Lisson Gallery

Cory Arcangel @ Lisson Gallery, May 19 – Jul 2

16 May 2016

Cory Arcangel will present solo show, currentmood at London’s Lisson Gallery, running May 19 to July 2.

The New York-based artist will install images, all printed the same scale of scans of Ibiza flyers, tracksuits and magazines, default Photoshop image effects, commercial and cell phone photography and low-res screen captures that would, if cropping up on a social media feed, be hashtag-ged with the words ‘currentmood’; a way of illustrating your specific emotional state via an image that is not specific or related to you and your life at all.

While the show runs, Arcangel will also share a series of ads across his social media accounts, promoting the exhibition and in doing so, by using the phrase #currentmood, will continue the work online.

Committed to a democratic practice of open source web culture, the artist is known for thoughts like these:

Arcangel is attentive to collective memories, celebrating their outmoded aesthetics while interrogating their cultural moment. “I’m not taking sides with almost anything… “For me, to see how these things change is my interest” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

See the Lisson Gallery website for more details.**

 

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Where Were You? @ Lisson Gallery, Jul 19 – Aug 25

15 July 2014

Lisson Gallery presents the Where Were You? group exhibition, running at their London space from July 19 to August 25.

Lifting the title from a British punk band song (The Mekons’ Where Were You), the exhibition combines prints, paintings, relief objects and canvas works united in the minimal physical artist involvement required to put them to fruition, but expressive of endless human hours of contemplation and refinement.

Participating in Where Were You? are the works of nine artists, including the Photoshop-mandated pieces by Cory Arcangel, the oil paint and flour paintings of Robert Janitz, and the manipulated sheaths of stacked paper by Dan Shaw-Town.

See the Where Were You? exhibition page for details. **

Julia Rommel,  'Robot'. Image courtesy Lisson Gallery.
Julia Rommel, ‘Robot’. Image courtesy Lisson Gallery.
David Ostrowski, 'F (Plötzlich Prinzessin)'. Image courtesy Lisson Gallery.
David Ostrowski, ‘F (Plötzlich Prinzessin)’. Image courtesy Lisson Gallery.
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Cory Arcangel @ Berliner Philharmonie, May 2

2 May 2014

Société and Lisson Gallery present the German premiere of Cory Arcangel‘s ‘Dances For The Electric Piano‘ at the Berliner Philharmonie, on May 2.

The composition will be performed solo by organist Hampus Lindwall on the Korg M1 piano famous for the classic Rave and Trance breakdowns of the 80s and 2000s.

It follows the opening of Arcangel’s All the Small Things exhibition, running in Denmark to June 22, and features conservatoire-educated musician, Lindwall, as a student of the late-Rolande Falcinelli in Paris and noted for his collaborations with other visual artists including John Duncan and aalliicceelleessccaannnnee&ssoonniiaaddeerrzzyyppoollsskkii.

See the Cory Arcangel website for details. **

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Haroon Mirza @ Lisson Gallery reviewed

24 May 2013

Haroon Mirza’s  o/o/o/o installations at Lisson Gallery visualise minimalistic production processes, run electric dreams between sonic mechanisms, amplify insect movements across reverb chambers, and throw broken samples into site-specific wave patterns.

Industrial, stripped-back, bare, it is an exhibition where echoes of the minimal artist’s practice is laid bare. Squared to the entrance, ‘Untitled 2013’ visually marks out a borrowed aesthetic.  Small and rectangular, divided into one green half and another blue segment composed from a series of commercially available LED lights, it clearly mirrors Dan Flavin’s use of readymade fluorescent lights, made up as luminescent sculptures in national art galleries. It’s famous, beyond the walls of most private contemporary collections and deliberately so.

Located within Lisson Gallery, ‘Sitting in a Chamber 2013’ takes a conceptual cue. Its homemade records spun over turntables reminiscent of Christian Marclay’s earlier Recycled Records played over decks as instrumentation, is a video work interacting with samples onscreen, close to ‘Telephones’ (1995)’s own mastery of sound and visual experimentation. Ideas and forms acquired from artists Mirza clearly admires, sampled and mixed together anew.

Haroon Mirza, 'Sitting in a Chamber' (2013), detail, full caption in pdf, Courtesy the artist and Lisson Gallery.
Haroon Mirza, ‘Sitting in a Chamber’ (2013), detail, full caption in pdf, Courtesy the artist and Lisson Gallery.

It is a blatant use. Like much house music, on which Mirza places great value, it is purposefully self-referential. A wall of noise for those new to the club but a new cut of sounds referential to genres, scenes, places, people, emotions and more, for those in the know. Here, Mirza produces a new track, made up out of sampled bass lines, high notes and rhythms, and at the same time a new artwork edited out of visual cues, concepts and sounds.

Importantly, sound is deconstructed visually. A video piece, part of ‘Sitting in a Chamber’ (2013) shows us a filmed screen shots of Audacity, a sequencer programme, on which the word “speech”, spoken out loud as a vocal and “articulated by speech” as an acapella, is looped into oblivion. Electronic music’s production process distorted first hand.

Interactively, in ‘Adam, Eve, others and a UFO’ (2013) visible speakers placed in a circle around a faux studio room invite visitors to walk though a mapped-out track. Architecturally, in ‘Pavilion for Optimisation’ (2013), a chamber created in collaboration with his brother Omar Mirza is a space is created where echoes from samples of a shower and an ant are overblown live in sequence to a light that floods the space with a powerful effect. Online ‘o-o-o-o.co.uk’ allows for samples from the show to be downloaded, remixed and uploaded in a cycle without a potential end.

Where Mirza panders to highly conceptual pieces of work, he excels. Reference to Alvin Lucier’s 1969 piece, ‘I am sitting in a room’, insatiably produce a worthy back catalogue of footnotes. As an exhibition, however. o/o/o/o condescends in its attempt to link avant-garde composition with underground electronic dance music. Punk-rock aggression sanitised and sequenced, house music’s groove lost.

Haroon Mirza’s /o/o/o/o/, is running at Lisson Gallery from May 17 to June 29, 2013.

Header image: Haroon Mirza, ‘Adam, Eve and a UFO’ (2013) Active speakers, UFO circuit, cables. Image courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery.

 

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