Iain Ball

Iain Ball @ Cell Project Space, Feb 18 – April 10

17 February 2016

London-based artist Iain Ball is showing solo show, Praseodymium Intracrine Signal Aggregate at London’s Cell Project Space, opening February 18 and running April 10.

The new work is the ninth instalment of Ball’s Rare Earth Sculpture series. He has a practice that ties together form and intricate, esoteric biological and nuclear processes and research. The show takes ‘intracrine’, a natural hormone that regulates the inside of cells, as a starting point and compares it to the way in which steroids act as well as the effects of anxiety and paranoia produced by this transmutable agent.

The sculptural items, or body of work both online and offline in Praseodymium Intracrine Signal Aggregate will aim to harvest the energy of this paranoia.

See the Cell Project Space website for further details. **

Iain Ball, '(RES) Terbium central container component > NAVIGATOR' (2015). Expressive Earth, Install view. Courtesy Toves and the artist.
Iain Ball, ‘(RES) Terbium central container component > NAVIGATOR’ (2015). Expressive Earth, Install view. Courtesy Toves and the artist.
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Grand Orpheus Highway @ La Plage, Dec 4 – Jan 11

4 December 2015

The Grand Orpheus Highway group exhibition is on at Paris’s La Plage, opening December 4 and running to January 11, 2016.

Following its inaugural show with Berlin-based artist Ilja Karilampi’s Truss Mi Daddy, the new space will feature work by London-based artists Iain Ball and Yuri Pattison, along with LA’s Parker Ito.

There is little information on the theme of the exhibition save for a short bit of poetry referencing Greek mythology’s tragic god-couple Orpheus and Eurydice, physical highways and information networks as a space of transition and a potential analogy for lost hope:

“It is night. Orpheus glances back and crosses Eurydice’s gaze
Intersecting between Grand and Orpheus, the highway
a place of transition
where some things change
others remain the same
at this speed, systems of information and structures of power are unveiled
Who is looking?
I don’t know
I don’t care

Looking back
The highway’s in ruins”

See the La Plage website for (limited) details.**

Parker Ito, Parker Cheeto’s Infinite Haunted Hobo Playlist (A Dream for Some, a Nightmare for others) exhibition view. Courtesy Smart Objects.
Parker Ito, Parker Cheeto’s Infinite Haunted Hobo Playlist (A Dream for Some, a Nightmare for others). Exhibition view. Courtesy Smart Objects, Los Angeles.

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JURASSIC PAINT (2015) exhibition photos

18 September 2015

If you wait for something long enough it’ll come back in style, and dinosaurs are coming back with a vengeance of all things though extinct. Jurassic Paint, the second online show by New Scenario, went live on their website in early June. The group exhibition, shot in the forest of Saurierpark Kleinwelka, a dinosaur park filled with life-size dinosaur models, combines “two prehistoric yet resilient species” for a collection of canvas works from eleven visual artists. 

New Scenario, founded by artists Paul Barsch and Tilman Hornig in late 2014, is a dynamic platform for conceptual, time-based and performative exhibition formats “that happen outside the real of the white cube”. With Jurassic Paint, Barsch and Hornig invite the participants to combine painting as a “creative act of the imagination” with the construction of the dinosaurs, whose likeness “emerges from fanciful and narrative processes of the human and scientific mind”. The canvas works and the dinosaurs share, as the exhibition’s press release identifies, the same ‘Lebensraum’ or living space, creating a new scenario.

Iain Ball, '(res) terbium series 3' (2015) Install view.
Iain Ball, ‘(res) terbium series 3’ (2015) Install view.

The eleven visual artists have all been asked to create a dinosaur likeness, with Zoe Barcza creating a Plateosaurus titled ‘Shred IV’, Ann Hirsch offering an Anatosaurus titled ‘My Starving Public 1998’, and Tom Davis creating a Campsognathus titled ‘Ovid-Acteaon’. The remaining artists include Scott Gelber with a Diplodocus hallorum titled ‘RothkoNetflix1’, Sayre Gomez with a Antrodemus titled ‘Thief Painting in Violet’, Martin Mannig with a Heterodontosaurus tucki titled ‘Psycho’ and Jaakko Pallasvuo with a Ornitholestes hermanni titled ‘Amusement Park’. There’s also Anselm Ruderisch‘s  Polacanthus titled ‘Voyager1’, Joshua Abelow with a Triceratops prorsus titled ‘Untitled (Witch)’, and Iain Ball with a Triceratops horridus titled ‘(res) terbium series 3’. Hornig and Barsch also contributed pieces to the exhibition with, respectively, a Ceratosaurus nasicornis titled ‘Stop Aids redux’ and a Tyrannosaurus rex titled ‘O. K.’s Time Travels (Back to the Future)’, accompanied by written contributions from Johannes Thumfart and Hendrik Niefeld. **

