Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Joe Clark: "Marrakech Biennale" Marrakech, Morocco


Joe Clark The Blue of the Distance, 2012. Steel, bike components, pair of slides and projectors, tarpaulin, ice. Installation view Marrakech Bienniale

Higher Atlas

29th February - 3rd June 2012
Theatre Royale
http://www.higheratlas.org/about/

Curated by Carson Chan and Nadim Samman

Alex Schweder La & Khadija Carroll La
Alexander Ponomarev
Andrew Ranville
Christopher Mayo
CocoRosie (Bianca Casady, Sierra Casady)
Ethan Hayes-Chute
Eva Grubinger
Faouzi Laatiris
Florian & Michael Quistrebert
Gideon Lewis-Kraus
Hadley Maxwell
Hassan Darsi
Joe Clark
Jon Nash
Juliana Cerqueira Leite
Juergen Mayer H.
Katarzyna Przezwańska
Katia Kameli
Leung Chi Wo
Luca Pozzi
Matthew Stone & Phoebe Collings-James
Megumi Matsubara
Pascale Marthine Tayou
Roger Hiorns
Sinta Werner
Sophie Erlund
Tue Greenfort
Younes Baba-Ali

In 2004 with the rise of global tensions, Vanessa Branson envisioned a cultural festival that would address social issues through the arts, using them as a vehicle for debate and discussion and to build bridges between diverse ideologies. Marrakech Biennale would become a celebration of creativity in a city that has been the focus of artistic exploration for centuries but with limited emphasis on contemporary art. Begining in 2005, as a gathering of arts enthusiasts who organized literary events and exhibitions. Marrakech Biennale has grown to become an internationally recognised biennale with a thriving visual arts, film and literature programme. The festival's role has evolved along with the climate of the times. With today's events in North Africa, the organization's goals could not be more pertinent for the cultural identity of the region. This festival aims to show the outside world that Morocco is an open society that encourages freedom of expression and debate, as well as sponsoring significant and lasting benefits for the area and its inhabitants, socially, economically and culturally.


Courtesy the Artist and Workplace Gallery

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Workplace Gallery at The Armory Show 2012, Solo Presentation by Laura Lancaster


Image: Laura Lancaster Golum II, 2012, Oil on Linen, 230 x 180 cm (91 x 71 Inches) Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery

Workplace Gallery is pleased to present a solo booth of new painting by


Laura Lancaster


Booth 512 / Pier 94
The Armory Show 2012
Twelfth Avenue at 55th Street
New York, USA

8th - 11th March 2012
http://www.thearmoryshow.com

for a preview of available works please email: info@workplacegallery.co.uk
   

Friday, February 24, 2012

Sophie Lisa Beresford: "Shit Show" Malgras Naudet, Manchester, UK


Image: Sophie Lisa Beresford My Culture Is Beautiful, 2009, Single Channel Video 7 min 49 sec 

SHIT SHOW
An exhibition about exhibitions

Preview 24th February 6 - 8 pm
25th February - 24th March 2012
Malgras|Naudet
Manchester

George Barber
BAZ
Sophie Lisa Bereford
Helen Brown
Noel Clueit
Dave Evans
Toby Huddlestone
David Mackintosh
Keith Maclsaac
David Osbaldestone
Rebecca Sitar
Matthew Stock
Bedwyr Williams


Courtesy the Artist and Workplace Gallery
    

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Laura Lancaster: "A Private Affair" Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston, UK


A Private Affair: Personal Collections of Contemporary Art

Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston, UK

28th January - 5th May 2012

http://www.harrismuseum.org.uk/current-exhibitions/475-a-private-affair-personal-collections-of-contemporary-art.html

A Private Affair: Personal Collections of Contemporary Art  tells the personal stories behind private collections of contemporary art and includes work from emerging northern artists, to internationally recognised artists. The exhibition aims to explore the background behind individual collections; why do individuals collect contemporary art, what influences decisions about what to collect, how do individuals and their families live with the art, and do relationships with artworks change over time?

