Workplace Gallery is pleased to present new work by
Eric Bainbridge Marcus Coates
THE ARMORY SHOW
PIER 94
Booth 541
MARCH 4-7, 2010
http://www.thearmoryshow.com
Eric Bainbridge (b.1955 UK) has presented numerous solo exhibitions in museums and galleries including Supercollage Galleria Caroline & Salvatore Ala, Milan 2009, Forward Thinking MIMA, Middlesbrough 2008, DELFINA, London 1997, The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 1989, ICA, Boston 1987, and Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis 1986. Forthcoming exhibitions include British Sculpture, Royal Academy, London and The Economy A Foundation, Liverpool. Group exhibitions include Monologue/Dialogue at Bangkok University Gallery, Collage at The Bloomberg Space, London, Glad That Things Don't Talk at Irish Museum of Modern Art, The Anxious Object, STORE, London, Etc, Amagerfaelledvej Art Project, Copenhagen, and New Generations - Sculpture in Britain 1951-2000, Leeds City Art Gallery.
Marcus Coates (b.1968, UK) has exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally. Forthcoming projects include Sydney Biennial 2010, Serpentine Gallery London, 2010. Exhibitions include: Psychopomp, Milton Keynes Gallery 2010, Kunsthalle Zurich 2009, Altermodern, Tate Triennial, London 2009, Diawa Prize Winner at Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo 2009, New Orleans Museum of Modern Art, USA, Manifesta7, Trento, Italy 2008. Coates received the Paul Hamlyn Visual Arts Award 2008 and the Daiwa Foundation Art Prize 2009 and was the Calouste Gulbenkian Artist in Residence in the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador, 2008. Coates lives and works in London.
image (top): Eric Bainbridge Untitled, 2010
Cut Paper
28.5 x 21.5 cm
Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery
image (below): Marcus Coates Vision Quest with Chrome Hoof (detail)
Coronet Theatre *1, London 2009
digital c-type print
115 x 163 cm
photography: Nick David
Produced by Nomad, Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery
The Armory Show is America's leading fine art fair devoted to the most important art of the 20th and 21st centuries. In its eleven years, the fair has become an international institution. Every March, artists, galleries, collectors, critics and curators from all over the world make New York their destination during Armory Arts Week.
For a full list of available works please contact info@workplacegallery.co.uk
6 February - 3 May 2010 Preview: Friday 5 February, 6-8pm
The first major UK exhibition of artists' wallpapers with work by over 30 artists including Andy Warhol, Sarah Lucas and Damien Hirst. Kitsch ideas of home decoration are turned upside down as artists subvert the stereotypes of wallpaper to hit home messages about warfare, racism, cultural conflicts and gender.
The exhibition is grouped around themes: subversion, commodification, imprisonment and sexuality. In Sonia Boyce's work Clapping, a feeling of claustrophobia and menace is strengthened by the repeated design of the black and white hand print. Zineb Sedira uses wallpaper patterns to illustrate social inequalities and gender difference from her French-Algerian Islamic perspective.
Thomas Demand, one of the foremost conceptual artists working today, covers the entire South Gallery in his Ivy wallpaper - intricate pieces of paper cut out and photographed make up a lifelike work of imprisoning beauty. In stark contrast to this are popular commercial papers that reinforce cultural and gender stereotypes; from Barbie or the Spice Girls to the use of male symbols such as beer cans, football teams or idealised female bodies.
Whether amusing, like David Shrigley's Industrial Estate, or startling, like Bashir Makhoul's Points of View, the rolls of paper in this exhibition provide an unprecedented insight into a bold and progressive contemporary art form. Wallpaper has long been thought of as a backdrop to the main event. With so many prominent designers and artists using the medium as their primary method of expression, this exhibition provides a timely exploration of the possibilities and power of print.
image: Catherine Bertola Beyond the looking glass (detail) 2010 ash and paper New Commissioned work for 'Walls are Talking' Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery
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
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
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.
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
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.
