Thursday, July 30, 2009

Jo Coupe, Jennifer Douglas, Ant Macari, and Matt Stokes: nominated for Northern Art Prize Long List 2009

Northern Art Prize 2009


Selectors | Nominations

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Selectors

The selectors for 2009 are Patricia Bickers (Editor, Art Monthly), Richard Deacon (Artist), Paul Hobson (Director, Contemporary Art Society), Peter Murray (Director, Yorkshire Sculpture Park) and Tanja Pirsig-Marshall (Curator of Exhibitions, Leeds Art Gallery).

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Nominations

The longlisted artists for 2009 are:

Farhad Ahrarnia, Andy Black, Pavel Bϋchler, Halima Cassell, J. Chuhan, Jo Coupe, Nick Crowe and Ian Rawlinson, Graham Dolphin, Jennifer Douglas, Jorn Ebner, Rachel Goodyear, Sally Greaves-Lord, Lubaina Himid, Simon Le Ruez, Bob Levene, Ant Macari, Haroon Mirza, Jane Poulton and Lin Holland, Emma Rushton and Derek Tyman, Bryndis Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson, Linder Sterling, Matt Stokes and Richard William Wheater.

The nominators for 2009 are:

North East
Julia Bell, Freelance Independent Curator and Visual Arts Consultant; James Lowther, Curator, DLI Museum and Durham Art Gallery;Helen Ratcliffe and Alan Smith, Directors, Allenheads Contemporary Art, Northumberland; Paul Stone and Christopher Yeats, Directors, Vane.

North West
John Angus, Director, Storey Gallery, Lancaster;Maria Balshaw, Director, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; Ann Bukantas, Curator of Fine Art, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; Fareda Khan, Deputy Director, Shisha, Manchester.

Yorkshire
Stuart Cameron, Director, Crescent Arts; Lara Goodband, Independent Curator; Nicola Stephenson, Director, The Culture Company; Liz Whitehouse, Director, The Art House, Wakefield


Friday, July 24, 2009

Ant Macari: "Rank: Picturing The Social Order 1615-2009" Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool, UK



Rank
Picturing the social order 1516-2009

25 July - 12 September 2009

Who do we think 'we' are? 'Rank' asks: how have we imagined the shape of our society? It is the first ever exhibition to examine how British artists - and many others - have represented the shape of their society from the Renaissance to the present. It brings together nearly 100 contributors, placing masterpieces from
almost all England's national collections - the British Library, Tate, British Museum, V&A and Arts Council Collection - next to images made for the urban poor
from the Working Class Movement Library, and those for Victorian middle-class collectors from libraries and archives. 'Rank' reveals the shape of our society
through objects from different social strata, as well as representations of 'ranks', 'classes', 'orders' and 'estates'.

WP Frith's 'Derby Day', shows what was described as "a gathering clearly subversive of the proper distinctions which should always in a well-governed country exist between class and class." 'Rank' mixes objects which occupy different positions in our hierarchy of images. It also juxtaposes works by some of the
greatest names in British art with new research from academic experts and public agencies, so that pictures of our myths and stereotypes of our national life sit
alongside those based on hard fact. All seek to visualise the ways in which our societies are and have been ordered and classified.

The exhibition is organised by Nothern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland, and is accompanied by a 144 page fully illustrated catalogue with essays by the journalist Polly Toynbee, historian Professor Keith Wrightson, geographer Professor Daniel Dorling, and sociologist Gordon Fyfe.

Grundy Art Gallery
Queen Street
Blackpool
FY1 1PX

Grundy is open Monday to Saturday, 10am to 5pm. Bank Holidays during exhibitions July to September, 11am - 4pm. Closed Sundays

image:

Ant Macari

The Heresy of the Free Spirit

2009
Ink pen on wall
2m x 2m
Commissioned for 'Rank' Leeds City Art Gallery. Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery, UK

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Marcus Coates' Follow the Voice screening tonight at The Sage


Follow the Voice

Tonight Follow the Voice will be screened at The Sage as part of Opera North - The Weather Man

A moving image and audio work by Marcus Coates ‘Follow the Voice’ is being presented in Darwin’s birthplace of Shrewsbury. It also accompanies a major new Opera North touring production produced to coincide with the Darwin bicentenary in 2009.

In a playful echo of Darwin’s publication ‘The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals’, ‘Follow the Voice’ establishes striking parallels between a range of familiar man-made sounds and an equally evocative chorus of animal cries and calls. Chasing (and carefully recording) pockets of sound around the contemporary urban landscape of Shrewsbury, Marcus Coates uncovers and explores unexpected patterns of sonic kinship.

