Juneau Projects, 'Gleaners of the Infocaplyse', 2012

Housed in a Georgian mansion, its private gardens and parkland, the Biennial adheres closely to the theme ‘Flights of Fancy’.  Of the Biennial’s curatorial practice, curators Danielle Arnaud and Jordan Kaplan of Parabola described that ‘We have always been at pains to commission artists from a range of backgrounds to create work that challenges and surprises audiences, and to do this in a way that doesn’t alienate our visitors, we develop a strong curatorial rationale, with outreach work, signage, guides and audio tours that can discuss complex work and its inspirations in a manner that welcomes (rather than repels) new audiences’.

Olivier Grossetete, 'Pont de Singe', 2012

Following along these lines, much of the work is easily accessible to a range of audiences. Artist Olivier Grossetete’s Pont de Singe features a suspended bridge over a pond held up by three white helium-filled balloons in the Japanese Garden. The bridge, which is non-functioning, and its balloons, allows the viewer to question the impossibilities of flight.

Brass Art, 'Trine Messenger', 2012

The trio of Manchester and Glagow-based artists who comprise Brass Art created a three-dimensional inflatable sculpture of a seven metre-long head titled Trine Messenger. Inspired by classical images of the god of sleep, the Surrealist work is situated on an inaccessible patch of grass on the far side of a small pond. Brass Art developed the contours of the sculpture’s face based upon a series of biomedical facial scans and used these blueprints to create a three-dimensional sculpture.

Other works included in the exhibition also commented on the impossibility of human flight and are scattered throughout the private garden, park and mansion house.

Tatton Park Biennial is on until 30^th September 2012.

Words Carol Huston

Photography Clara Casian

Photo courtesy of FutureEverything

Formerly FutureSonic, FutureEverything returns for a seventeenth year to Manchester this 16^th through 19^th of May 2012. Celebrating innovative technologies, this year the arts, music and ideas festival focuses on heightened connectivity that exists within our increasingly participatory culture.

FutureEverything features new media artworks from fifty-two international artists which will be on display until 10^th June at the Museum of Science and Industry in Castlefield. The exhibition includes a digital reproduction of a hundred dollar bill by Aaron Koblin and Takashi Kawashima, constructed through the labour of 10,000 microworkers. The live music line-up includes forty-five musicians and leans towards the digitally-slanted and experimental. Of particular interest is Dieter Moibus’ improvised score for the 1927 film ‘Metropolis’ in St Philips’ Church in Salford on 17^th May. For this year’s two-day conference, the Icelandic MP Birgitta Jónsdóttir and former volunteer for Wikileaks will be the headlining speaker.  The conference features seventy speakers as well as a mass participatory experiment celebrating Alan Turing’s legacy.

Corridor8 will be reviewing the festival in the coming week.

FutureEverything 2012, 16 – 19 May 2012, Manchester, http://futureeverything.org

Download brochure and timetables here.

For more information about the event, which is being held during the FutureEverything Festival, see here.

Victoria Baths, Hathersage Road, Manchester, M13 0FE

Hope to see you there!

'Maybe you can live on the moon in the next century', 2009 © Fiona Rae; Courtesy, The Pace Gallery, New York; Timothy Taylor Gallery, London

Continuing the city’s courtship of the YBAs, Fiona Rae is the latest artist of that generation to be exhibited at Leeds Art Gallery, following recent solo shows by Gary Hume and Damien Hirst. The exhibition of Rae’s work, titled Maybe you can live on the moon in the next century, brings together a selection of seventeen paintings made within the last ten years.

Rae is known for her vibrant and densely painted canvases, which she has been creating for over two decades. Throughout her career, Rae’s vision has remained singular and idiosyncratic, and the works on display in Leeds pay testimony to this.