Marcus Coates
Human Report 2008 Single Channel Video 7:14 minute loop Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery, UK
British Council Collection
Zacheta Narodowa Galeria Sztuki, Warsaw All Creatures Great and Small
18th December 2009 – 21st February, 2010
All Creatures Great and Small develops themes initiated in the exhibition Hot/Cold — Summer Loving shown in Zacheta in 2007 that presented different forms of love, including the love humans feel for animals.
The forthcoming exhibition concentrates only on the problem of the world of animals, exploring artists' diverse takes on this problem and the range of ways of visualizing it in art. The point of entry for the exhibition is the desire to overcome the dogmatic anthropocentrism that places the human in the centre of the world as a privileged species of the highest ontological status. This viewpoint continues to dominate in contemporary science, and as a consequence we witness the exclusion of other species/phenomena of life on earth from the sphere of scientific knowledge in terms of their subjectivity or rights.
The theory of evolution presented in the book The Origin of Species (for which this year was a double anniversary, since it was 150 years since it was first published and 200 years since the birth of its author, Charles Darwin) put humans on the summit of the animal hierarchy, but not as a separate ‘super-animal’, but as a species that was part and parcel of nature and subject to its processes in the chain of natural changes. In 1872, Darwin published another book: On the Expression of Emotion in Humans and Animals, describing the world of animals through expressions of emotions which up until that point has been the purview only of the human species. This was a revolutionary thought for its day which presented animals and people not as separate or antagonistic worlds, but as connected to one another by degrees of similarity and close ties.
Although discontented commentators write that contemporary science generally encounters the Other only at its daily meal times (animals are often included in the group of all Others excluded by society or existing at its margins, beyond the ‘centre’), nonetheless worthy of attention is a new wave of books, accounts and texts written between the 1960s and today (a large part in which was no doubt played by the ecological movements and struggles for animal rights that emerged on the wave of revolutionary changes in the 60s) formulating new approaches to the non-human world, its relations with the human world and vice-versa, and thus opening up new philosophical or ethical questions.
One of the elements in the radical changes in art, that also began in the 1960s, has been the fundamental change undergone in the way that artists approach the animal world and the relations between people and animals. The works shown visualize this world in its diverse aspects through the use of less or more engaged observation, the pleasure of watching, touching or possessing through domestication, the pleasures experienced by animals themselves in play, but also the question of enclosing their existences into the ghetto known as Zoological Garden. Works also make reference to difficult questions concerning the use of animals as commodities, of causing them pain and suffering, of eating their bodies. Many works upturn the semantics of animals, giving them the symbolic significance which culture has denied them through civilisational change. In others, animals become participants in experiments through which we observe their mutual interactions, or are also a part of formal artistic experiments. Amongst the questions relating to the relations between humans and animals are to be found works on the animalist aspect of human nature and on the desire to identify with an Other by ‘becoming animal’.
The exhibition presents this world from a human perspective (as we do not know any other), and thus in the background also sketches out the image of humans as they emerges through their relations with the animal world.
The exhibition presents the works of the following artists:
Marina Abramovic, Vito Acconci, Pilar Albaracin, Francis Alys, Dan Attoe, Roger Ballen, Kuba Bąkowski, Joseph Beuys, Bogna Burska, John Bock, Olaf Brzeski, Mircea Cantor, David Claerbout, Marcus Coates, Peter Coffin, Anna Dębska, Mark Dion, VALIE EXPORT, Angus Fairhurst, Peter Fischli&David Weiss, Peter Friedl, Leszek Golec&Tatiana Czekalska, Douglas Gordon, Jean-Charles Hue, Elżbieta Janczak-Wałaszek, Agnes Janich, Christian Jankowski, Marina Kappos, Mike Kelley, Kristof Kintera, Grzegorz Kowalski, Igor Krenz, Natalia LL, Yuri Leiderman, Dominik Lejman, Marcin Maciejowski, Artur Malewski, Chris Marker, Rafał Milach, Ciprian Muresan, Yach Paszkiewicz, Włodzimierz Pawlak, Elisa Pône, Marc Quinn, Jozef Robakowski, Zygmunt Rytka, Alain Séchas, Ene-Liis Semper, Deborah Sengl, Carolee Schneemann, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, Roman Signer, Dusan Skala, Gabrielle Stellbaum, Eric Swenson, Javier Téllez, Gabriela Vanga, Minette Vári, Bill Viola, Martin Walde, Marek Wasilewski, Boyd Webb, William Wegman, Paweł Wieckowiak, The Wooster Group, Wunderteam, Erwin Wurm.
