is the latest and most ambitious project in this series.

Dawn Chorus uses unique digital methods to explore the relationship between birdsong and the human voice, drawing out previously unexplored similarities between the behaviour of birds and humans.

Dawn Chorus is an ambitious exhibition comprising films of 17 singers that uncannily recreate birdsong in their ‘natural habitats'. The individuals are located in various situations such as an underground car-park, an osteopathic clinic and a bath-tub, the project is as much a portrait of British idiosyncrasies as it is of the natural world. The films are hung on screens in the gallery according to the position of the birds when they were recorded, creating an immersive soundscape for visitors to the exhibition.

During rigorous fieldwork 14 microphones were placed around woodland to record birds during one morning of birdsong in Northumberland. This study is the first, simultaneous, multi-microphone recording of individual birds during the dawn chorus. From this multi-track recording each song was slowed down up to 16 times, then each human participant was filmed mimicking this slowed down song. Finally the resulting video footage was then speeded up, returning the bird mimicry into its ‘real' register. The speeding up of the film not only magically translates the human voice into bird song, but also emphasises unconscious gestures that appear uncannily similar to the physical behaviour of specific birds; a grandfather becomes a pheasant andteachers in a staffroom transform into chiffchaffs, robins and blue tits.

Picture This has worked with Marcus Coates and birdsong expert and wildlife sound recordist Geoff Sample over a three year period to support all aspects of the project, from scientific research and field work, to sourcing and filming singers and presenting the exhibition. The project has been funded by the Wellcome Trust.

Exhibition
14 February - 18 March, 2007, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead

Publication
A new Picture This InProfile DVD publication containing excerpts from Dawn Chorus and other works by Marcus Coates as well as an interview with the artist and a specially commissioned essay by Max Andrews is available spring 2007.

To Celebrate the opening of Dawn Chorus by Marcus Coates at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art,
Picture This and Workplace Gallery invite you to join us at Star and Shadow Bar & Cinema from
9pm until late on Tuesday 13th February.
http://www.starandshadow.org.uk/

Sunday, February 04, 2007

Marcus Coates: "Waterlog" Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery





Waterlog

Marcus Coates
Tacita Dean
Alexander & Susan Maris
Alec Finlay & Guy Moreton
Simon Pope

Saturday 3 Feb - Sunday 15th April 2007
Preview
2nd Feb 2007, 6 - 8pm
Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery

Participation has long been an important aspect of Marcus Coates’ practice, and in particular the notion of ‘becoming animal’, that is, taking on an animal’s characteristics as either a spiritual journey, or one that imitates basic behaviour. For ‘Waterlog’, Coates has created two new and related works, both of which explore the cultural mythology of one of the region’s most elusive birds: the bittern. In a long display case are placed eleven unstuffed bittern specimens – known as ‘skins’ – from the museum’s natural history collection, representing the total number of males recorded in Britain in 1997, the lowest figure since the 1950s, and from which the current population has subsequently grown. Emanating from this rather macabre display, as if from the dead birds themselves, is a song of bitterns and bitterness composed and performed by the artist in a local accent, itself a warning – and perhaps example – of man’s folly.

The bittern has long been perceived as a messenger of doom, perhaps due to its deep, booming call; this can be heard at regular intervals within the rotunda of the Castle Museum, around which can also be read the following quotation from the Old Testament’s Book of Zephaniah: ‘the bittern shall lodge in the upper lintels of it; their voice shall sing in the windows; desolation shall be in the thresholds.’ Given that this warning concerns the Lord’s destruction of the city of Nineveh, now known as the Iraqi city of Mosul, these words possess a distressing contemporary relevance.

Miles Thurlow: "Good Riddance", MOT International, UK



Drawing: Erased and Removed, Miles Thurlow 1998 - 2000
Empty Frames, John Clayman 2006


GOOD RIDDANCE.
3 February – 10 March 2007.
Open Fri, Sat, Sun 12-5 or by appointment
Private View 2 February 6-9pm.
Brown Sierra, John Clayman, Paul Davis, Jem Finer, Leo Fitzmaurice, Miles Thurlow, Lawrence Weiner
What happens if, rather than add-on, build-up, fill-in or replace, you get-rid-of something instead? Can getting-rid-of be constructive, progressive and forward looking, and not just destructive, nostalgic, or somehow redemptive? Can taking-away open things up, push things forward and create new lines of enquiry? Good Riddance looks to explore and expand on these thoughts and questions by inviting people to think, or think again, about the means and potential of taking-away. The exhibition brings together work by seven contemporary artists in response to the idea of taking-away and getting-rid-of as a means of making.


The artists in Good Riddance use a variety of media including sound, film and text. Most adopt a manual approach to modify, adapt and transform existing objects and forms through a process of taking-away. Through this process, things are gained rather than lost.