In her works, Rae deploys a dizzying array of painterly techniques and abstract gestures, combining thick, sloppy brush-smears with sleek graphic motifs, detailed cartoon figures, and calligraphic lines. All is rendered with a palette of intensely lurid colour. This gleeful abundance of forms, colours, and gestures, comes together in a heady mix, to almost nauseating effect. Rae’s claustrophobic and cluttered canvases achieve a visual overload, never allowing the eye to rest. Instead we cannot help but flit from one alluring form to the next, from a day-glo explosion to an intricate floral motif. In these dense, palimpsestic paintings, each constituent part competes and overlaps with the next. In one work, rainbow strands of paint jostle for space alongside cartoon pandas. In another, bright painterly marks become engulfed by a splash of black dripping down the canvas.

‘The woman who can do self-expression will shine through all eternity’, 2010 © Fiona Rae; Courtesy, Buchmann Galerie, Berlin; Timothy Taylor Gallery, London

Through painting, Rae creates immersive and highly personal worlds, with each canvas having a atmosphere uniquely its own. The works appear dream-like and hallucinatory in their ambiguity of space. Familiar forms fuse together to create worlds that are unfamiliar and alien, where space becomes intangible and otherworldly. In certain works there is a sense of the cosmic or planetary, as brightly coloured forms float in front of darkly rendered backgrounds. Rae’s use of ‘cutesy’ imagery, such as cartoon animals and flowers, evokes childlike worlds of fantasy, bringing touches of sweetness to the violent chaos of her compositions.

Rae’s canvases swell with such excess of energy and colour that to appreciate the overwhelming multiplicity contained within these works, they must be seen in the flesh.

Fiona Rae: Maybe you can live on the moon in the next century is on display at Leeds Art Gallery from today until 26^th August 2012.

Alice Miller is a History of Art postgraduate and writer based in Leeds, currently working at the Henry Moore Institute.

Ben Jeans Houghton’s work Coping With Theandor is only a partial extract – but you can download the whole story here. Just click on the link below….

Coping With Theandor by Ben Jeans Houghton

Our guest speaker on Friday will be Roger Luckhurst, professor of modern and contemporary literature at Birkbeck College, University of London. Roger’s talk will revisit Richard Kostelanetz’s seminal art and writing publication Breakthrough Fictioneers (1973), featured in Part 2 (see below), and reflect on the contemporary state of the aesthetic avant-garde.

If you would like to attend the launch in Sheffield on Friday 30 March please RSVP to: rhiannon@satchelcommunications.co.uk

The event starts at 6pm and finishes at 8pm.

Copies of the publication will be on sale, in which we continue our coverage of the North of England’s contemporary visual art scene, this issue sending our writers and cameraman to the region’s artist-led spaces – The NewBridge Project (Newcastle), Platform A i(Middlesbrough), S1 Artspace (Sheffield), Project Space (Leeds), Rogue Studios’ Project Space and Malagras|Naudet (Manchester), The Royal Standard (Liverpool) and Supercollider (Blackpool).

Sheffield is our featured city, and artist and Guardian writer Robert Clark profiles the city in which he has worked and lived for the past — years, while New York’s Jan Herman writes about Richard Kostelanetz, the subject of our pull-out supplement Re-Reading Breakthrough Fictioneers. This short anthology, edited by Bryony Bond and containing works by Anna Barham, Pavel Büchler, David Osbaldeston, Imogen Stidworthy, Charlotte Morgan, Ben Jeans Houghton, Carol Mavor, Roger Luckhurst and Richard Kostelanetz, is Corridor8’s special homage to the 1973 publication.

Monica Biagioli: Speak Through, Untitled Gallery, Manchester

Tucked away in the basement of an early nineteenth century building is Untitled Gallery in central Manchester. The gallery’s current exhibition ‘Speak Through’ features a collection of newly-commissioned works by London-based artist Monica Biagioli. Cradled by the small, narrow space with white brick walls, the intimate exhibition is composed of four textual-sculptural works and a large, free-standing sculpture.