A Private Affair has been curated in collaboration with Mark Doyle, Head of Collector Development, Contemporary Art Society North West, and will be opened by Paul Hobson, Director of the Contemporary Art Society.

image:

Laura Lancaster
Untitled, 2008
Oil on Board
21 x 30 cm
Private Collection
   

Marcus Coates: "Le silence des bêtes/Hors Pistes" Pompidou Centre, Paris


Hors Pistes

January 27 to February 12. Open from 11 am to 9 pm. Closed on Tuesdays.

http://www.centrepompidou.fr/horspistes2012
Centre Pompidou
Hors Pistes
75191 Paris CEDEX 04
France

Since 2006, Hors Pistes has pursued its passion for diversity of forms in contemporary moving images. Screenings, performances, video installations, ephemeral web images: the event offers an international selection of these forms. Hors Pistes exists to showcase visual works investigating the world we live in by challenging narrative forms and remapping the borders between film genres (fiction, documentary, essay...).

In the cinemas of the Centre Pompidou:

An international selection of films and videos by 20 artists, whose innovative works left their mark on last year: Gabriel Abrantes, Mauro Andrizzi, Herman Asselberghs, Pascale Bodet, Erik Bünger, Salma Cheddadi, Phil Collins, Teboho Edkins, Hala Elkoussy, Pierric Favret & Roman Scrittori, Flatform, Dominic Gagnon, Andrew Kötting, Christelle Lheureux, Natasha Mendonca, Valérie Mrejen et Bertrand Schefer, Provmyza.
Their films and videos challeng narrative forms and remap the borders between film genres (fiction, documentary, essay...). The films are presented by the artists.

In the lower floor of the Centre Pompidou:

An exhibition around the theme 'animal' called 'Le silence des bêtes' (this name is the title of the famous book by the writer and philosopher Elisabeth de Fontenay). It will take place in the Forum -1 (underground) of the Centre Pompidou: lectures and performances each evening (Jean-Christophe Bailly, Marcela Iacub, Marcus Coates, Michael Fliri, Vincent Epplay…), installations, video programs (Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Karen Knorr, Juliette Fontaine...)

Two Parisian venues are partners of this exhibition: the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature and the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, where some screenings, lectures, an exhibition will be presented (Ariane Michel and Philippe Descola, Armin Linke accompanied by Bruno Latour, Persijn Broersen and Margit Lukács, Marie Voignier, ...)
   

Catherine Bertola: "Swept Away. Dust, Ashes, and Dirt in Contemporary Art and Design" at Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), New York USA


Swept Away: Dust, Ashes, and Dirt in Contemporary Art and Design

Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), New York USA

7th Februrary - 12th August 2012

http://collections.madmuseum.org/html/exhibitions/551.html

Swept Away: Dust, Ashes, and Dirt in Contemporary Art and Design the first exhibition of its scope to examine the artistic potential of ephemeral materials, will showcase the work of 25 international artists who transform dust, ash, and dirt into intricate and poignantly beautiful installations, sculptures, paintings, photographs, and performances. The 34 featured works-13 of which have been commissioned specifically for the exhibition-are created through the collection, removal, and reconstitution of ephemeral matter, exposing, in many cases, the debris of human existence. On view from February 7 through August 12, 2012 at the Museum of Arts and Design, the exhibition will include a series of "live" installations that will allow museumgoers to interact with artists and their works.