Exhibition photos, top right.

Jurassic Paint group exhibition went live at newscenario.net on June 11, 2015.

Header image: Zoe Barcza, ‘Shred IV’ (2014). Install view. Courtesy the artist.

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Low Impact, Issue 2: ‘Shallow Waters’ launch, Aug 5

4 August 2015

The artist-run, independent publication Low Impact is releasing its second issue, ‘Shallow Waters’, launching at 152 Wilmot Street in London on August 5.

The new issue brings a dozen contributing artists, including works by Iain BallCristine BracheLauren WilsonGeorge Jacotey, Serra Tansel, and Motoko Ishibashi

Low Impact‘s first issue, titled ‘Transparentities’, featured works from Sarai KirshnerEiko Soga and Valinia Svoronou, a ‘Love letter’ from James Lowne, and contributions from Sarah Boulton, and Harriet Rickard, amongst others.

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Jurassic Paint @ New Scenario, Jun 11

9 June 2015

New Scenario brings a new exhibition to their conceptual platform, titled Jurassic Paint and launching on June 11.

The New Scenario project was launched by Paul Barsch and Tilman Hornig as a time-based platform for performative exhibition formats taking place “outside the realm of the white cube”, and the two founders team up to for the concept and curation of Jurassic Paint, described as having works on canvas and “live size (sic) dinos”.

Amongst the twelve contributing artists are some familiar faces, including Ann Hirsch, Iain Ball, and Jaakko Pallasvuo, as well written contributions by Johannes Thumfart and Hendrik Niefeld. Launching on June 11, the group show will be on view on the New Scenario website this summer.

See the FB exhibition page for details. ** 

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FOMO @ SYNTAX, May 7 – 8

4 May 2015

Portugal’s SYNTAX art project is hosting a group exhibition titled FOMO, running at the Lisbon art space on May 7 and May 8.

The project, developed by Markéta Stará Condeixa as a way of bridging the void between the international art scene and that of local Lisbon art context, functions as an environment for creation and new encounters, with the hope of lasting international collaborations linking Portugal’s art scene to that of the greater global art world.

For FOMO, also curated by Condeixa, SYNTAX has invited five artists to participate in the group show. There are Jan Brož and Richard Nikl working collaborative, joined by Olga Cerkasova of Running Residency, André Sousa, and Iain Ball.

See the exhibition page for details. **

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An interview with Iain Ball

29 August 2014

Engaging with Iain Ball’s work requires research. There are words I’d never heard before, clusters of reference points drawn from a breadth of information that seems endless. It probably is. Take the ongoing Energy Pangea project as an example. ‘Europium’, ‘Thulium’, ‘Promethium’. They’re titles of works drawn from the periodic table, more specifically the 15 Lanthanides, otherwise known as ‘rare earth elements’ but paradoxically plentiful as part of the planet’s crust. They’re a substance that both makes up and is extracted from the ground of the globe –a self-consuming entity.

double flip
(Rare Earth Sculptures) Europium 2014

“Information is growing like deforestation and we want to burn shit”, Ball reads at his PHILIPS2013 [The Guts]: Revision 2012 talk at Lima Zulu two years ago. It follows a narrative that defies reason, linking an increase in UFO sightings to a shift in the planet’s magnetic poles and comparing it to Dutch technology company Philips’ ‘Vision 2015’ strategic plan. In using “alien’s as an access point” Ball illustrates the equally irrational and confounding nature of human history where “black swan events are the virus and the blood of progress”. It’s an idea drawn from Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s theory of a societal tendency towards rationalising the emergence of an unexpected occurrence (say, the rise of the internet or economic collapse) into a logical sequence of events. But nothing makes sense and nothing is predictable.

