Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Marcus Coates: 'Vocal Folds' Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, Australia





Image: Marcus Coates Dawn Chorus, 2007 14 Channel HD Video Installation, (MC0015) Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery, UK
Vocal Folds

MANON DE BOER (NL)
MARCUS COATES (UK)
VALIE EXPORT (AUT)

Curated by JACQUELINE DOUGHTY

Gertrude Contemporary
21.06.13 – 20.07.13

Gertrude Contemporary is pleased to present Vocal Folds. This exhibition of video installations by three influential international artists explores the physical and spatial qualities of the voice, moving beyond language and melody into the material and embodied. The voice articulates language and the transmission of abstractions, emotion and ideas, but it is also a physical product of the lungs, vocal chords, tongue and lips. In Vocal Folds the voice is both embodied and disembodied, sculptural material and conceptual conduit.

A listening library accompanying the exhibition presents an eclectic mix of recordings from the fields of experimental music and improvisational performance. Situating the exhibition within a wider context of expanded vocal and sound poetry practice, these recordings by iconic figures such as Meredith Monk (USA) and Henri Chopin (France) will be presented alongside more recent practitioners such as Jaap Blonk (Netherlands), Fatima Miranda (Spain) and the Sydney-based sound poet Amanda Stewart.

Live events in the gallery by Melbourne performers will include appearances by Jenny Barnes, Carolyn Connors, Dirk de Bruyn, Alice Hui-Sheng Chang, Tarquin Manek, Christopher LG Hill and Alex Vivian. These performers push the voice beyond its role as a vehicle for speech and melody, breaking language down into its smallest components, or doing away with it altogether to take the voice into a realm of growls, hisses, clicks, gurgles and wheezes that situate the voice firmly within the body and assert its origins in the breath.

Breath and voice are often characterized as immaterial and lacking in substance, but in the work of Dutch artist Manon de Boer they are revealed as strongly bodily.  Her video work one, two, many, recently exhibited at DOCUMENTA 13, is made up of three performances which explore the existential space of the voice and its relationship to the body and the listener. In one segment the flautist Michael Schmid performs a solo composition of circular breathing that builds in intensity,  uninterrupted for nine minutes, and in which his strain embodies the physicality of breath.

The major, multi-screen video installation Dawn Chorus by British artist Marcus Coates sees 14 people interrupt their quiet moments with spontaneous birdsong. Coates, who explores contemporary shamanism and our connection to the natural world, filmed performers mimicking the slowed down field recordings of bird calls, translating the sounds of a language incomprehensible to us into abstract song. The footage was then sped up so that the human-bird sounds recall the original avian dawn chorus. The performers' quickened movements - impossibly fast breath, facial twitches - return the voice to the physical body.

Valie Export, the iconic and provocative Austrian artist, takes us right to the origin of the voice in her video I turn over the pictures of my voice in my head, with footage from a performance in which the artist inserted a laryngoscope into her larynx and filmed the contractions of her vocal cords as she reads a text. In this monologue she proposes that the voice is neither body or language, but a sign.

200 GERTRUDE STREET
FITZROY VIC 3065 AUSTRALIA
TELEPHONE +61 3 9419 3406
FACSIMILE +61 3 9419 2519
WWW.GERTRUDE.ORG.AU

Monday, June 24, 2013

space/socialspace - Preview: Friday 28th June 6-8pm Workplace Gallery, Gateshead, UK






space/socialspace


Eric Bainbridge
Ralf Brög
Lothar Götz
James Hutchinson


Preview 28th June 2013, 6 - 8pm

29th June - 3rd August 2013
Thurs - Sat, 11am - 5pm
(or by appointment)



Kindly supported by


Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Last chance to see: be like water at Workplace Gallery, Gateshead, UK






BE LIKE WATER


DARREN BANKS
ANNA BETBEZE
MICHAŁ BUDNY
JOE CLARK
RICHARD RIGG
KERRY TRIBE



Closes Saturday 22nd June 5pm.
Workplace Gallery is open 11am - 5pm Tuesday - Saturday, or by appointment.