The sprawling installation of a PVC pipe sculpture, Before Charge (2012),  recalls the mid-twentieth century sculptures of Anthony Caro and Eduardo Paolozzi. Painted white with a thin green veneer, the structure unveils what is usually hidden out of sight. Through this exposure, Before Charge references a tenet of New Brutalist architecture which was characterised by the exposure of functional elements such as pipes and air ducts. Hidden speakers inside the pipes ends emanate spoken word – one side recounting the legend of Alderley in Cheshire and the other apparently giving a recitation of Jungian archetypes.

The accompanying four works are mounted words written in cursive and composed of lead. Using templates carved by hand, Biagioli poured molten lead into the moulds to create text, which she then mounted and framed. At once light-hearted and serious, the text works imply the lead of a pencil which has been expanded onto a surface. The work Prostitute Magician Veiled Child Her Visibility Collapsed (2012) suggests concrete poetry with its emphasis on the visual rather than the textual and its invitation of multiple readings. Using Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious as a point of reference, Biagioli selected words to highlight the various archetypes Jung describes, such as the Wise Old Man, the Hero and the Child. The lead works Avenger (2012) and Vampire Weaver (2012) add to this list of archetypes, emphasising the artist’s interest in fairy tales and mythology.

‘Speak Through’ is on view at Untitled Gallery from 17 March – 28 April 2012

Carol Huston

The Arka Group, Extramission, 2011, 19 minutes

Extramission by The Arka Group (Ben Jeans Houghton and Matthew Giraudeau) is a sequence of snippets taken from a biology professor’s ill-fated research expedition made in 1992. It combines scientific footage of wildlife and tropical scenes, with a voiceover of his secretary, who narrates the circumstances behind the tapes sent back by the professor from an increasingly erratic excursion. The vivid imagery is documentary-like, but acute observations of nature and wildlife are occasionally broken by the professor protagonist shaking branches and encouraging insects to act in front of the camera. The narration describes the professor’s increasingly irrational behaviour and the growing lack of objective distance to his subject matter. The final title sequence concludes the story, stating that the professor never returned to University and the tapes remain the only evidence of his final research trip. In discussion with Houghton it transpired that the tapes were actually found by himself and Matthew, and the narrative constructed from their initial viewing of the footage, watching hours and hours of exotic wildlife to finally see the filmmaker step into shot. The film is beautifully crafted, but the knowledge that the back story is a fiction, opens up a new interpretation of the entire video.

The ARKA group was founded by Ben Jeans Houghton and Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau with the premise of creating a collective of multi disciplinary individuals working toward a collaborative research practice discovering and disseminating information through new visual synergies.

Their latest film The Ocelli can be seen at Spaceinbetween Gallery; London. 03/03/ – 07/04/12

http://www.benjeanshoughton.co.uk
http://www.dekersaint.co.uk/

Kate Liston, Practice Maintaining, 2011, 6:28 minutes

Kate Liston’s short film is a fast-paced textual narrative that guides the viewer through observations of Stephenson’s Works, the locomotive factory of ‘Rocket’ inventors George and Robert Stephenson. Liston’s film focuses on the little-known fact that George Stephenson was also the inventor of the ‘cucumber straightener’, using a combination of stills and moving images, the imagery seeks out reoccurring parallel lines in the Stepehnson’s Works, the train tracks, double yellow lines outside the works, the thick walls of the glass straightener. The disjointed pace as well as the relationship between the string of visuals forces the viewer to read the narrative in a different way – one that challenges a normative structure. Contrasting masculine and feminine forms, Liston playfully juxtaposes a rigid scientific objectivity with her own subjectivity.

Liston has developed a site-responsive practice that combines chance encounters, subjective observations and historical inquiry in equal measure – employing sculpture, video, writing, codes, symbols and structures to map space. Practice Maintaining was made during a CIRCAWorks residency at Stephenson Works, Newcastle.

http://kateliston.com

Diane Guyot, Cable, 2011, 11:56 minutes

Diane Guyot’s anthropological documentary contrasts the idleness of a female restaurant worker with the intense labour of a group of male workers moving an electric cable from under a street in Beijing. The physical struggle of the men becomes more poignant as the film progresses. The lack of subtitles enforces a sense of estrangement separating the non-Mandarin-speaking viewer from the workers on camera. Our incapacity to ease the experience of the workers as well as the viewer’s placement in a voyeuristic position creates an uncomfortable tension between us, the men working and the passers-by.