Ant Macari and Oliver Beck Thank You For Staying #2
11/12/09
19:00 - social space, Star and Shadow cinema, Stepney Bank, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
www.platformnortheast.org
Thank You for Staying #2 is a re-enactment of a 2008 performance by Raymond Pettibon and Mike Watt for the Earwax series at Riverside Art Museum, LA. This is live art as mimesis which attempts to reveal tensions between aspiration and failure: celebrity and public, plastic and diachronic arts and the boundaries between rural and urban in the context of Americana as experienced by two teenage skater punks growing up in the Scottish Borders.
Excerpts from a proposal....
The title 'Thank You for Staying #2' refers to the main difficulty of live art: holding the attention of the audience. Re-enacting 'EARWAX' a performance/ gig hybrid, which happened relatively recently, only some 20 months ago - neither too fresh to be a response or too long to have settled into an intelligible historical context - is like performing a cover version before it's had time to accrue a patina of history. This homage to the progenitors (Pettibon and Watt) of a particular brand of punk by two aspiring devotees (with little to no experience or charisma) is a kind of impotent gesture and brings into focus the trans-Atlantic delay we sometimes experience in cultural exchange in contemporary art.
At the centre of human discourse is remix. As well as engaging in a critique on originality, the aim of this action is to examine the nature of the plastic (painting) and the diachronic arts (music) by direct comparison, seeking to give the two an equal duration. Like sand painting or water calligraphy; the artist's material intention is transitory. This aligns visual art with speech music and performance in as much as it brings painting (in this case) to meet with music on its own terms.
In Pettibon and Watt's original performance, the drawings which were generated during this performance were kept and displayed in the Riverside Art Museum's programme under the title 'Thank You for Staying,' a nod to the time endured by their audience (90 minutes). Our version of the performance (25 minutes) however, aims to highlight the transitory nature of language in a live situation by destroying the work at the end of the performance by loading a shredder accompanied by screaming.
Beck will play riffs and improvisation informed by Watt. Macari will make black and white paintings using a Japanese brush with transducer (pickup) in the style of Pettibon and in response to Beck's playing and informed by stories of Beck's experience as a punk rock fan/ skateboarder growing up in Kelso, UK.
Re-enactment itself is interesting as both Beck and Macari grew up in suburban towns with the American subculture of LA and NY in their minds. In an attempt to live out scenarios from the skate videos which had a big influence on them; they would – oblivious to one another – share an aim to re-enact scenes and tricks from these videos, round the back of Kwiksave or the Co-Op in their parochial towns. The rolling hills of the Scottish Borders, scenic though they are, reveal little of the horizon. In this respect those who live there should expect to experience limited horizons both physically and psychological. These conditions often push escapism to its zenith, accounting for the high percentage of addiction and drug related deaths in this area of Scotland. The two share a preoccupation with Americana, a cultural exoticism which represents an extremely different experience to a Borders town. It's a type of escapism in which you can play an active role, with the potential for reinvention and making it your own.
The piece asks these questions:
What is the value of temporary (plastic) art work in the context of live art?
Where should our emphasis lie: on the act or the product of the act?
How does one address and gauge aspiration and failure through performance?
Background:
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. The two have never worked together before, although they would like to start a post-punk band. Somehow, I think this is the closest they'll ever come to achieving that.