“I want to show each project as if they’re simultaneously held together and broken apart,” Ball tells me via type. He’s London-based but reluctant to speak in person or on the phone, eventually agreeing to a real-time online doc conversation only to self-consciously draft and paste his answers in blocks, while I wait, over an interview that lasts nearly three hours. “Each project container is its own dimension with its own set of laws or physics, which could expand infinitely or destroy itself”, Ball says re the difficulty of trying to talk about his practice in general terms. That’s particularly as he relates his work to Bruno Latour’s concept of “blackboxing“, whereby greater scientific insight only leads to greater complexity and increased obscurity –the black box being its outward simplification.

PHILIPS 2013
PHILIPS 2013

Starting at “beacons of ‘we’re all fucked’, basically” (as mentioned in an interview with Matthew Drage) and ending with the aestheticisation of a bewildering network of destruction and reconstruction, Ball’s newest addition to his Energy Pangea Rare Earth Sculpture series ‘Lanthanum’ sounds impenetrable but the aim is accessibility; it seems abstract but is, in fact, fairly literal. Launching at Obikà Mozzarella Bar in London’s Canary Wharf business centre as part of OPENYOURKIMONO’s digital commissions –the project will emerge online as the Centre for Youth Consciousness (CYC) on September 4. It’s a “sculpture-object/device” generated by the “reverse swarm-funding” of the aforementioned hypothetical organisation brought into existence by pure potential –whether it’s made material or not.

Lanthanum derives from a Greek word that means, “to lie hidden”. The thing about rare earth elements is they’re seldom found as concentrated, economically exploitable deposits. They’re dispersed and diffused. The Toyota Prius is thought to be the biggest exploiter of Lanthanides in the world: “each project-object is held together by its ability to work as a closed system, but they have a multitude of parts, each of those parts is also a black box”.

promethium overlay
(Rare Earth Sculptures) Promethium 2012

Your work seems more like a process rather than a concept and I say concept but I see now that it’s not necessarily, or at all, conceptual work.

IB: It’s very hard to describe a total concept, like having an artist statement or general theme. I often struggle with how to brand ‘Iain Ball’. It’s easier for me to develop different entities for the holding of the work, each with its own concept, philosophy, politic. But I would go as far as to say that, even within each container, it isn’t necessarily clear if there is an overriding ‘concept’, as each project is comprised of many parts. I want to show each project as if they’re simultaneously held together and broken apart, so there may be many conflicting concepts and information strands within.

A word like ‘concept’ is a bit like using the word ‘commodity’, like asking ‘what is the product of this? What is the concept?’ I could talk about concepts within each container, I could talk about the ‘concept’ of Philips2013 but its just a style, the concepts are totally affective.

A woman marches on the Muslim Brotherhood's HQ in Cairo to protest at plans to reduce the legal age

That answer doesn’t surprise me, especially considering the density of the work and in the way it functions kind of like a network, or nodes that are, or can be, somehow related but also might not be.

IB: Yes, which might reduce the idea of what I’m doing to a very simplified assemblage of things… If it’s just things I like or fetishise; things that intrigue me and I find a way to draw them in and create a brand/project from this random assemblage or pattern rec[ognition] of interests, fetishes and concerns, it becomes maybe less complex and is demystified, ornamental, self-centred.

I’m all too aware of that, so I think the true density of the work must lie somewhere else, which might be something nonhuman, or post human or post-Anthropocene. And the only way I can see this is through some kind of morphology, like its a science or chemistry or something, alchemy…that fusing together of these parts actually does something, like I’m making some working model or energy transducer; converting one thing into something else, or reprogramming, re-branding, computing…

energy pangea quick logo 3

Is this ‘reprogramming’ an attempt to make a working model in response to a model that isn’t working?

IB: It’s also not really that either, or maybe it’s about trying to find some tangibility within the idea of a working model or closed system… but then the reality is that it’s very fragile, unconvincing and transparent. There’s no real pragmatism, it’s maybe more about applying multiple filters or perspectives on top of the current order, or unveiling, revealing what’s underneath. But then it’s not even clear which mode is being performed/legitimate/serious or exactly what is happening or going on, everything being another surface critique.

