Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Last chance to vote for Matt Stokes: "Northern Art Prize 2009" Leeds Art Gallery, UK

To vote for Matt Stokes to win this years Northern Art Prize 2009

Click here

Northern Art Prize 2009

Pavel Buchler, Nick Crowe and Ian Rawlinson, Rachel Goodyear, and Matt Stokes

27 November 2009 - 21 February 2010
at Leeds Art Gallery, The Headrow, Leeds LS1 3AA
Open Mon-Tues Thurs-Sat 10am-5pm, Wed 12-5pm, Sun 1-5pm

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).

The winning artist will be announced on 21 January 2010, scooping the £16,500 prize money whilst each of the runners up will receive £1500.

Image:
Matt Stokes
These Are the Days (Production Still), 2009
Dual Channel video
16mm Film Transferred to Hard Drive
(MS0033)
Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery, UK and Ziehersmith, New York

Monday, January 18, 2010

Psychic Geography - Preview: Friday 22nd January, 6pm - 9pm

Psychic Geography

Eric Bainbridge Sophie Lisa Beresford David Blandy Dan Ford Laura Lancaster Mike Pratt James Richards Daniel Silver Lara Viana

23rd January – 20th February 2010
Tues - Sat, 11am -5pm
(or by appointment)
Preview: Friday 22nd January, 6-9pm

“…The psychic geographer specializes in spotting that place where humans and their environment meld and we can no longer speak of individual will as such, but only communal or sometimes corporate imperatives, the desires of the space as it speaks through the body politic that inhabits it” 1

Workplace Gallery is pleased to present Psychic Geography a group exhibition of new and existing works by nine diverse artists. The exhibition includes Collage, Painting, Photography, Sculpture, and Video that examines the interaction between spaces and people, places and identity.

In a new series of collages by Eric Bainbridge, base elements taken from interior design and fashion magazines are cleverly disguised through simple manipulation. Eyes, mouths, sinks, stairs are all hidden, replaced with abstracted patterned forms themselves cut from the same source to leave us with hybrid unsettling images that are both familiar and absurd. In The First and Second Creation part of an ongoing series of intimate and revelatory ‘to camera’ videos Sophie Lisa Beresford attempts to communicate her complex and unified world view whilst also exploring with her own problematic and paradoxical relationship to making ‘Art’ and to ‘Being’. David Blandy’s work highlights the slippage and tension between fantasy and reality. In Hollow Bones Blandy performs Syl Johnson’s underground soul classic "Is It Because I’m Black" in an inverted “whiteface” version of the racist stereotype from American theatre of the 19th Century, popularized until 1978 in the BBC Television’s “The Black & White Minstrel Show“. Blandy’s film takes an alternative position: by appropriating the politically ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ he finds an antiheroic and morally ambiguous alter-ego that becomes archetypal and symbolic of Blandy’s quest for identity and cultural position. Dan Ford’s paintings and drawings examine the design industry aesthetics found in disparate pockets of visual culture such as knitting patterns, S&M magazines, sauna brochures and comic books. In Sheet 2009 a page of Dildos is the starting point for a small delicate painting in which shapes become merely motifs that expose the quality of the image against the artists sense of placement and appropriation. Laura Lancaster’s new series of 21 portrait paintings deconstruct the photographs they are copied from to such an extent that faces and features are obliterated with painterly gesture. The almost monochrome works leave us guessing as to the period, class, and identity of the subjects. Short Back And Sides (Bombay Bad Boy) is a new sculpture by Mike Pratt in which 12 classic art school plaster busts are reduced to the role of plinth for an assemblage of furniture and found objects. Through a process of re-enacting, borrowing and re-appropriation Pratt comments upon the cycle of assimilation constantly evolving from an affecting voice or act into popular culture. James Richards uses the accumulation and reassembly of imagery as a devotional and elegiac process. In his looped video Misty Boundaries Has Left the Room he entices us with a quick fire sequence of brief vignettes: a puff of steam, a hand being held, soap bubbles, a blizzard, followed by a clip from a television programme about how to draw until a girl zones out in a classroom as the tutorial explains how to realistically depict an eye. Daniel Silver’s sculptural installation Studies for Adam and Eve (1-3) mixes found objects with small sculptures presented in a series of altar like cabinets. Silver’s works play with universal values and tradition presenting us with ambiguous figures that echo religious artifact, iconic sculpture, mutation, and disfigurement. For Lara Viana painting itself is a tool for transport. In her recent paintings we are taken to the tabletop aftermath of opulent dinner parties. The fluid marks symbolise an experience of these forms and subjects, dreamlike in their foggy depictions, and at the same time, as substantially real as the memory of a past experience.

To celebrate the opening of Psychic Geography there is an Afterparty at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art from 9pm onwards, with special guest DJ's and drinks promotions.

Dan Ford and James Richards are shown Courtesy of the artist and Moot Gallery, Nottingham. Daniel Silver is shown Courtesy of the artist and IBID PROJECTS, London. Lara Viana is shown Courtesy of DOMOBAAL, London.

For more information contact info@workplacegallery.co.uk

Kindly supported by:


1 Extract from A Brief Explanation of Psychic Geography by Matthew Everett, published in The Agenda, Issue #15, 2006

Sunday, January 17, 2010

AFTERPARTY - BALTIC Centre For Contemporary Art, Friday 22nd January, 9pm - Late


AFTERPARTY

Friday 22nd January 2010
BALTIC Cafe/Bar: 9pm - Late

BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art
South Shore Road, Gateshead, NE8 3BA

Special Guest DJ's and Drinks Promotions

Admission Free

AFTERPARTY is an event organised by Workplace Gallery and Sailor Girl Ltd to co-incide with the preview of the group exhibition Psychic Geography at Workplace Gallery.

For more information please contact: info@workplacegallery.co.uk or visit: www.workplacegallery.co.uk

   

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Marcus Coates: 'Psychopomp' Milton Keynes Gallery, UK. 15 Jan - 4 April 2010

Marcus Coates

Psychopomp

Milton Keynes Gallery
15 January - 4 April 2010

Preview:
14 January 2010, 6pm until late
7pm: Speeches followed by drinks, canapés and music

Milton Keynes Gallery

900 Midsummer Boulevard, MK9 3QA

www.mk-g.org



Preview:
Getting Here
Ride in style from London to Milton Keynes by coach with onboard performances:
Seats Of Learning by Brown Mountain College
Depart: 15 Jan 5.15pm from the Whitechapel Gallery
Return: 9.30pm from Milton Keynes Gallery
Cost: £5 (booking essential)

Call Joanne Trotter on 01908 676 900 or email j.trotter@mk-g.org
Alternatively, there are frequent trains from London Euston with a short taxi ride to Gallery

Wednesday, January 06, 2010

Darren Banks: 'Soothsayers' - Sierra Metro, Edinburgh

DARREN BANKS - SOOTHSAYERS

OONAGH HEGARTY - TABLOID ALCHEMY


17 January - 28 February 2010

Preview: Saturday 16 January from 7pm

with live music and visuals from The Turing Test


Sierra Metro presents new work by Darren Banks and Oonagh Hegarty. Please join us for a drink and live music from Newcastle based duo The Turing Test to celebrate the opening of our first two exhibitions of 2010.


Open Friday-Sunday, 1pm-5pm

Sierra Metro

Ground Floor North, 22 West Harbour Road

Granton, Edinburgh EH5 1PN

info@/www.sierrametro.com