Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Peter J. Evans: "Render10" Curtis Mayfield House (former Globe Gallery), Newcastle, UK


RENDER 10

Peter J. Evans
Thomas Gray
Oliver Marchant
Dave McNicol
John O'Shea
Travis Roush
Joey Scully
Davy Smith
Abraham Thomas

Opening: September 23rd, 2010, 7PM
Exhibition: 24 - 27 September 2010, 12PM - 7PM
Curtis Mayfield House (former Globe Gallery)
Carliol Square East Pilgrim Street
Newcastle upon Tyne
United Kingdom
NE1 6UF

Free admission
http://dm.ncl.ac.uk/render10/

Culture Lab, Newcastle University announces an exhibition of featuring creative digital media works from the Culture Lab research community.

RENDER 10 presents the forward-looking scenarios of contemporary audiovisual experimenters from the Digital Media Masters of Research course, as well as members of the Culture Lab research community. Focusing on live media, performance, expanded reality, interactive video and sound installation, the exhibition comprises a range of new projects addressing technology and media with a critical, empirical and often playful approach.

RENDER 10 is a student-led exhibition hosted and supported and organized by Digital Media at Culture Lab (Newcastle University). We strive to create opportunities for public engagement with and accessibility of research at the cusp of contemporary technological and creative practice. RENDER 10 is the second in an annual series of temporary exhibition environments created by staff and students of Culture Lab.

Digital technologies are extensions not only of our physicality but also of our imagination, continuously reshaping our relationships with the outside world, addressing. With the works on display RENDER 10, now intimate technologies of our present and future everyday are to be seen at their most creative, inventive, and often critical. This years' exhibition includes works specifically focused to issues of memory, materiality, time, as well as the limits and delimitations of human activity and possibility. 
Culture Lab is a unique research infrastructure providing an environment for academics and practitioners working beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries. Culture Lab promotes socially and economically valuable synergies with artists, creative industries, cultural and scientific institutions and the development of innovative research with digital tools.

image:

Peter J. Evans
Für Immer, 2010
Birch ply, ash, oak, steel, drawing table, blackboard paint, chalk, felt, transmission belts, pulleys, stepper motors, stepper drivers, power supply, solenoid, custom spring, breadboard, Arduino, steel cable gland, switch, cabling, screws and glue.
(PJE0076)
Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery
With thanks to Logotech Display Solutions, Dr J.H.Evans, Tim Knapen, Kyle McDonald, Tom Schofield, Joey Scully, & Robert E. Taylor
   

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Laura Lancaster: "New Work" Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle, UK


Laura Lancaster

Solo Exhibition
Preview 23rd September 6pm - 8pm
24 September 2010 - 30 January 2011

Laing Art Gallery
New Bridge Street
Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 8AG
www.twmuseums.org.uk/laing

For her first UK museum solo exhibition Laura Lancaster presents an ambitious new body of work including an installation comprising of 144 watercolour paintings and a series of new oil paintings and collages.

image:

Laura Lancaster
Untitled, 2010
Oil on board
51.5 x 61 cm, 20 1/4 x 24 1/8 in
(LL0385)
Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery
   

Friday, September 17, 2010

Marcus Coates: "Journey to the Lower World" Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool Biennial, UK


Journey to the Lower World

Walker Art Gallery
National Museums Liverpool
William Brown Street
Liverpool L3 8EL

17 September - 28 November 2010

Journey to the Lower World, screening at the Walker Art Gallery, is a recent purchase made through the Contemporary Art Society's Acquisitions Scheme. Taking place within the gallery amongst the Walker Collection, this artists' talk/performance will mark the screening of the work and its' introduction in to the internationally reknowned collection.

This work originates from Further Up in the Air, a residency programme for artists in Liverpool's Sheil Park estate in 2003. In the film, residents from Linosa Close, a tower block awaiting demolition, watch with a mixture of anxiety, faith and good humour as Coates performs a shamanic ritual. Dressed in a deer skin and uttering eerie, animalistic grunts, he attempts to answer the emotive question put to him by his audience: "Do we have a protector for this site? What is it?"

Journey to the Lower World will be on display at the Walker Art Gallery during the Liverpool Biennial (17 Sept to 28 November 2010).


image:

Marcus Coates
Journey to the Lower World (Rooftop Preparation), 2004
Archival Inkjet Print
115 x 163 cms
45.31 x 64.22 inches
(MC0009)
Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery

   

Joe Clark: "New Contemporaries 2010" A Foundation, Liverpool Biennial, UK


New Contemporaries 2010 sponsored by Bloomberg

A Foundation
67 Greenland Street
Liverpool L1 OBY

18 September - 13 November 2010

Selectors: Gabriel Kuri, Mark Leckey and Dawn Mellor.

