Joe Clark: "RE:animate" Oriel Davies Gallery, 26 June - 18 August 2010

Joe Clark Oriel Davies Open 2010 RE:animate Oriel Davies Gallery The Park, Newtown Powys SY16 2NZ 26 June 2010 - 18 August 2010 Preview: Saturday 26 June 7-9pm Thirty-nine artists from across the UK have been selected from 150 entries for this fourth edition of Oriel Davies's biennial Open exhibition, taking a theme of animation this year, from movement to non-narrative structures and the potential for audience participation. Opening up the gallery as a space for artists to expand the ideas they've proposed, the selection panel challenged wannabe residents to draw inspiration from cave drawings, magic lanterns, stop-motion films and computer-generated imagery, resulting in a diverse show of installations, projections, photography and drawings. Image: Object 2, 2010 CMYK Digital Poster Print on Plastic Substrate with Hanging Mechanism 116.8 x 116.8 cm (JCL0070)

Darren Banks, Flora Whitely and Christopher Rollen: "An Evening with Better Place Portraiture" Barbican Centre, London

Darren Banks, Christopher Rollen & Flora Whitely An Evening with Better Place Portraiture Magic and the Occult Barbican Centre 24 June 2010 6.30 - 10.00 PM Barbican Website Better Place Portraiture Blogspot Better Place Portraiture is a psychic collaboration between the artists Darren Banks , Flora Whitley & Christopher Rollen. Better Place Portraiture "The Present" Tonight Better Place Portraiture will be hosting their final bestial séance at the Barbican Art Gallery. They are inviting you to come and join them in drawing out memories of animal friends - as spirits will be cast onto paper through the medium of the pencil.  Please make your way to the reception and book an appointment with Better Place Portraiture, the receptionist will be happy to answer any queries that you may have and will explain where and when you will be able to see our psychic team.  During your appointment our medium and her meta-visible guide will endeavor to make contact and provide a portrait from beyond the grave.  Appointments will be given on a first come first serve basis and a maximum of two people can be seen at once. From beginning to end the whole process will last about 7 minutes. Please do not feel anxious, ghosts are harmless.  There is nothing to fear.  If an entity is perceived, simply view it as evidence of a living imagination. "The Past" Better Place Portraiture is a psychic collaboration conceived up by the artists Darren Banks and Flora Whiteley. They come together through a shared interest in the intuitive, the domestic, the animal and the supernatural. Since 2002 they have made several projects together exploring the human, the animal and the supernatural. Better Place Portraiture came into being in 2005 and has been performed in a number of manifestations since, including: Novotel Rooms 2, Magnifitat, Edinburgh, 2002, Mima, Middlesborough, 2004 and Magacin, Belgrade 2009, Temporary Contemporary, The Old Police station, London , Fantasmagora Better Place Portraiture,Auto-Italia Southeast, London 2009 Image: An Evening with Better Place Portraiture - still from performance Photo Courtesy of Theo Cook

Paul Merrick & Miles Thurlow: "Brut, Brut" Edinburgh Annuale, 26 June - 1st July 2010

Brut, brut Graeme Durant Owen Piper Paul Merrick Miles Thurlow 2F1 32 Sandport Street Edinburgh, EH6 6EP 27th June - 1st July 2010 Preview: Saturday 26th June 6 - 8pm Edinburgh Annuale Co-ordinated by Embassy, Edinburgh http://www.annuale.edinburghcontemporary.org/ Graeme Durant's work stems from personal reflections upon certain materials and their transformations. Durant reorders a formalist sculptural vocabulary of form, volume and matter to play host to personal memory and experience. Form and function are not clearly assignable in his work, but are a type of argument with the objects we recognize and aesthetically accept. Graeme Durant was born in 1987 in North Shields UK and currently lives and works in Newcastle upon Tyne having completed a BA in Fine Art at Northumbria University in 2009. Owen Piper often constructs replicas of existing objects in alternative materials, creating a space where the boundaries between sculpture, furniture and abstract structures are blurred. Usually employing domestic materials Piper alters and amplifies the final construction allowing interplay between scale, subject, and meaning. Owen Piper has exhibited at Tramway, Glasgow and Witte de With, Rotterdam, Holland. Recent exhibitions include a solo show at Kaiserpassage 16/21a, Karlsruhe, Germany, Inbox: Glasgow, Centro Nacional de las Artes, Mexico City, and Busco Similar at Collective Gallery, Edinburgh. Paul Merrick combines painting with sculpture, and the made with the ready-made. Investigating colour, shape and architectural arrangement whilst consistently referencing back to Painting as a subject and discipline in and of itself. 'Raised Painting' series is a continuation of his interrogation of painting and process in relation to the found object. A scrap aluminium surface is raised above the floor supported by modular utilitarian fluorescent lighting units, semi clad in sterling board to reveal the innards within reminiscent of a defunct and stripped back Donald Judd style minimal sculpture which asserts itself through challenging and beguiling the viewer to accept it as Art.   Miles Thurlow makes sculpture, drawing and site-specific work. His work is deliberately paradoxical - at once conceptually sophisticated and yet aesthetically bare. Referencing the demise of modernism and the rise of quick fix, cheap alternatives; his work investigates the architecture of modern day living and our relationship with the products of consumer culture. Recent exhibitions include Tomorrow The Future, Fishmarket Gallery Northampton, King Fisher's Tales, Union, London, Good Riddance, MOT International, London and Morro, Projecto 270, Lisbon, Portugal. Thurlow is co founder and co Director of Workplace Gallery, Gateshead with Paul Moss.