Brown Sierra (Paddy Collins & Pia Gambardella) is a London-based collective that works predominantly with sound and mechanical interventions. Brown Sierra’s Reduced Mechanical Sound Scapes comprise of found music box mechanisms from which teeth on the rotating drum have been filed-down to create sparse new compositions. For the exhibition, Brown Sierra will also install a wall of electrical ‘silences’.


John Clayman is a London-based artist, who, for the last two years, has been digitally manipulating black and white photographs from art textbooks. Empty Frames is a selection of iconic images of site-specific artworks made between 1955 and 1997 with the artwork painstakingly removed. What remains is a sequence of seemingly banal, but oddly familiar images presented here as a 35mm-slide show.


Paul Davis is a London-based artist, DJ, and founding-member of the ‘Beige’ art collective and the media arts company ‘Lektrolab’. For the exhibition, Davis has created a digital work from a ‘hacked’ Super Mario Brothers game cartridge. All of the game code has been removed, leaving behind an ever-changing stream of digital imagery generated by the primary data stored on the cartridge.


Jem Finer is a London-based artist and musician. His responses to Good Riddance have drawn on ideas of reduction and entropy. Finer has produced a time-lapse film that records the gradual accumulation of dust on a record over a period of months. Reduced to the original length of the recorded song, as the dust accrues the sound becomes increasingly muffled, until finally, it falls silent.


Leo Fitzmaurice is an artist based on Merseyside. His work includes floor and wall installations made from commercial packages, such as cigarette cartons and cereal boxes, from which all sections of text have been removed. Rather than being simply an anti-brand intervention, these ‘reverse collages’ invite new and surprising understandings of space, structure and identity.


Miles Thurlow is an artist based on Tyneside. He will be re-staging his piece Drawing: Erased and Removed (2000), which emerged from a laborious, process of applying/erasing graphite to/from an ink soaked board leant against a wall. Thurlow eventually abandoned this process and got-rid-of the board altogether, leaving behind grubby handprints on the wall and eraser ‘droppings’ on the floor, which unexpectedly became the work.


Lawrence Weiner is a New York-based artist. He will be participating in Good Riddance with a seminal text work – REMOVALS HALFWAY BETWEEN THE EQUATOR AND THE NORTH POLE (1969, #096) – that proposes any number of possible dimensions, scales, variables and possibilities, as well as all manner of motives and consequences.


Curated by Claire Davies and Sam Gathercole

http://www.motinternational.org

MOT
Unit 54/5th floor Regents Studios
8 Andrews Road London E8 4QN

t/f +44(0)20 7923 9561

e info@motinternational.org

Director Chris Hammond +44 (0)7931 305 104

Open Fri, Sat, Sun 12-5 or by appointment

Bethnal Green Underground
Bus 394,106,253,26,48,55,D6, D3, 8

Marcus Coates: "Emotional Man" Centro d'Arte Contemporanea del Ticino, Switzerland



Emotional Man. Insights into Beuty and the Beast
Nniet Brovdi,
Marcus Coates,
Andrea Crosa,
Mauro Ghiglione,
Anthony Howard,
Supersober Bohdan Stehlik/Una Szeemann,
Marco Villani

25 November 2006 - 25 February 2007

Paul Moss & Cecilia Stenbom: Waygood Gallery Harker Herald - February


Untitled (Dog & Pattern # 1) © Paul Moss & Cecilia Stenbom 2007

Untitled (Dog & Pattern #1) is a first time collaboration between Paul Moss and Cecilia Stenbom. Both artists are known for their interpretations of the everyday: Moss using information and materials taken from architecture and the urban landscape and Stenbom selecting subjects from places including fashion, mass media, and household technology.

“For Harker Herald we have created an image that combines our interests and responds directly to the billboard site and its potential audience. We want it to ask questions about how pattern influences opinion and judgement, simultaneously signalling high and low values, danger and decoration.¨

Email art@waygood.org for monthly updates or to be added to our postal list to receive monthly calendar postcards.

Harker Herald is a monthly changing artwork on a billboard located outside of Waygood Studios, temporarily located in Byker whilst the High Bridge site awaits redevelopment.

It can be seen on Old Shields Road, opposite the Parson’s Turbine Hall, from the no 15, 22, 301 and 302 buses and is a short walk from Chillingham Road and Walkergate Metro Stations.

Ginny Reed: The National Review of Live Art, Tramway, Glasgow.





The National Review of Live Art, 7-11 February, 2007 will take place at Tramway, Glasgow.
www.tramway.org
Ginny Reed
until my pencil runs out
small bang

Part of a body of work on the accumulation and dispersal of human actions, themes of the absurd, randomness and repetition recur throughout 'small bang' and 'until my pencil runs out'. Reed's performances highlight the residues and remnants of the event; often, small particles from everyday materials are distributed, expanded, exploded or sucked away. Her influences vary widely and here they range from comedy to cosmology to mapping.
Concerned with contrasting different aspects of production including film, performance and light and it's effects the works coincide in contrasting the materiality of actual, depicted and used objects with the materiality of the forms of their representation.