Featuring: Greta Alfaro, Holly Antrum, Caline Aoun, Johann Arens, Ed Atkins, Nick Bailey, Nathan Barlex, Melis van den Berg, Alice Browne, Amir Chasson, Joe Clark, Matthew Coombes, Patrick Coyle, Keren Dee, Sophie Eagle, Claas Gutsch, Guy Haddon-Grant, Jessica Harris, Rowena Harris, Emma Hart, Darren Harvey-Regan, Raphael Hefti, Ian Homerston, Chris Shaw Hughes, Rowena Hughes, Vasileios Kantas, Krister Klassman, Sam Knowles, Alec Kronacker, Agnieszka Kucharko, Dan Lichtman, Agata Madejska, Russell Maurice, Ella McCartney, Nick Mobbs, Murray O’Grady, Chloe Ostmo, Siôn Parkinson, Peles Empire, Laure Prouvost, Kristian de la Riva, Kiwoun Shin, Theodoros Stamatogiannis, Sue Tarbitten, Edward Thomasson, Naomi Uchida, Mark Walker, Pablo Wendel, Joel Wyllie.


New Contemporaries is proud to announce it will return to A Foundation, Liverpool, this autumn. Opening on the 18 September and featuring the work of 49 artists across a range of media, the exhibition provides a unique opportunity to engage with new practice and ideas from across the UK.

Established in 1949, New Contemporaries is an important and highly regarded annual initiative that gives art students and recent graduates essential support and recognition at a crucial stage in their development through a high-profile exhibition.

Participants are selected by a panel comprised of influential arts figures, predominantly artists - often who have themselves previously been a part of New Contemporaries - and through a rigorous process that is open, fair and democratic.

“Since the Liverpool Biennial began in the year 2000, New Contemporaries has always launched at the A Foundation. This year, 2010, we are delighted to be continuing this tradition with such a vibrant and vital selection of artists who all remind us how visual art can be.” — Rebecca Heald, Director, New Contemporaries

Exhibition continues its tour to the ICA, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 26 November 2010 – 16 January 2011

image:

Joe Clark
Somewhere in West Virginia, 2009
Interactive Installation: Custom Electronics in Console Housing, Micro-Controller (Arduino), Computer, Data-Projector, Projection Screen, Firewire Camera, Wood, Buckets, Hose, Pond Pump, Black Velvet and Angle-Poise Lamp.
1.5 x 1.5m
(JCL0075)
Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery
   

Thursday, September 16, 2010

Matt Stokes: "Voice Hand Hammer Fire" Works Projects, Bristol, UK.


Voice Hand Hammer Fire
18 September - 23rd October 2010
Works Projects
Sydney Row
Bristol BS1 6UU

Matt Stokes constructs investigations into alternative movements and informal social groupings that often bind together audiences from disparate or unexpected backgrounds. Music subcultures have been central to the development of his recent projects, which have focused on their ability to shape lifestyle, beliefs, and create collective identity. Stokes' works begin with research and a process of immersing himself into the social structures of the scene he is working with, which result in films, installations and event-based works that hold collaboration and shared authorship at the centre of both their structure and philosophy.

For Independent State, produced by Foreground in Frome, Somerset last summer, Stokes was commissioned to create a work that would be made directly with members of the local community to be inserted into the town's Carnival. Stokes worked with the thriving local punk/hardcore music scene to conceive of a sculpture which would pay homage to the energy and self-image of a genre that might be thought of as a surprising cultural output for a small Somerset town. To realize the ideas of the fans and bands Stokes identified a distinctly separate group with which to collaborate. He recruited local blacksmiths and metalworkers to actualise the idiosyncratic design - an organic growth of conjoined icosahedrons welded from steel-plate, and bound together with steel rope forged by the blacksmiths and artist. The work was initiated during a weekend-long Forge-in Festival at which visitors could watch the blacksmiths at work, alongside the clamor of the live performances by local hardcore bands.
Drawing on Frome's heritage of skilled metal-working, the resulting crystalline form was put on public display for a single evening - paraded in the Carnival procession on a trailer towed by a black Mitsubishi Warrior pick-up truck to a hardcore soundtrack, and escorted by musicians and fans of the genre, creating a caustic rupture between the majorettes and kooky, decorated floats.

