These days it would appear that anything can be curated and anything is a gallery. It might just be that as the art world expands, so does the cultural lexicon. In the same way that ‘like’ and ‘friend’ can mean one of several things, so too can a credit card become an art space.
Hence, the ever prolific and ingenious Anthony Antonellis and his Credit Card Curation, which this month features artist Faith Holland and her Sadie Plant-inspired “feminine zero”. Its suggestive hues and hypnotic movement is an image of those Western gender stereotypes and binaries that evidently won’t die with 1 and 0s of the internet. And if you have any doubt as what this images is suggestive of just check out the abstract porn site from whence it came.
Maurice Carlin’s Performance Publishing happens live, in front of an audience that can at anytime be made up of online spectators, selected writers, or visitors to a former furniture warehouse based in Salford, Greater Manchester. Slowly but surely the artist spreads CYMK paints, associated with the colours used in newspaper printing, with a weggee, across thick pieces of paper, laid out on an industrial floor. Peppered with characterful cracks and pale colours, the prints bring to mind Abstract Expressionism in their aesthetic but in truth are a very real documentation of the space in which they were created. Side by side, mapped out across the huge floor, they make up a pattern across the space, which reveals subtle variation, as well as the possibilities such a space can offer an artist.
Travelling into Salford, the site of derelict buildings meets you head on. And it’s inevitable that the context of the performance, in the sense of the scale of the area to work in at the Regent Trading Estate, will play on the mind. Far from the extortionate rents of London, where artists cram into tight spaces, building in floors to accommodate their friends or bedrooms, room for expansive projects is a possibility. Yet, at the same time, this is a totally connected project, accessible from around the world, with a live feedback channel, that gives spectators a chance to comment on the process of production in front of their eyes. In response, Carlin shapes the layout of the work into a triangular ‘v’ that matches the perspective of one of the camera views, while the other peers over his shoulder as he works.
Having already worked on a project titled The Self-Publisher, gathering refuse photocopying from various shops in different cities, stapling them into ready-made zines full of anecdotes, such as exercise routines or CVs, this project carries on that idea of gathering locally-sourced information. It’s a basic publishing production technique but, most importantly for Carlin, it’s also a moment when there is a literal transfer of information.
In ‘Screenscans Havana 14’30’ (2012) Carlin switches on a handheld scanner before moving it slowly back-and-forth over the charged surface of a television screen. The work then produces a single-angled, black and white storyboard, crashing narratives from various channels across the screen, and flattening them into one continuous glitch. In short, Carlin takes an interest in the importance of surfaces, the mechanisms that produce those surfaces, and the way in which we interact with them. In his own work he pushes all of these to the extreme. One of his simplest and most effective demonstrations of this is creating relief prints off street walks for on-looking passers-by.
In Performance Publishing, printing, production and distribution all happen at once. A very close interaction with one surface becomes captured information, disseminated to a global audience, across screens and the artist is brought to life as the medium through which an audience interacts with one and the other.**
Curated by Bea de Souza of The Agency Gallery, an open ended study of Korean multimedia artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, A Portrait in Fragments, will run at London’s Korean Cultural Centre, from September 24 to October 26. Featuring works and notes from her career, Theresa Cha’s life was cut tragically short in 1982, just days after the publication of her influential “auto-ethnography”, Dictée, which notably experimented across hypertext, juxtaposition, images and more.
Other contemporary artists, including Ruth Barker, Sujin Lee, Jefford Horrigan and Bada Song, will also be contributing to the exhibition, expanding on those questions around performance and film, Feminism and the ‘East meets West’ dialectic that Theresa Cha’s fragmented body of work provokes.**
Delightfully-titled exhibition space and barbershop conversion Videofag is presenting a one-night survey of Net artist Jennifer Chan‘s work tonight, August 14, in Toronto. She’s been based in a bunch of places but mainly lives on the internet, exploring its infrastructure and how that shapes our increasingly Net-dependent lives.
Kitsch, funny and critical of contemporary online culture, it’s worth a look if you’re in there area. If not we recommend check out her work where she lives.
As galleries around the Northern hemisphere close up for the Summer, Ceri Hand Gallerywill be filling the gap with their inaugural Summer Fete, on Saturday, August 17. It features stalls and works for sale for under £250, from over 50 artists, including Deuce Deuce, Sophie Jung, Hannah Perry and Yangjiang Group.
ESP (Extra Special People), Eastside Projects and Grand Union (Birmingham) will be running a special gallery stall, while artist performances and games, from Tombola and a six hour anarchy badge production line to “Curatorial agony aunt service” and a cake in the likeness of gallery owner Ceri Hand. With food and refreshments, interactive poster games and a solo show in a BMW, this is a fête not to be missed.
There’s not much in terms of information on what to expect but we do like the artists featured and there’s this little blurb caught up in its own masculinity to draw from (below), which would explain the percievably (but one should never assume) all-male line-up:
“Be decisive.
A man should know what he wants from the start.
Decisiveness is an important characteristic that can take you far in life. Be it in the area of work, money or just going on a date, your decisiveness shows confidence and your ability to take charge of situations. Be firm and fluent.
A real man states what he wants with authority. Relax.
A real man doesn’t throw his weight around. Be considered yet confident.”
bubblebyte.org‘s Il Bardo di Timperley is a collaborative exhibition and online moving image collage featuring 16 artists from around the world, including Angelo Plessas, Constant Dullart, Rhys Coren and more.
Running for over a month, from September 9 to October 20, moving image art works will be added to the bubblebyte.org site every few days, slowly building on and revealing a larger collaborative work in the form of a collage. The finished piece will be unveiled at this year’s Art Licks Weekend, a three day initiative presenting emerging creative talent in London (running October 4 to 6), with bubblebyte.org representing digital arts.