Swept Away is organized by William and Mildred Lasdon Chief Curator David McFadden as part of MAD's groundbreaking Materials and Process exhibition series, which explores wide-ranging artistic approaches to traditional and unusual materials, including lace, paper, organic materials and once living objects, and miniatures. The exhibition investigates how humble, overlooked, and discarded materials can be altered, manipulated, and recombined into works which address such issues as the transient nature of art and life, quality and content of memory, issues of loss and disintegration, and the detritus of human life. Swept Away features works of art by contemporary artists from around the world, including Kim Abeles (U.S.), Catherine Bertola (U.K.), James Croak (U.S.), Phoebe Cummings (U.K.), Zhang Huan (China), Maskull Lasserre (Canada), Alexandre Orion (Brazil), Jim Dingilian (U.S.), Su Zhiquang (China), Vik Muniz (U.S.), and Antonio Riello (Italy).

Swept Away Projects, an extension of the show opening on March 6, will include commissioned installations, where artists will create new works in the galleries in front of the public. The "live" installations will allow audiences to experience the artistic process and interact with artists and their dust, dirt, sugar, and sand creations. In some instances, visitors will sweep away the installations by walking through and touching them, accelerating the temporality of these artists' output.

"Swept Away underscores the tremendous power of the creative process in transforming even the most modest of materials into works of art that challenge our perceptions of and relation to the surrounding environment," says Holly Hotchner, MAD's Nanette L. Laitman Director. "The fragility and fleeting nature of these works provides a singular opportunity to reexamine the relationship between artist and artwork, the defining attributes of a work of art, and extends MAD's previous explorations of unusual materials and innovative artistic processes."

"The artists in Swept Away resurrect and rearrange the neglected and castoff materials of our daily lives, and in doing so force us to reconsider their underlying associations," says Chief Curator McFadden. "More than elaborately crafted and designed works of art, the sculptures, installations, and performances featured in the exhibition heighten our awareness of time, place, memory, and emotion."

Swept Away: Dust, Ashes, and Dirt in Contemporary Art and Design explores the intersection of materials and techniques as viewed through the lens of contemporary art and design as part of a series of MAD exhibitions that include Radical Lace and Subversive Knitting (2007); Second Lives: Remixing the Ordinary (2008); Slash: Paper Under the Knife (2009); Dead or Alive: Nature Becomes Art (2010); and Otherworldly: Optical Delusions and Small Realities (2011).

Featured artists include:

• Renowned British artist Andy Goldsworthy, known for creating site- specific sculptures by utilizing natural and organic materials such as mud, rocks, twigs, and snow, which he then photographs-will exhibit a series of 13 photographs.

British artist Catherine Bertola whose site-specific work focuses on the experience of memory and loss. She researches the users and/or inhabitants of an installation space and collects its dust, much of which is human hair and skin cells, over the course of several months. Her artistic process culminates in the creation of an honorific pattern made of the collected dust and placed on the walls or floors of the space. Bertola will create a new work for Swept Awaymade from dust collected at MAD.

• American artist Kim Abeles explores urban sprawl and social issues in her The Smog Collector series. Abeles masks out designs on unfired porcelain plates and linen tablecloths and allows the smog of Los Angeles to fill in the pattern. Swept Away will feature a new work by Abeles.

• American artist James Croak creates sculptures of human figures, animals, and furniture from unfired dirt, expressing both a physicality and fragility. For Swept Away, he is recreating a modernist office space with two life-size figures made entirely of unfired dirt. This will be his first work of installation art.

• Brazilian artist Alexandre Orion will present a video of the creation and destruction of his soot "reverse" graffiti. The video documents Orion wiping away soot along a stretch of São Paulo's traffic tunnels to create a stunning "ossuary" of human skulls, a work created over 17 nights, and eventually censored by the police by being washed away with water hoses.

• American artist Jim Dingilian creates intricate nature and urban scenes inside glass bottles by smoking them and wiping away the ash with skewers and needles. The landscapes are built up through a series of smokings and have a haunting, three-dimensional quality. Dingilian will present nine smoked bottles in the exhibition.

• The London-based Anglo/Dutch team of Tim Simpson and Sarah van Gameren, known asGlithero, is dedicated to exploring and presenting the beauty of the moment of creation. Glithero has produced an installation involving a flammable paint they specially developed with a chemist. They are presenting a similar video in Swept Away.