You mention commodity and demystification. When you talked to Matthew Drage about providing an “alternative business model”, or attempting to with Phillips2013, would you not say that by reducing your work to a series of symbols, it’s an attempt to understand and demystify existing destructive structures in terms of consumerism, or economics and geopolitics?

IB: I can’t say that my intention is to demystify or expose destructive structures per se. Destructive structures are everywhere, I could make ‘personal’ work about destructive thought processes and in many ways I am, the personal struggles are all embedded within but they could be channeled in a de-personalised and abstract manner.

Destructive structures are as important as constructive ones so I don’t try to paint the world as out of balance, or sick and in need of healing unless I become fascinated by the phenomena, or aesthetic, or politic/style of the world being represented in such a way. I want to work with that, as a material, or style, or critique. Much of the time it’s about a fascination, or finding a way into something, like working with terms like ‘geopolitics; and trying to find out how I attach new narratives or meanings or keep it intact with an object like geopolitics. Even gaining access to something like Philips, or seeing what happens if I work with eco/bio language.

thulium1wb
(Rare Earth Sculptures) Thulium 2013

It’s interesting that you talk about a political style in terms of its materiality. That sounds rather speculative, what’s your relationship with those ideas?

IB: Much of the time it’s related to fetish, like reading radical traditionalist philosophy like Julius Evola, because it’s like, the other side. OOO[Object Oriented Ontology]/Speculative Realism/Latour has of course influenced me. I think politics has a pragmatism I’m not interested in when its presents itself as demanding specific outcomes and results. Like, I don’t see why listening to Sunny Day Real Estate is any less political than listening to Anti Flag; where the former is personal/emotional and the latter is sociopolitical and class conscious. Maybe that’s a very entitled perspective, of course; shit circumstances and oppression might change that but they also may not. I go for plasticity, uncertainty, mutations, weird antagonisms.

I do remember seeing somewhere you mentioning that your practice started with this idea of total collapse, your art as a means for coming to terms with it.

IB: I’m interested in the role that crisis or collapse has in making space for new innovations, transformations of consciousness and as personal/cultural/spiritual evolution, which is a kind of a Jungian/Shamanic perspective. It’s somewhat related to individualist-anarchism as well; like being in a state of constant antagonism/revolt with yourself and the world as structures arise, demanding attack and reform. My work seems very taxonomized, ordered and named, of course, but in reality it definitely feels like it’s totally ephemeral, undefined and on the verge of total collapse.

HolographicUniverse

Can you tell me something about the OYK event?

IB: The new sculpture/project I’m working on for this show is based on the idea of a reverse-engineering process to make sculpture possible, or reverse- swarm funding… I decided on a speculative organisation called ‘The Centre for Youth Consciousness’, which doesn’t and probably won’t exist.

But imagining that it does or could exist, the idea is that the potential for ‘The Centre for Youth Consciousness’ to be a real entity could actually fabricate and lay down the material/conceptual framework for the manufacture of sculpture. This then double flips back upon itself…the sculpture becomes real from the potential of ‘The Centre for Youth Consciousness’ to function. Then it provides an access/gateway to source potential people/entities to actually come together to make ‘The Centre for Youth Consciousness’ a real autonomous thing, which would enhance the legitimacy of the sculpture. But it’s also likely that this won’t happen, so the sculpture is already legitimised/crafted from all of this potential energy and ‘The Centre for Youth Consciousness’ narrative…

It also has all these other conflicting components, because it’s a table sculpture developed for a Mozzarella Bar, which is very weird, I think. But the idea is that it acts as a stealth object, hacking/infecting strange environments and posing as normcore/corporate launch. And yes, it’s also a rare earth sculpture, so it manages to fit within Energy Pangea, in that it does what the other RES’s do…but its like a fragmented narrative. At the same time, the model for working through the rare earth list is pretty solid right now, like I’m likely to do it for the rest of my life. **

cyclanthanumicon

Iain Ball’s OPENYOURKIMONO commission Rare Earth Sculpture ‘Lanthanum’ (2014) launches at Obikà Mozzarella Bar and online at the Centre for Youth Consciousness on September 4, 2014.

Header image: Iain Ball. Courtesy the artist.

 

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