Isolating a number of sounds from the continuous hubbub of everyday background noise, including the ‘beep’ of the supermarket checkout, the siren of a police car and the noises of a school playground, Coates subjects the audio components of each video sequence to varying levels of manipulation (speeding them up or slowing them down to alter their pitch). As if tuning in to the right wavelength on this sonic sliding scale, he then adds to the mix by introducing field recordings of animals and birds whose songs and cries are uncannily identical to his newly-dislocated, disembodied sounds. Highlighting the rising-and-falling, one and two-note structure of primitive calls expressing recognition or alarm that are common across disparate species, ‘Follow the Voice’ captures the heightened feeling of interconnectedness at the heart of Darwin’s view of the world, while reminding us of the spirit of curiosity and discovery that infuses Darwin’s ideas.

Monday, July 13, 2009

Matt Stokes: "MARZLIVE" MARZ-Galeria, Lisbon, Portugal



MARZLIVE

JULIAN ROSEFELDT / JOHANNA BILLING / MATT STOKES

JENS WAGNER, MICHAELA EICHWALD, KAI ALTHOFF AND RALF SCHAUFF / IAIN FORSYTH & JANE POLLARD

Runs June 27 through July 30, 2009


Rua Reinaldo Ferreira 20 A, 1700-323 Lisbon. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday from midday to 8 pm.

www.marz.biz / galeria@marz.biz / +351 218 464 446


On June 26th2009, MARZ Galeria will inaugurate “MARZlive”, a program of screen-based “con-certs” that will run parallel to the season of summer music festivals in Portugal. This exhibition will look into the fecund relationship and exchange between contemporary visual artists and music, and seeks to underscore the collaborative practice inherent to the works screened during the course of this five-week long period.

Artists included in this exhibition are: Julian Rosefeldt, Johanna Billing, Matt Stokes, Filmgruppe West (Kai Althoff, Michaela

Eichwald, Ralf Schauff and Jens Wagner) and Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard.


MARZlive presents itself under the guise of a summer festival, and as such, is a celebration of the culture and power of music, and of the festival in its broadest sense as a conduit for the construction of individual and collective identity. At its core, this exhibition aims to show how artists and their continued relationship and rapport with music results from an attitude that is bound to the questioning of artistic autonomy, authority, authorship and the traditional role of the romantic artist as a solitary genius. The works on view, on the most part, belong to an unsettled space of interconnection between art and non-art, art and other disciplines; a space that tests the social boundaries of where, how, with what, and with whom art may be made. Generally speaking, these works, by way of surrogates such as the rock band, the rock concert, the musical, raves and

revellers, are quite radical in their wavering visibility as art, for they can most easily, and therein lies their radicality, be filtered into and confused with other economies, or better yet, other industries or cultural forms (music, music videos, film, documentary). As such, one might venture to say that these works, although inscribed in the logic of the art market, frustrate it at the same time. As a festival-exhibition, the works on view are expected to create a kind of discursive space on the whole. Herein several ideas will be explored, but on the most part, and by way of these

works, witness will be given to the creation of temporary communities. Ultimately, anyone who has immersed in the atmosphere of a live concert senses a certain belonging and rapture, a kind of cohesion that is distinct from the indifference, detachment and individualism of modern day life. The works on view bring to the fore this atmosphere of “coming together” in several of its guises: gawking audiences in a movie theatre in India,

musicians united to record a song in a Swedish recording studio, Northern-Soul dancers in the interior of a Gothic Revival church in Scotland, a quarrelsome band of four from Aachen, and lastly, a vast group of musicians, volunteers and charity workers who gather together to re-

enact a mythic performance by The Cramps. Rather than analyse, evaluate or intentionally give praise to collaboration, this show focuses on the heterogenous methodologies of collaboration and the inherent tension, confrontation, deliberation and negotiation that may rise prior to or during interaction, group activity, exchange and “working together.” “Collaboration” here is adopted as an open-ended concept, an “umbrella term for the diverse working methods that require more than one participant.” The term in the context of this show can be distinguished from “cooperation,” which implies greater detachment and a lesser degree of identification between those who partake, “collective action” which suggests working forms within socialist social systems and “interaction” which is more or less used when referring to man-machine relations. In certain instances, the term “participation” could also be used, for instance, when referring to contexts where the internal or external participant can take part in something someone else has created, and where an opportunity to make an impact is given (as in the case of Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard’s File under sacred Music).i On the whole, MARZlive presents different modes of collaboration. To this effect, the people involved in a large part of the projects on view had the responsibility of following the project and determined, in one way or another, their outcome. In most cases, with the exception of Filmgruppe West, the collaborative work results from informal groupings of people in search of a common denominator. The artist