Swept Away Projects will showcase works by:

• German artist Elvira Wersche is known for her polychrome, Islamic inspired, floor paintings made from sand and earth collected from over 600 locations around the globe, including holy sites, places of pilgrimage, mountains with temples, sacred caves. Shortly after the work is completed, Wersche invites dancers to erase the carefully constructed pattern in a dazzling final performance.

• Chinese-born Cui Fei will be creating a site-specific installation using sand as her medium and the evolution of Chinese characters as her inspiration. Visitors will be able to watch the installation that will take place over the course of several days. Her work will be on view for the entire duration of Swept Away Projects.

• Croatian artist Igor Eškinja will create a large "Dust Carpet," a floor covering using dust collected over the period of several months by the maintenance team at MAD. Here the dust, consisting of shedding skin cells, hair, and clothing fibers from hundreds of anonymous visitors, will be exposed "in plain sight." The installation will take four days, and viewers will be allowed to watch from beginning to end.

• Using stencils, British artist Linda Florence will cover MAD Project's gallery floor with an elaborate pattern made in chalk. Later in the exhibition, dancers will perform on the chalk floor, rhythmically eradicating the intricate pattern, capturing and revealing traces often unnoticed.

CATALOGUE

Swept Away will be accompanied by a 136-page, fully illustrated catalogue, which includes an essay by Chief Curator David McFadden. A complete set of artist biographies and statements will be included along with images of the artists' works.

ABOUT THE MUSEUM OF ARTS AND DESIGN

The Museum of Arts and Design explores the blur zone between art, design, and craft today. The Museum focuses on contemporary creativity and the ways in which artists and designers from around the world transform materials through processes ranging from the artisanal to digital. The Museum's exhibition program explores and illuminates issues and ideas, highlights creativity and craftsmanship, and celebrates the limitless potential of materials and techniques when used by gifted and innovative artists. MAD's permanent collection is global in scope and focuses on art, craft, and design from 1950 to the present day. At the center of the Museum's mission is education. The Museum's dynamic new facility features classrooms and studios for master classes, seminars, and workshops for students, families, and adults. Three open artist studios engage visitors in the creative processes of artists at work and enhance the exhibition programs. Lectures, films, performances, and symposia related to the Museum's collection and topical subjects affecting the world of contemporary art, craft, and design are held in a renovated 144-seat auditorium.
   

Friday, February 10, 2012

Darren Banks, Laura Lancaster, Rachel Lancaster: "Omnia Mea Mecum Porto: Works on Paper/ Arbeiten auf Papier" kotti-shop, Berlin, Germany


Image: Darren Banks Blob 17, 2008, Ink on Paper 
 
 

Omnia Mea Mecum Porto: works on paper

Preview 10th Feb 2012

10th - 16th February 2012
12:00 - 16:00 hrs
Darren Banks
Nisha Duggal
Jorn Ebner
Tim Greaves
Susie Green
Annette Knol
Laura Lancaster
Rachel Lancaster

Michael Mulvihill
Narbi Price
Christopher Rollen
Flora Whiteley
    

Tuesday, February 07, 2012

Cath Campbell "Ideal Mexico" Preview - Friday 10th February, 6-9pm at Workplace Gallery


Image: Cath Campbell, And we said nothing, all of the day (detail), 2012, Photographic Prints, Shelf, Dimensions Variable. Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery, UK.

 

Cath Campbell

Ideal Mexico

Preview: Friday 10th February 2012 , 6 - 9pm

Exhibition continues:
11th February - 17th March 2012
Tuesday - Saturday, 11am - 5pm
(or by appointment)

Workplace Gallery are pleased to announce Ideal Mexico our first solo exhibition by Cath Campbell.