Visualisation:
Two people dressed in a style between LA hillbilly and surf bum standing on a stage containing; a flat top writing desk (featuring a lamp, art materials and a swivelling mirror mounted directly above the work surface by which the audience can view the painting work in progress), a calligraphy brush and paper mounted with transducers, a bass guitar and valve amp, a smaller amp, two microphones with stands, a PA system, a paper shredder and two glasses of water. OB plays bass guitar riffs influenced by Watt. AM makes paintings in response to OB's sounds in the style of Pettibon. Both AM and OB recite poetry and aphorisms into the microphones during the performance. The performance ends with OB and AM screaming (as the expression of cosmic totality in a pre-verbal language) into microphones as they put each painting methodically into a paper shredder.
An exhibition curated by the first year MA Curating Contemporary Art, Royal College of Art Hockney Gallery, Royal College of Art, Stevens Building, Jay Mews, SW7 2EU Opening Wednesday 9 December 2009, 6.30 — 8.30pm Exhibition continues 10 — 18 December 2009
Suns Neither Rise Nor Set brings together work by Vanessa Billy, Richard Hughes, Nina Beier & Marie Lund, The Atlas Group / Walid Raad, Richard Rigg, and Kim Rugg. Using everyday objects, archival materials and collage techniques, these works call into question the processes through which reality and illusion are constructed in visual communication and perception.
Vanessa Billy's Suns neither rise nor set (2008), from which the exhibition takes its title, alludes to the fact that everyday events such as the rising and setting of the sun, are not objective truths but part of a subjective system of symbols and narratives that supports our understanding of reality and perceived position in it. Whereas Billy looks to expose such fictions, The Atlas Group / Walid Raad, claim new ones. Their renegotiations of contested historical memory take the form of presentations of archival documents of Lebanon's recent past, which are themselves of questionable authenticity.
Nina Beier & Marie Lund also engage with notions of the archive. In The Archives (2008), the content of second-hand peace posters is buried beneath the weight of a fold, denying the original authors their protest and quashing past, unrealised hopes for the future. Along with Kim Rugg's A Single Balloon Drifting Skywards (2008), an evocative reconfiguration of the language and graphic conventions of a daily newspaper, Beier and Lund's series points towards the hierarchies in place in the distribution of information and how these can affect our interpretation of events.
The reworking of everyday objects is also apparent in the playful and illusory propositions of Richard Hughes and Richard Rigg. Rigg has made a precise but flawed replica of his own desk, whereas Richard Hughes presents us with a shattered clock face, which provocatively questions the authority of time.
In different ways, each of the artists in this exhibition interrogate or deconstruct weighty or complex notions. In doing so, they bring to light the uncertainties that pervade the production and reception of knowledge, helping us to visualise the oscillating line between fact and fiction.
Gallery opening hours 10am - 6pm Monday - Saturday by appointment. Please contact Vanessa Boni at vanessa.boni@network.rca.ac.uk or 07595 154 220
With thanks to Laura Bartlett, Nazareno Crea, Nettie Horn, Limoncello, Anthony Reynolds, The Modern Institute, Workplace Gallery and Soraya Rodriguez for their kind help and support.
Workplace Gallery is pleased to present a solo presentation of work by British artist Jo Coupe.
Supernature is a major new installation that recreates electromagnetic and paranormal effects observed by Jo Coupe through the combination of jewelry, gold and silver-plated steel chain, furniture, and electromagnetic fields.
Exploiting the aesthetics and methodologies of Science, the recent work of Jo Coupe adapts simple experiments and subverts half-understood scientific ideas, plundering iconic imagery for its metaphorical significance. In her work, the school science experiment, alchemy, and a fascination with decay unite to reveal the world as a mysteriously rational place.
Continuing her investigations into the objects and symbols of ritual, magic and the everyday. Coupe's fascination with paranormal occurrences has led to extended periods of research into the powerful electromagnetic forces of the smelting rooms at one of the world's largest producers of aluminum and bauxite. In this unique environment coins levitate upwards, keys stick rigidly to walls, cameras produce ghosted and partially blacked out images, and video cameras distort unpredictably; all commonly documented symptoms of haunting or psychic activity.