Ant Macari & Oliver Beck: "Rapid Prototyping #1: Lone Toke" The Star & Shadow Cinema, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK

Ant Macari & Oliver Beck Rapid Prototyping #1: Lone Toke Vernon & Burns Meets Lied Music The Star and Shadow Cinema, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK 23 June 2010 8:00pm - 1:00 am Mark Vernon and Barry Burns in collaboration with Luke Fowler Ant Macari & Oliver Beck Susie Green Witness the inception of a post-rock band, amidst mediated visions of stoner culture; through short lived paintings and bass lines. All mixed up and misinformed by the 'summer of love' hangover that is West Coast America. Ant Macari's work is based around drawing and writing, makes reference to tattoo art; heraldry, medieval illuminated manuscripts, esoteric knowledge, curiosa and myth. Through the recombination of sources and genres - often in the context of interventions in galleries and public spaces - Macari encourages a close reading of the cultures he references. Synergising painting with sculptural physicality, the work of Oliver Beck focuses on a tendency to treat the art object as one would a hunting trophy head. Visual artists Macari and Beck share a common interest in Americana. Specifically West Coast American punk and DIY culture from the 80s and 90s as a manifestation of escapism to youths growing up in rural and suburban areas in the South of Scotland. Macari and Beck grew up in Galashiels and Kelso respectively; they first met in Gateshead some years later while working as technicians at BALTIC CCA. Both share an interest in performance and art as a way of exploring the potential for reciprocity between image, text, sound and audience. This is their second outing which is one step closer to achieving their aim of becoming a real band. Their motto is "stay pure, stay poor."

Darren Banks: "Film Lounge The City and The Stars Programme" Stills, Edinburgh, UK

Darren Banks Film Lounge The City and The Stars Programme Stills, Edinburgh, UK http://www.stills.org 19 June - 18 July 2010 Film Lounge is Stills' new, permanent, moving image exhibition and resource space, presenting changing programmes of artists' film. Film Lounge provides a platform to experience and explore a diverse range of films by Scottish and international artists in a unique screening environment. Examining experimental approaches to film-making, the programmes respond to the ideas underpinning Stills' main exhibitions and create themed presentations of both historical and contemporary works. The five films that make up the first Film Lounge programme, explore the city as a seething network of information, within a rapidly expanding universe of details. Between them, the five artists map out physical environments, model imaginary natural systems, track the movements of the stars across the sky, blur the boundaries between science and science fiction and unpick narratives from stories and images found online. Darren Banks  Its not the End of the World 2009 Jeanne Liotta  Observando el Cielo 2007 Karen Russo   Target 090313977 2009 Semiconductor  Sound of Microclimates 2004 Thomson and Craighead Flat Earth 2007 This special Film Lounge screening will present Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair's film London Orbital, a mesmeric 76 minute documentary concerning the psychogeographical mappings of the world's largest motorway, the M25 using interviews, archival footage and voiceovers. The film journeys back into the past to arrive at the future, enroute engaging with history and the occult, excavating the past through H.G Wells - War of the Worlds and Bram Stoker - Dracula with musings on surveillance, shopping, terrorism and Essex gangsters. Image Darren Banks It's Not The End Of The World, 2007 Single Channel Video DB0041 courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery, UK