Presenting the work for the first time within a gallery environment, the exhibition at works projects provides another opportunity to see one of Stokes most unique projects - an abstract sculptural symbol for the rhizomic nature of collaborative creativity.

image:
Matt Stokes
Voice | Hand | Hammer | Fire, 2009
Courtesy of the Artist and Workplace Gallery, UK
MS0043

   

Monday, September 13, 2010

Catherine Bertola & Matt Stokes: "New Prints from Northern Print" Northern Print, Newcastle, UK





New Prints from Northern Print…

Catherine Bertola I Cullinan Richards I Rachel Gross I James Hutchinson I Matt Stokes
 
Contemporary prints on paper created at Northern Print over the last 12 months


9th September - 4th November


http://www.northernprint.org.uk



image:

Catherine Bertola

Blue Babylonica

2009
Screen printed wallpaper
Commission for National Museum of Wales, Cardiff
CB0058
Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery, UK

Tuesday, September 07, 2010

Richard Rigg - Preview: Friday 10th September, 6-9pm


Richard Rigg


Holography

11th September - 9th October 2010                       
Tuesday - Saturday, 11am - 5pm
(or by appointment)

Preview: Friday 10th September, 6 - 9pm

Workplace Gallery is pleased to present Holography our first solo exhibition of work by Richard Rigg.

Richard Rigg's sculptures reproduce and manipulate everyday objects, transforming them into reflexive propositions and theoretical paradoxes. Employing culturally resonant objects that signify the foundations of our civilization through drawing upon the histories of science, mathematics and literature, Rigg pitches reason against itself, elegantly and iconoclastically undermining our own rational basis, yet suggesting an ulterior route. Rigg's reductive, minimal works open up potential meanings and ontological possibilities. Attempts to pin the works down into an exact reading are thwarted through their elliptical conceptualism. In this work there is a direct meeting of it's beginning, with its end.

In this new body of work Rigg explores ideas of time and place, challenging us to consider something that exists just beyond our perception, at the very edge of possibilities. I forgot what was said when we were outside, stood empty, now without those words I fell back, consists of two full size telegraph poles stood upright in the stairwell of the gallery, the telephone line hanging loosely between them becoming the memorial of a brief excerpt of conversation between the artist and an anonymous but significant other. The title of the work taken from the disjointed notes scribbled down by the artist during the call in an attempt to remember. Latent Morning is a semi-folded mirror image replica of one the original sash windows in the attic space of The Old Post Office, Workplace Gallery's late 19th century location. Installed against the wall and floor, and out of sight of the original the new window becomes a distant echo of its subject. Referencing a shaft of light projected on a wall opposite, Latent Morning evokes a sense of quiet ennui, reminiscent of those occasional still moments of heightened perception before thought and responsibilities have come to mind. Some rest on 6 occasions (February View) is a line of three identical double backed ash chairs that describe the impossible position of six seats taking the place of three. The hybrid form is based on the simple functional designs of Danish designer Børge Mogensen and his contemporaries, an inverted play on the rationality of the functionalist aesthetics they commonly held. This attempt to refer to an interpretation of an aspect of experience and the problems associated with it is evident in The Fort was there before it was built, a cyanotype print of the shadow of a complex mathematical non-alternating amphichiral knot with 15 crossings, impossible to fathom when rendered in its two dimensions. In a group of 3 works Rigg has coerced the gallery building to be complicit in a deception. Wall Hanging is a negative cast of a Victorian coat hook set into the gallery wall, in a deadpan parody of the use of the void in 20th century abstract sculpture Wall Hanging implies the hanging of the gallery on the work playfully elevating the status of the architecture surrounding the to the work itself. This One, The Next, and The One After That is a drip of water released precisely every minute from a handmade quartz clock with a suspended water tank mechanism, installed in the ceiling above. The Broken Appearance of the Floor consists of two oars improbably poised in the position of rowing connoting the absence of both rowing boat and oarsman, the blades seemingly dipped into the floor, as they propel nothing, no-where. This sense of poetic absence is also present in Cloth arranged to look like a Jacket (Self Portrait) the title descriptively candid of an anti-heroic sculptural strategy to depict a jacket left where dropped on the floor, the imagistic isolation of this reproduction and admission of materiality and process enabling the work to gain metaphorical weight through its surrogacy for the real thing. In The Gate Black two identical tables instantly reminiscent of school furniture occupy the same space with one the 'right' way up and the other on its side. A wax tablet held together with a broken arrow adjoins the tables the work exploring the origin and evolution of things by connecting objects both linguistically and formally. Through the isolation and manipulation of everyday objects, faithfully reproduced or dissected, Rigg' collapses and conflates function through reductive and apophatic logic, eliciting poetic meaning by the implication of latent usage or absence.