To view installation images and download a full press release please follow the link below

http://www.workplacegallery.co.uk/exhibitions/_44/

Next exhibition preview:

space/socialspace
Eric Bainbridge, Ralf Brög, Lothar Götz, James Hutchinson
Friday 28th June 2013
6pm - 9pm
http://www.spacesocialspace.co.uk/

Kindly supported by



Darren Banks: 'Empty Distances' Mark Moore Gallery, Los Angeles, USA






Image: Darren banks Blob 18 2013 Ink on paper. 31 x 31 cm, 12 1/4 x 12 1/4 in, Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery, UK

Opening Reception:
Saturday, June 15, 6-8pm

On View Through:
July 20th, 2013
Tues - Sat 11-6, and by appointment daily

Mark Moore Gallery and guest curator Caryn Coleman present "Empty Distances," a group exhibition featuring works by James Aldridge, Darren Banks, Sean Higgins, Deborah Stratman, Alan Warburton, and a selection of episodes from "The Twilight Zone." Playing on Eugene Thacker's idea of horror as the "paradoxical thought of the unthinkable," Coleman has meticulously composed a show that illustrates the visualization and simultaneous abstraction of the unknown. Concurrently in the Project Room, the gallery presents "Untitled #160 (Balcombe)", the latest video by gallery artist Josh Azzarella. Known for work that explores the power of context in the authorship of memory, Azzarella oftentimes utilizes seminal moments in pop culture and news media to create accessible confrontations with historiography. From his videos and photographs, Azzarella meticulously extracts characters, shadows, and audio from each frame of a well known event or film. The resulting visuals consist of altered background scenes haunted by the absence of familiar narrative, and pose provoking questions about the disturbingly similar dissemination of fact and fiction. In this work, F.W. Murnau's 1922 German Expressionist classic "Nosferatu" undergoes a comprehensive transformation.

Through an assortment of drawings, paintings, photographs, and videos, the artists in "Empty Distances" delve into creative perceptions of "the void" - a nebulous space that can refer to post-apocalyptic, pre-civilization, or even psychological vacuity. These physical and mental chasms are astutely manifested in James Aldridge's (UK) Black Metal Theory-infused paintings and works on paper - which contend with our societal reliance on images to determine the natural world - as well as Darren Banks' (UK) ink on paper "Blobs," which act as tropes for the all-consuming fear of the unknown. Similarly, Sean Higgins' (CA) manipulated photographs assume intervening roles in the creation of landscape and cosmic imagery, while Deborah Stratman's (IL) black and white film, "…These Blazeing Starrs!" (2011) depicts the macabre struggle for power between mortality and catastrophe. In using technology to visualize a true "world-without-us," Alan Warburton (UK) animates the ghostly aesthetics of vacancy, using z-depth images to reference our cultural shortsightedness. Finally, Coleman will present several episodes from the classic sci-fi television series, "The Twilight Zone" (1959 - 1964) - created by Rod Serling. As an overarching depiction of fear and the unknown, the featured episodes in Empty Distances best exemplify Serling's cautionary narratives, which often oscillate between the horrific and fantastic. Despite being depicted as thrilling events in a parallel universe, Serling's tales ultimately become allegorical omens for our own impending realities; perils for which we are often to blame.

Similarly, Josh Azzarella delves into "Nosferatu," the thrilling adaptation of Bram Stoker's Gothic novel "Dracula" (1897). Over the course of two years, the artist has painstakingly erased all evidence of the characters - including their reflections and shadows - from the original footage, along with the film's infamous soundtrack and expository intertitles. Azzarella has re-built the vacant space left by his extractions pixel by pixel, constructing an alternative rendition of the film that exemplifies his mastery of digital construction through perfectly accurate imitation and craft. Added to each panorama is a reconstructed version of the original Erdmann scores and ambient noises that reflect the atmosphere of the original film. The outcome is an uncanny 90-minute portrayal of the original classic that identically matches Murnau's lighting, film quality, and resolution, but abolishes its pioneering storyline and figures. Despite the absence of these key elements, the film's eerie and dark nature is practically amplified through Azzarella's manipulations-doors open mysteriously, curtains sway, and dawn breaks to ominous music, heightening the tension of implied action. The viewer watches each scene with the feeling of anticipation, the desire to see something spectacular occur without the gratification. With Count Orlok absent, the Gothic architecture and gloomy backdrops assume a characterization of their own, unsettled in much the same way as the viewer-waiting for the film's antagonist to emerge yet unable to coax him into existence. Viewing the video, one gets a sense of how existential characters, Vladimir and Estragon must have felt as they waited for Godot.