By investigating the symbolic power of the object through a holistic knowledge of the natural world and its scientific, ritualistic, and poetic usage; Coupe's work takes on a political significance via the employment of the anti-rational and magic - traditionally the domain of witchcraft. The setting of her practice within the macho environment of heavy industry, and her use of commonplace and domestic objects conflate two stereotypically gendered positions to move towards an analysis of objects, and the cultural and social forces at play that pervade the meanings we commonly ascribe to them.
Jo Coupe was born in 1975 and studied Fine Art at Newcastle University and at Goldsmiths College, London. She lives and works in Gateshead, UK. Recent exhibitions include Fade Away and Radiate at Workplace Gallery, An Archaeology at 176 in London, Tatton Park Biennial, Give and Take at Firstsite, Colchester, and You Shall Know Our Velocity at BALTIC, Gateshead. In 2008 she was awarded best artist at 101 Tokyo in 2008 presented by Joseph Kosuth.
image:
Jo Coupe
Supernature, 2009 (detail)
Jewelry, Furniture, Hooks and Fixings, Gold and Silver Plated Steel Chain, Table, Electromagnetic Field
Pavel Bϋchler, 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, 2009 Dual Channel video 16mm Film Transferred to Hard Drive (MS0033) Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery, UK and Ziehersmith, New York
Mike Pratt, Laura, 2009, Oil on Canvas, 162 x 132 cm
JAMBON
Cobalt Studios
Saturday 28th November to Sunday 29th November, 10am-5pm
JAMBON is a recently formed arts group consisting of five Fine Art graduates from Northumbria University, Newcastle.
Mike Pratt's paintings and sculptures immediately engage us with frank and achingly simple phrases borrowed from contemporary life. Pratt's work knowingly references abstract expressionism, pop art, the paintings of Richard Prince and Christopher Wool
Andrew Maughan makes paintings that reflect ironically upon the art world and current consumer culture. Employing anti aesthetic strategies, Maughan uses a pallet of garish colours and pastel tones to create a dystopic response to daily life. 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. Richard Moat makes drawings and constructions based on his fascination with Arctic exploration and the romanticism that surrounds it. Andrew Sandercock makes performances that are informed by his addiction with climbing and fixed gear cycling. Sandercock employs quixotic strategies to fulfill these desires and simultaneously create work.
Catherine Bertola, Everything and Nothing, 2007, Collected dust, paper, glue and varnish. Commission for the V&A Museum, UK
WONDERWALL
300 Years of wallpaper
An anthology of historic papers from the Roger Warner collection
2nd December 2009 - 9th May 2010
Temple Newsam House Temple Newsam Road Leeds, LS15 0AE http://www.leeds.gov.uk/templenewsamhouse/
Wonderwall showcases wallpapers from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Taken from the never before exhibited collection of the antiques dealer Roger Warner, it comprises of fine papers, leather hangings and designs from unknown makers and great names of British design. Accompanying the exhibition is a special commission from the artist Catherine Bertola. Bertola's practice involves creating work that responds to existing sites, objects and materials; whether that is a particular building, a collection of photographs or a museum archive. She uses the given history and context as a starting point, from which to physically interrogate and enhance the poetics of that site, by embedding her own perishable traces and adding additional layers of meaning for the viewer. A specially commissioned installation will be in Miss Scot's room throughout the duration of the exhibition
Beyond Pattern Oriel Davies Gallery, The Park, Newtown, Powys, Wales
21 November 2009 - 27 January 2010
An exploration into the cultural meanings of pattern, through exhibition, commission, publication and debate.
Exhibition Preview Saturday 21 November 2009 6-8pm
Includes new commissions by Steve Messam, Catherine Bertola and Angharad Pearce-Jones and work by Michael Brennand-Wood, Nisha Duggal, Leo Fitzmaurice, Doug Jones, Adam King, Pamela So, Henna Nadeem and Andrea Stokes.
www.orieldavies.org
Image: Catherine Bertola Bluestockings (Fanny Burney) (Detail) 2009 Pen on paper (Archive framed and mounted) 85 x 135 cms, 33.49 x 53.19 inches CB0062 Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery, U
A playful echo of Darwin's 'The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals', Marcus Coates' new work continues the artists' fascination with the unexpected kinships that exsist across human, animal and material worlds. Following Darwin's own curiosity and insights into the interconnectedness of species, 'Follow The Voice' establishes striking parallels between a range of familiar man-made sounds in Darwin's birth place Shrewsbury (including a supermarket checkout, police siren and school playground) and an equally evocotive chorus of animal cries and bird calls. This exhibition will include other works by Coates.