Richard Rigg was born in Penrith, Cumbria in 1980 and graduated from Newcastle University in 2005. Earlier in 2010 Workplace Gallery staged Ballade op.23 (without words) a performance in which a classical pianist played a Chopin recital using Rigg's 2007 work Piano, a piano entirely tuned to Middle C. Rigg is currently showing in Cage Mix: Sculpture & Sound at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead. Other recent and previous exhibitions include The Glass Delusion at The National Glass Centre, Sunderland, Suns Neither Rise Nor Set at Royal College of Art, London, Morphic Resonance at PSL, Leeds, Explum 09 in Murica, Spain, TOMORROW THE FUTURE at Fishmarket Gallery, Northampton, Draw a Line, Follow it at Allenheads Contemporary Arts, King Fisher's Tales at Union Gallery, London, Traumaqueen in Athens, Greece, Moved at Workplace Gallery, Gateshead, Textual Healing at Embassy Gallery, Edinburgh, Formal Dining at Hales Gallery, London, and Everything Must Go Part 1 at Workplace Gallery, Gateshead. In 2009 Workplace Gallery presented Rigg's work at Zoo Art Fair, London where he was also selected to show Two Writing Desks, False Drawer 2009 as a solo work in the curated section. He lives and works in Newcastle.

Workplace is a hybrid contemporary art organisation founded and directed by artists Paul Moss and Miles Thurlow. Based in Gateshead UK, Workplace Gallery represents a portfolio of emerging and established artists through the gallery programme, curatorial projects and international art fairs. Workplace Gallery opened in 2005 at 34 Ellison Street, Gateshead - part of Trinity Square Shopping Centre particularly noted for its iconic Brutalist car park designed by architect Rodney Gordon for the Owen Luder Partnership, which featured as a key location in Mike Hodges 1971 cult British gangster film Get Carter starring Michael Caine. Since the original gallery was demolished in 2008 as part of the planned regeneration of Gateshead Town Centre, Workplace Gallery has relocated to The Old Post Office in Gateshead; a listed 19th Century red brick building built upon the site of the house that the important British artist, engraver and naturalist Thomas Bewick (1753-1828) lived and died. The next exhibition at Workplace Gallery will be a solo exhibition of new work by Laura Lancaster opening on 15th October 2010.

To celebrate the opening of Holography please join us afterwards at Central Bar in Gateshead.

Kindly supported by:

   

Friday, September 03, 2010

Marcus Coates: "Questions & Answers" Kate MacGarry Gallery, London, UK


Compound Lenses, 2010, prescription glasses, insulation tape.Image courtesy Milton Keynes Gallery.

3 September - 10 October 2010

Private view Thursday 2 September 2010, 18.00 - 20.00

Marcus Coates is renowned for his shamanic performances, where a community or an individual is invited to ask difficult questions pertaining to their own predicament, from the deeply personal to the broadly political. Coates summons answers by communing with an animal kingdom that is part imagined, part scientifically observed. In costume and literally entranced, he relates the nature of this host of species and their attendant attributes; and from these narratives he extracts analogies, identifies thought patterns and discerns clues to a wider understanding.

For his first exhibition at the gallery, Coates has absented himself from the gallery, displaying only the material peripherals of these performances. We are presented with the questions asked and answers offered, as well as the costumes and objects used to facilitate the exchange, displayed like anthropological artefacts of a strangely familiar culture. The questions and answers are translated and transcribed during each performance, the handwriting indicating a sense of urgency behind each social, political or personal problem addressed. The objects have been collected, adapted and reused over years, bridging the utilitarian and the symbolic, the everyday and the mythical. Several pairs of glasses bound together become a mask and a mode of seeing beyond the immediate; lemon juice produces a soured, contorted face, which, in some shamanic traditions, increases the chance of admittance to the grotesque realm of the spirits.

Participants in these performances may or may not believe in Coates’s abilities as a transcendental shaman – the point is not so much the validity of his claims, but the discussion they elicit. With such pressing issues as anorexia and war on participants’ agendas, it can be the naïve outsider who asks the obvious, but useful, questions. And it is Coates’s recourse to the world of animals that demarcates an alternative space, enabling the demystification of social relations, imaginative speculation on causes and the dramatic resolution of enduring problems.

MARCUS COATES born 1968 in London, lives and works in London.
 
Upcoming and current exhibitions include Skills Exchange: Urban Transformation and the Politics of Care, a project for the Process Room at the Serpentine Gallery, London, 2011; Tokyo Art Meeting Transformation, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (October 2010 - January 2011) and new acquisitions at Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. Recent solo exhibitions include Psychopomp, Milton Keynes Gallery, 2010, Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo and Kunsthalle Zurich (both 2009) and screenings at Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2007. Coates's work was also included in The Beauty of Distance - Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age, 17th Biennale of Sydney, 2010; Altermodern, Tate Triennial, 2008, and British Art Show 6, 2005.