Guyot is a French artist based in Liverpool. In a quest that she describes as “both poetic and burlesque”, she initiates every work through a naive question. Highlighting the absurdity of everyday situations, Guyot’s varied practice includes drawings, videos, photography, objects and performances.

http://diane-guyot.org/

Clara Casian and Carol Huston.

]]> http://www.corridor8.co.uk/blog/our-favourite-three-films-from-the-north-east-film-screening/feed 0 http://www.corridor8.co.uk/blog/northern-art-prize http://www.corridor8.co.uk/blog/northern-art-prize#comments Sat, 04 Feb 2012 12:05:21 +0000 BryonyBond http://www.corridor8.co.uk/?p=924 Carol Huston analyses the recent announcement of Leo Fitzmaurice as the 2011 Northern Art Prize winner.

Northern Art Prize 2011. Leo Fitzmaurice. Photo David Lindsay

As announced at Leeds Art Gallery, the fifth winner of the Northern Art Prize was Shropshire-born artist Leo Fitzmaurice (born 1963). Besides pronouncing the fact that painting is repeatedly shunned by art judges generally, perhaps the appeal of Fitzmaurice’s work for the prize was its deconstruction of the everyday as part of a greater British legacy which embraces the mundane. Fitzmaurice both used this approach within an institutional context – reworking a gallery space- as well as with the external world – through stills of quotidien urban life.

Since the prize was given to an artist who rethinks the ordinary, perhaps this indicates the North’s regional taste for the familar. Or, perhaps if we may consider the North of England as a burgeoning centre for contemporary British art- the appeal of Fitzmaurice to the panel of judges is that his work recalls a legacy of early to mid- twentieth century idiosyncratically British art.

Northern Art Prize 2011, Leo Fitzmaurice. Photo David Lindsay

Namely, coming to mind is the work of the British Surrealists of the 1930s whose works emphasised landscapes and the Independent Group of the 1950s who reenvisioned the influx of a new postwar media landscape. For example, Independent Group photographer Nigel Henderson captured ordinary urban scenes of Bethnal Green in  a postwar East London. Further to a reworking of the everyday, Fitzmaurice’s selected works from the Leeds Art Gallery’s collection focus on landscape – which too was a predominant preoccupation for the British strand of Surrealism.

The Way Things Appear. Leo Fitzmaurice

The most simultaneously retrospective and contemporary aspect, however, of Fitzmaurice’s exhibition was his digital slide presentation The Way Things Appear. This series of photographic stills – taken with the artist’s mobile phone- recalls Paolozzi’s 1952 BUNK presentation to a live audience of collaged magazine cut-outs using an overhead projector.

Other nominees for the prize included abstract painter James Hugonin, who is featured in Corridor8 issue 3 part 1, Richard Rigg, who was nominated as the public’s winner, and Liadin Cooke who uses natural materials to create organic works.

The Northern Art Prize  exhibition continues at Leeds Art Gallery until 19 February 2012.

Robert Casselton Clark’s solo show at North Gallery, Northumbria University opens this Friday, 3 February 2012.

Artist, writer and a regular contributor to The Guardian, Robert is contributing an article on Sheffield, the city he’s worked in for the past 25 years, to the March edition of Corridor8.

A Silence That Never Was is an exhibition of three work-in-progress installations from the last three years, including a new work, The Catechism of the Goddamned Saints is a multiple-piece mixed-media installation of lyrical evocations. Photographs, watercolours, drawings and poetic fragments portray the sites of visitation, the apparitions, reflections and responses. For a link to the gallery’s website click here.