Campbell's new work focuses on the world portrayed and offered by the proliferation of ubiquitous upmarket lifestyle and travel guides. Image-rich, and with a carefully selected colour palette, these publications are intelligently illustrated employing cool architectural photography with tautly corrected perspective free of lens distortion. Such images tap into our knowledge both of art (via Edward Hopper and Bernd and Hilla Becher) and of cinema. These guides serve as a golden ticket enabling us to project our lives into places that we will probably never visit, with the secondary function that they look good on our bookshelves, advertising our cosmopolitan worldliness in a compact row of pantone neatness.

In Hotel Series Campbell carefully collages tiny circles cut directly from images of hotel interiors from different cities. Each dot is placed on white paper in the same layout as the original photograph and in each case Campbell has only selected one blue, one yellow, two browns, and a black; creating a new reading of these photographs through her ambiguously seductive minimal constellations that reflect upon the banal nature of international interior design.

In stark contrast to these delicate collages Campbell has created a series of dramatically enlarged found images which have been UV printed onto powder coated aluminium; titled For I have known them all already, known them all # 1-6. Each image, selected from a travel guide has then been rephotographed by Campbell and then almost entirely removed to leave an aperture surrounded by a the white margins of the publication page and a small border of abstract colour and shape that relates more to the history of abstract painting than to the photographic source.

This relentless interrogation of and intervention into such a specific source and subject matter is continued in an untitled series of works that again sit deliberately between contemporary art's disciplines and conventions. Photographic images are again printed onto aluminium however this time Campbell has aggressively obliterated each image entirely with spray paint limiting our engagement with the photograph by rendering it as a subtle ghost image only just visible through the painted surface.

Cath Campbell's practice to date is dominated by an ongoing enquiry into the status, meaning and fabric of architecture and public space. Taking Modernism as a point of departure Campbell has consistently re-appropriated architectural imagery to create works that reinvent our associations with the built environment. And we said nothing, all the day continues this analysis from the privacy of her dining room table. The work is an ongoing unlimited series of photographs that are presented stacked and leant along a narrow shelf. Taking it's title from a line in John Donne's poem The Ecstasy each photograph is of another photograph chosen as if Campbell is a tourist looking around the city portrayed, taking snaps of things that catch her eye. These Lo-Fi images, which often include the reflection or shadow of Campbell and her Camera on the original photograph, serve to undermine the authoritarian status assumed by the original imagery.

Alongside these photographic works, Campbell presents a series of new sculptures continuing her interest in re-creating found architecture as scale models. Information gleaned from anonymous Google images is used to piece together three-dimensional forms from two dimensional images, allowing an element of editing, adding and deleting to create an object that acts as a credible architectural form.

Ideal Mexico, a chance but fitting title taken from the model name of the old central heating boilers in the gallery building, invites us to question the relationship between reality, desire, and experience; challenging the superficiality and formality of our insatiable appetite for images depicting and describing how our lives could be in an ideal world.

Cath Campbell was born in 1972 in Ilkeston, UK. She lives and works in Newcastle, UK.

Workplace Gallery was founded in 2005 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 is currently at The Old Post Office, Gateshead; a listed 19th Century red brick building built upon the site where the important British artist, engraver and naturalist Thomas Bewick (1753-1828) lived and died.

Kindly supported by

   

Thursday, February 02, 2012

Rachel Lancaster: "Step Sequence: Treacle" pixel.palace, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK


Image: Rachel Lancaster (work in progress) Treacle, 2011 video installation
 
 
Step Sequence: Treacle

2nd Feb - 29th Mar, 2012
Treacle is a new installation by Rachel Lancaster. Inspired by the language of cinema, Lancaster's work explores the interplay between reality and illusion. Using ordinary household items to create Foley sound effects and moving image, Treacle playfully constructs a sense of disorientation and mystery in the central stairwell at Tyneside Cinema.

Rachel Lancaster was one of the Pixel Pallace Artists in Residence at the Tyneside Cinema in Autumn 2011.