Mark Moore Gallery
5790 Washington Blvd
Culver City, CA 90232
Telephone 310 453 3031
Fax 310 453 3831
info@markmooregallery.com
www.markmooregallery.com


Friday, June 07, 2013

Cecilia Stenbom: "The Rescue" Queens Hall Art Centre, Hexham, UK

Image: Cecilia Stenbom The Rescue 2010 Single Channel HD Film. Duration: 3 Minutes 57 Seconds, Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery, UK 


 

Cecilia Stenbom

 

The Rescue

 

at a glance

Queens Hall Art Centre, Hexham, UK

Saturday 8 June 10.00am - 2.00pm
Free Entry

 

As a curtain raiser to the Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival 2013, QHA will screen a short film by Cecilia Stenbom.

 

In The Rescue Stenbom has taken interview extracts from "Rescue 911", an American docu-drama of the 1990s about real life rescues, and remade them with her playing all the interviewees: the 911 dispatcher, the police officer, the paramedic, the fireman, the doctor and the nurse.

For more information visit:

 

http://www.queenshall.co.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/717

Thursday, June 06, 2013

Cecilia Stenbom: "How To Choose" 9th International Short Film Festival, Detmold, Germany

Image: Cecilia Stenbom How To Choose 2012 Single Channel HD Film. Duration: 3 Minutes 31 Seconds, Produced by Third. Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery, UK 


Cecilia Stenbom

How To Choose

8th June 2013

9th International Short Film Festival
Hangar 21, Detmold, Germany

 

Festival runs from 31st May - 9th June 2013

 

More than 3,000 short films from 78 countries were submitted, of which 368 were selected for this years International Film Festival in Detmold. The festival is intended to provide a platform for intercultural exchange and  during the 10 day long festival directors from around the world will present works accross filmgenres including fiction, experimental, animation, documentary and music to a large and international audience.

 

Cecilia Stenbom's How To Choose is a short film about small seemingly insignificant every day choices, such as what to wear, what crockery to choose or what to bring with you for the day. Guided by a female narrator, who addresses the camera, in a deadpan manner, the story is told as instruction rather than personal reflection. Flawed with anxieties around illness, death and other bad outcomes, the decisions described are made using partly logic and partly a set of made up rules. Set in a modern stylish home, the structure of the work is inspired from existing television formats; the instruction film, the makeover show, and the docu-drama, juxtaposed against a more personal narrative. How to Choose is about the desire to remove the agony of decision making in a world constantly bombarded with endless possibilities in the quest for a less anxious existence. Running Time 3 min 31 sec

 

For more information and a full timetable visit:

 

http://www.fest-der-filme.de/

Jo Coupe: 'Easy Does It' Aid & Abet, Cambridge, UK

Jo Coupe, Phenomena, 2009, 5 Channel Video Installation, Dimensions Variable (JCP0043), Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery

easy does it

The second in an evolving trilogy of exhibitions curated by Kevin Hunt examining the complexity inherent within the simplest of actions.


Carwyn Evans

Fiona Curran

Hannah James

Jo Addison

Jo Coupe

Kevin Hunt

Leo Fitzmaurice

Littlewhitehead

Sean Edwards

Tom Godfrey

Tom Ireland

 
Preview: 06/06/13, 19:00 - 21:00
Exhibition: 07/06/13 - 06/07/13
Open: Thurs - Sat,  12:00 - 19:00
Or by appointment

 


Aid & Abet
Cambridge Railway Station
Station Road
Cambridge

info@aidandabet.co.uk

www.aidandabet.co.uk