Marcus Coates: "Adaptation: Between Species" The Power Plant, Toronto, Canada

Marcus Coates Adaptation: Between Species The Power Plant, Toronto, Canada http://www.thepowerplant.org 19 June - 12 September 2010 Allora & Calzadilla, Francis Alÿs, Cory Arcangel, John Bock, Olaf Breuning, Marcus Coates, Robyn Cumming, Mark Dion, FASTWÜRMS, Michelle Williams Gamaker, Shaun Gladwell, Lucy Gunning, Nina Katchadourian, Louise Lawler, Hanna Liden, Hew Locke, Sandra Meigs, Rivane Neuenschwander and Cao Guimarães, Jeff Sonhouse, Javier Téllez Curated by Helena Reckitt, Senior Curator of Programs Responding to the contemporary desire to go "back to nature," The Power Plant's summer group exhibition highlights inter-species encounters. What happens when humans, animals and the natural world meet? What forms of communication, mis-communication, intimacy, and exchange ensue? As the industrialized world further encroaches on the natural world, species live in ever closer proximity. Yet many people feel profoundly cut off both from natural environments and from their own animal natures. Our deep longing to connect with non-human life forms is reflected in contemporary phenomena ranging from the boom in pet ownership and the widespread anthropomorphism in popular culture to the upsurge in vacations that promise to transport us to unspoiled lands. However, despite this deep-seated sense of alienation from nature, the species are in fact closely related. For instance, as Donna Haraway notes in her book When Species Meet, 90 percent of human cells are filled with the genomes of bacteria, fungi, protists, and such, with only 10 percent comprising human genomes. 'Adaptation: Between Species' explores this commonality between the species and considers the various forms of intelligence and knowledge they share. It also asks what our interactions with other species reveal about our human as well as our animal natures. Highlighting the urge to observe, touch, live with, and mimic other species, the exhibition delves into the intimate and, at times, uncanny fusions that result. From another perspective, 'Adaptation' looks at the facility that animals have in adapting to our domestic and urban environments, including the ability to "train" their masters. Coinciding with the United Nations International Year of Biodiversity, the exhibition considers how adaptation functions as a form of biological and cultural survival. 'Adaptation' also builds on Roger Caillois' 1935 essay "Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia"-which was central to Surrealist thought as well as to Jacques Lacan's theories of the Mirror Stage-to think through the spatial, aesthetic and psychological nuances of camouflage and assimilation. However, 'Adaptation' also takes a realistic view of human/non-human dynamics: it acknowledges the unbalanced and exploitative power relations that too often characterize our society's attitudes toward other life forms. This focus on the interface between humans and other species builds on a rich body of critical work that is emerging in various disciplines, from policy and law, philosophy, anthropology, science, and cultural studies, to animal rights and environmental activism. Influential studies include Giorgio Agamben's The Open: Man and Animal, Jacques Derrida's The Animal That Therefore I Am, Gilles Deleuze's The Body, the Meat and the Spirit: Becoming Animal, Richard Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, and Donna Haraway's impressive oeuvre on human/animal relations. Academic institutions are also addressing similar questions. In Ontario alone, a recent studio art class at the University of Guelph explored the phenomenon of "cultural followers"-animals that thrive within human environments-and in 2009 the Ontario College of Art & Design launched a module on Biomimicry & Design. 'Adaptation: Between Species' presents the work of leading international artists alongside that of newer figures whose work has gained international attention. Ranging in tone from reverent to decidedly iconoclastic, and created with media including photography, film/video, sculpture, and painting, works in the exhibition examine the lure of primeval states and primitive behaviours, and the urge to understand oneself as wild at heart. SUPPORT DONOR: The Jack Weinbaum Family Foundation Image Marcus Coates Journey to the Lower World (Beryl), 2004 Archival Inkjet Print 115 x 115 cm MC0013 Photography Nick David. Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery, UK

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Matt Stokes: "Right Right Now Now" Arthur Boskamp-Stiftung, M.1 Hohenlockstedt, Germany

Matt Stokes Right Right Now Now Arthur Boskamp-Stiftung M1 http://www.arthurboskamp-stiftung.de 12 June - 22 August 2010 Sven Augustijnen, Friederike Clever, Libia Castro & Ólafur Ólafsson, Heinz Peter Knes, Denise Mawila, Eline McGeorge, Gareth Moore, Roseline Rannoch, Matt Stokes Right Right Now Now focuses on artistic positions that build on journalistic, sociological, and scientific formats and strategies, this does not assimilate, but rather develops their own aesthetic description of the world. The focus of this work traces historical events, describing social and cultural contexts, but always avoiding a traditional analytical summary. What value can be added to these events, through application of artistic language? Right Right Now Now is a plea for narrative and subjective forms of expression. The potential of the featured artists is their subjective positions and often obsessive gaze. While these artists supposedly marginalise, neglected details or move selective personalities into the concentrated attention, they also open up new perspectives on the familiar. They develop independent languages and thus make history, as well as the presence of subjective perspective accessible. Curated by Katja Schroeder image Matt Stokes Real Arcadia (Never Been to Belgium), 2003 12 x archive ink-jet prints on paper 72 x 57 x 4 cm (MS0007) courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery, UK