or artists in these projects takes on the role of the idea-developer, the director, the protagonist and/or the editor and all who have partaken in the work’s creation and execution have been credited. Taking the concept of the festival, MARZlive also calls to mind Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the carnival as a participatory model. For Bakhtin, the individual or egoist (the enemy of the people) could be sacrificed and taken over during the festival, a system where the king is clown. To this effect, festival, the summer festival (and by extension concerts, raves and other musical gatherings) can be seen as a celebration of the victory of the collective body over the individual spirit. Through mimicry, derision, expressiveness,

role reversal and satire these get-togethers provide an escape from the usual social order, and fixed social relations – between different social classes, gender and ethnic groups - are confronted. The parade thus provides a transformative experience, though brief, where alternative moral and aesthetic orders can be envisioned and created.

i

See Maria Lind, “The Collaborative Turn,” Taking Matter into Common Hands, London, Black Dog, 2007, p. 17.

List of works:

Week 01: Julian Rosefeldt, Lonely Planet, 2006, private view June 26th, 10 pm

on view June 27th and 30th and July 1st and 2nd from midday to 8 pm

Week 02: Johanna Billing, You don’t Love me Yet, 2003, private view July 3rd, 10 pm

on view July 4th, 7th, 8th and 9th from midday to 8 pm

Week 03: Matt Stokes, Long After Tonight, 2005, private view July 10th, 10 pm

on view July 11th, 14th, 15th and 16th from midday to 8 pm

Week 04: Jens Wagner, Michaela Eichwald, Kai Althoff, Ralf Schauff, Aus lauter Haut, 1998-2001, private view July 17th, 10 pm

on view July 18th, 21st, 22nd and 23rd from midday to 8 pm

Week 05: Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard, File under Sacred Music, 2003, private view July 24th, 10 pm

on view July 25th, 28th, 29th and 30th from midday to 8 pm

Wednesday, July 08, 2009

Marcus Coates: "Follow the Voice" Unitarian Church, Shrewsbury, UK



A moving image and audio work by British artist Marcus Coates ‘Follow the Voice’ will be presented in Darwin’s birthplace of Shrewsbury. It also accompanies a major new Opera North touring production produced to coincide with the Darwin bicentenary in 2009.

In a playful echo of Darwin’s publication ‘The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals’, ‘Follow the Voice’ establishes striking parallels between a range of familiar man-made sounds and an equally evocative chorus of animal cries and calls. Chasing (and carefully recording) pockets of sound around the contemporary urban landscape of Shrewsbury, Marcus Coates uncovers and explores unexpected patterns of sonic kinship.

Isolating a number of sounds from the continuous hubbub of everyday background noise, including the ‘beep’ of the supermarket checkout, the siren of a police car and the noises of a school playground, Coates subjects the audio components of each video sequence to varying levels of manipulation (speeding them up or slowing them down to alter their pitch). As if tuning in to the right wavelength on this sonic sliding scale, he then adds to the mix by introducing field recordings of animals and birds whose songs and cries are uncannily identical to his newly-dislocated, disembodied sounds. Highlighting the rising-and-falling, one and two-note structure of primitive calls expressing recognition or alarm that are common across disparate species, ‘Follow the Voice’ captures the heightened feeling of interconnectedness at the heart of Darwin’s view of the world, while reminding us of the spirit of curiosity and discovery that infuses Darwin’s ideas.

Alongside an exhibition presentation at the Unitarian Church in Shrewsbury, Coates’ work will also accompany Opera North’s latest production ‘The Weatherman’, at:
11 July 2009 Theatre Severn, Shrewsbury (World Premiere, Shift Time Festival)
15 July 2009 The Sage Gateshead
17 & 18 July 2009 Howard Assembly Rooms, Leeds
For more info visit www.operanorth.co.uk

‘Follow the Voice’ is co-commissioned with Shropshire Museums Services and funded by Arts Council England.

Marcus Coates: "Front Row Radio 4" 7:15pm GMT 9/07/09



Marcus Coates will be speaking to Kirsty Lang on BBC Radio 4's Front Row Programme at 7:15pm on Thursday the 9th July 2009

He will be talking about his current project Follow The Voice a new moving image and audio work presented in Darwin’s birthplace of Shrewsbury which also accompanies a major new Opera North touring production produced to coincide with the Darwin bicentenary in 2009.