'Follow The Voice' is co-commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella with Shropshire Museums Services and funded by Arts Council England.
Artists Talk with Marcus Coates Newlyn Art Gallery, FREE Thursday 26th November at 7pm Marcus will talk about his work and this exhibition
Image: Marcus Coates "Follow The Voice" 2009 (detail) Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery
Reception for the artist: Thursday, November 12th, 6-8 pm
ZieherSmith516 West 20 StNew York, NY 10011 info@ziehersmith.comwww.ziehersmith.com
ZieherSmith presents the New York debut of these are the days (2009), a film installation by British artist Matt Stokes originally commissioned by Arthouse, Austin, Texas, and the launch of the accompanying catalogue designed by British collective, Abake. Inspired by punk rock subcultures, these are the days is the artist's first institutional commission in the United States.
In 2007, Arthouse invited Stokes to create a new film project with ZieherSmith acting as co-producer. these are the days is the result of Stokes' close work with communities connected to Austin's music scene and his extensive research into anti-establishment musical genres, particularly punk rock. Investigating the dichotomies expressed within earlier and later punk communities, his research ultimately led to the creation of the dual channel film installation, an archival installation exhibition exclusively at Arthouse, and the publication about both.
The first film features footage from a specially organized punk show, staged by Stokes, at the Broken Neck, an alternative venue in Austin and filmed by renowned cinematographers Lee Daniel and P.J. Raval. The second film, created in response at a recording session at Austin's Sweatbox Studios, depicts a makeshift band's musical reaction to the event footage. A reversal of roles between audience and performers, the work examines the concepts of inspiration and response. Punk as it was then and as it is now, different yet the same--these are the days.
Matt Stokes' artistic practice is marked by anthropological enquiry and an interest in happenings or informal movements that bind people together. Taking a variety of forms -- from organizing events and assembling archives to making films and creating sculptural installation -- Stokes' works are often collaborative in nature and sometimes take place outside the traditional gallery space. Music subcultures have been central to the development of his most recent projects, which have focused on their ability to shape lifestyle, beliefs and create community. Northern Soul, acid/house and black metal are among the genres of music he has explored, poetically revealing music's intrinsic ability to create fellowship through devotion or the quasi-religious experience of dance.
these are the days was first presented in 2009 at Arthouse and at 176 / Zabludowicz Collection, a major new contemporary art space located in London. The London show also featured The Gainsborough Packet (2009, co-commissioned by 176 and the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art), which will screen in the back room of ZieherSmith. An editioned dubplate featuring music from both these are the days and The Gainsborough Packet is also available. The Abake-designed catalogue will be first released at the opening and includes documentation of both the film piece and of ephemera from the 1970s and 1980s related to the punk, post-punk, and DIY movements in Austin, material that was presented as an ambiguous archive at Arthouse.
Matt Stokes was born in 1973 in Penzance, England and currently lives in Gateshead, England. He is the 2006 recipient of the esteemed Beck's Futures Prize, awarded by the ICA, London and is currently on the shortlist for the 2009 Northern Art Prize. In 2009, he was also included in solo and group exhibitions at the Baltic Centre of Contemporary Art, Newcastle, and the Lentos Museum, Linz, Austria, among other venues. Special thanks to Arthouse, the Arts Council England, Michael A. Chesser, Johnna and Stephen Jones, and Julie and John Thornton.
Workplace Gallery is a contemporary art gallery run by artists.
Based in Gateshead UK, Workplace Gallery represents a portfolio of emerging and established artists through the gallery programme, curatorial projects and international art fairs.
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