Launched on July 26, Auto Italia‘s Recent Work by Artists is a collaborative project investigating the modern artist’s working space. Running until September 28, the exhibition features “installation, image production, office design, events and a catalogue” from Tim Ivison, Julia Tcharfas, George Moustakas and Rachel Pimm.
They explore working conditions that are always shifting, between the library and the studio, the geography and distractions that doubtless have a direct impact on their output. That’s no more apparent than in an exhibition with its concept founded in these creative processes, which in turn reflects the convergence of distinctions between production, consumption, economy and design, potentially rendering them meaningless. In turn, Auto Italia places itself right at that intersection by blurring the line between art practice and home renovation by landscaping a production space in the Auto Italia site, while hosting events and discussion within it, along with ongoing research “supplemented by refreshments and environmental control selected for productivity”. Clever.
In many ways, Anthea Hamilton’s Let’s Go at Bloomberg Space, is a continuation of the mixed media artist’s recent work at Tate Modern’s The Tankslive venue. Performances of classical Japanese dance theatre, based around the dances of Noh and Kabuki, are acted out, in tandem with the four phases of the moon, against a backdrop of wallpaper featuring Robert Crumb’s American Folk comic art. Bright yellow piping and kimono sculptures hyperlink one culture to another, across disparate narratives from past generations to the present.
With men playing women, novices take on Kabuki’s bizarre costumes and make-up, or Noh’s rigorous day-long plays. Performed by Jordan John-Hope and Gervais Cedric Bitijoka, the setup faces out onto Finsbury Square, clashing not only traditional choreography, in the form of gestures and footwork, but also the reflective bright-yellow lines and some of the underlying xenophobia that Crumb’s densely cross-hatched depictions of African-American women represent.
Key to this is juxtaposition. Movement, scale, materiality and narrative come together, all at once. Before, Hamilton used ultra-thin cutouts of figures like John Travolta or Karl Lagerfeld to tempt us into exploring the worlds of movie stardom or fashion hedonism head on. Now, the RCA graduate’s theatrical props envelope the viewer into the scenery with orchestrated precision. A photograph of the forest monumentally covers the walls up to the high ceiling, striped over with bold orange and black blocks of colour, only to be broken up by a snide, beefy-hairy Crumb cartoon character, casually crossing between both scenes.
Anthea Hamilton, Let’s Go (2013).
All of this is Hamilton’s attempt to get closer to a situation where work can be touched and interacted with. Differences in form and scale are meant to disorient a visitor; tension binds them to the place, while breaks in the installation keep a conventional way of viewing objects out of sight. Vistas in the space control views. Dramatic entrances keep the viewer unsettled. Even the sound of your shoes hitting the black tiled ground is a conscious effort to make ideas click.
Previously, Hamilton immersed herself in video, literally playing onscreen personas, in what was a form of self-portraiture. Though they never made it into her final portfolio, they mark some of the thinking behind her move to three-dimensional objects. Here, it’s possible to go beyond the limit of appropriating existing film clips spliced with home movies, to situations where a spectator can be involved and self-initiated action can take place, while still connecting with Hamilton’s personal narrative through physical images in a performance space.
An essential evolution in Hamilton’s work, absent from this display, is the Chroma-key backdrop. The blue paint, usually to be found on video TV productions like the weather report, creates neutral spaces, blanker than a white cube, giving an aura of a film set (especially with a few celebrity cut-outs for company). But in Let’s Go, thephotographic wallpaper of a rural backdrop stands in their place, clearly setting the scene into which the viewer is invited. And if much of the narrative doesn’t immediately make sense, it’s simply because Hamilton makes no excuses for a work that’s a personal exploration of its own art-historical references. Let’s Go feels raw, unfinished and with that comes a real energy, a feeding of contemporary art’s constant flux between diverging cultures.
Sprung from a conversation between Philippe and Frédérique Valentin and artist Luca Francesconi, Art of Living at Galerie Valentin, running from June 20 to July 27, looks at the objects that surrounds as an expression of our experience and hence, ourselves. Featuring work by artists Lupo Borgonovo, Sonia Kacem, Emanuele Marcuccio, Katja Novitskova, Timur Si-Qin and Anicka Yi, alongside a series of interviews on object by Francesconi, the show attempts to turn those objects into art, into a life narrative.
Incidentally, we interviewed Netherlands-based contributor Novitskova as she was preparing for the exhibition with her material experiments and, in opening on the same day as another show in Amsterdam, her ‘Shapeshifter 1’ was made from the material she wasn’t extremely allergic to. See the gallery for images. **
In the spirit of activism, each artist and collective explores globalisation, gentrification and artistic collusion across installation and sculpture, print and literature. Read our review of the show here. **
For anyone based in New York, Jogging‘s Soon exhibition at The Still House ends this Friday, June 14. Running since Friday, May 24, the show explores ideas of impermanence in the face of impending environmental catastrophe, with recurring motifs of water, from camo-patterned fish nailed to the wall to hydrophobic glass installations, as the collective announces, “We are potentially the first generation of people to begin making down payments on a hellacious environmental check that has long been deferred.”
In a recent interview with aqnb, Finnish artist Jaakko Pallasvuo noted the collective’s use of image as performance to give new weight to what he considers to be the poor image’s devaluation in a state of overproduction. That element of endless manufacture and the disintegration that results from it is here again reflected through some bitter humour pervading a cynical outlook in the face of an economy and consumer culture that is reaching terminal velocity and hurtling toward human extinction. See more images on the Jogging website. **