Sunday, July 05, 2009

Matt Stokes: "INDEPENDENT STATE" Foreground Projects, UK

Edwina Ashton

Bob & Roberta Smith

Matt Stokes

26th September 2009

Frome Carnival, Somerset

Commissioned by Foreground

foregroundprojects.org.uk

Independent State is an ambitious participatory visual art project commissioned by Foreground. The project brings three internationally renowned artists to work with groups from Frome’s community from July to September this year to make major new works that will form entries into Frome Carnival as well as interventions into the town in the days leading up to Carnival.

Carnival is one of the most distinctive features of Somerset’s cultural identity and generates huge popular audiences to witness its outpourings of grass roots creativity. Frome Carnival is the first carnival in the Somerset Carnival season and is one of the smallest yet generates an audience of over 20,000 people in a single night.

Independent State will explore how we define social and geographical distinctiveness and achieve self-determination as individuals and communities. The new works will take a number of different forms, calling on the diverse and expansive practices of Ashton, Smith and Stokes and directly featuring the creative contribution of the participant groups, but will all culminate as floats and performances within Frome Carnival on 26th September.

Edwina Ashton’s videos, performances and drawings create oblique and absurd concoctions of character and narrative. They explore the allure and peculiarity of eccentricity and idiosyncrasy whilst using anthropomorphism of animals and insects to ridicule the perversities of British society.

Bob & Roberta Smith fuse humour and serious politics into an egalitarian art that uses the skills of the sign writer, pop group and workshop leader to cajole his audience into a celebratory but often acerbic campaign for more art and more democracy in our society. Smith’s accessible forms and irreverent delivery allow him to deliver a galvanising message on the emancipatory and political potential of creative endeavour and the specificities of identity.

Matt Stokes’ work is marked by anthropological enquiry and an interest in events or informal movements that bind people together. Music subcultures have been central to the development of his recent projects, which have focused on their ability to shape lifestyle, beliefs, and create collectivity.

Stokes creates ‘performance based’ investigations into the ephemera of alternative and underground cultures, through which he has created new art works that often produce moments of peculiar beauty through the juxtaposition of form and content, film and music.

Further information on the artists and their projects, images of previous works, information on Frome Carnival and the curators is all available on request. Interviews can also be arranged.

Please contact Tabitha Clayson or Simon Morrissey on 01373 888187 or email info@foregroundprojects.org.uk for details.

Friday, July 03, 2009

Darren Banks: "Better Place Portraiture" Temporary Contemporary, The Old Police Station, Amersham Vale, Deptford, London

Laura Lancaster: Dawning Of An Aspect - Green On Red Gallery, Dublin




DAWNING OF AN ASPECT


Artists: Niall De Buitléar, Damien Flood, Laura Lancaster, Sonia Shiel

Curated By Mary Cremin

July 9 – August 15, 2009

Preview: Wednesday, July 8th 6-8 pm

Green On Red Gallery presents Dawning of An Aspect, an exhibition of four artists whose work offers an exploration of our capacity for perception through painting and sculpture. ‘Dawning of an aspect’ is taken from both Wittgenstein’s and Wollheim’s philosophical writings on the fundamental distinction between our perception and plain seeing. While the writings on this subject are based on painting, in this exhibition it is also applied to sculptural objects that reveal themselves through the act of looking. This twofold nature of our perception involves both the surface and subject simultaneously. Wittgenstein's aim was to dissolve the paradoxical appearance of aspect-dawning: when looking at a picture-object we can come to see it differently, although we also see that the picture-object itself remains unchanged. Wollheim’s writings view the expressiveness of depiction through psychoanalytic concept of projection in which we come to see a piece of the external world as corresponding to an inward state of mind which he referred to as the internal spectator The experience of seeing resemblances within the pictorial representation is an essential aspect of this idea.
Niall De Buitléar’s use of found objects and re-presenting them as sculptural forms, play with both the history of the found objects and the potentiality to mutate into abstract sculptural forms. It is the recognizable element in the works that reveals the transformation from the everyday to sculptural object.
Damien Flood’s paintings occupy a space between fact and fiction. His work, while primarily landscape in line with the traditional notion of painting reveals a world of discovery and illusion.
Laura Lancaster’s paintings reveal an element of nostalgia; the figures emerge from the blurred landscape, depicting a moment within a narrative structure that is part of a larger schema.
Sonia Shiel’s work commandeers miscellaneous everyday materials to build literal fabrications of ‘lofty’ notions. Her shambolic constructions simultaneously rouse and abandon ceremony, pomp and ego. They merge video, sculpture and paintings to expose subjects associated with the world’s make –up and by revealing their own, assume the subject of creativity itself.

For further information, please contact Jerome O Drisceoil or Mary Cremin at
T +35316713414 E info@greenonredgallery.com
Green On Red Gallery, 26-28 Lombard Street East, Dublin 2