Lemniscate - Žilvinas Kempinas

I'm gripped; mesmerised; in awe of the beauty of a loop of magnetic tape snaking round in a figure of eight as it is propelled by two fans. It prompts me to reflect on what it's like to be in an effective partnership; each half doing its bit to help the other half; pulling its weight, so to speak, working in tandem, a pair, a team. As one diminishes, the other steps in.

https://www.zilvinaskempinas.com/work#/lemniscate-2007/

Eduardo Paolozzi General Dynamic F.U.N

My thanks go to Rob Blazey for sharing this video with me.




Eduardo Paolozzi General Dynamic F.U.N. from Gordon Beswick on Vimeo.

Collage Drawing (It will get easier)

https://youtu.be/lrbR-OsSLNI

Emma Hart: BANGER at The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh

The Fruitmarket Gallery is one of my favourite galleries. I rarely leave disappointed, whether that be due to the reliably top class exhibitions or the excellent range of art and culture publications available in the shop. Located right next to Edinburgh Waverley train station, it is often my first point of call on any trip up to the Scottish capital. My recent visit was no exception. 

I had no prior knowledge of the work of Emma Hart, and this made for an excellent treat. I was immediately attracted visually to the sculptural installation that greeted me in the downstairs gallery. 

"The exhibition presents two bodies of work that represent the most recent developments in her artistic practice: Mamma Mia! (2017), a major installation made following a residency in Italy awarded as part of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women that Hart won in 2016; and a group of new sculptures collectively titled BANGER (2018) made since Mamma Mia! and in response both to it and to the space of The Fruitmarket Gallery.

Mamma Mia! (2017), consists of ten large ceramic objects which hang from the ceiling, while an eleventh lies sidelong on the floor. The objects simultaneously resemble heads, upturned measuring jugs and lamps. They are glossy and monochrome, and project large speech bubbles onto the floor, some of them periodically sliced through by the shadows of ceiling fans made of oversized cutlery. As you move around and under the forms you become aware that the interior of each is a riot of intensely coloured, highly inventive pattern. The patterns used, ranging from the violent to the humorous, suggest the cyclical nature of anxieties and addictions, as well as the habitual repetitions of everyday life.

  

Upstairs in BANGER, viewers are faced with Just Because You’re Paranoid Doesn’t Mean They Aren’t After You. Headlights in a rear-view mirror, the work has you projecting forward and looking back, thinking about what’s behind you before you turn left into the rest of the space. And when you do turn, you find yourself face to face with the first in a series of four double-sided sculptures, car windscreens that stand, like road signs, around the gallery. On one side – the outside – you see into the inside of a car. On the other – the inside – you look out to the outside. The sculptures are made from handmade ceramic tiles, closely tessellated in such a way that the same shapes make different images on each side.



The four major sculptures, Green Light, Give Way, Wipe Out and X, are joined by others that direct and affect how you navigate the space – peering at and under the car bonnet of Fix Up; standing square onto the steering wheels of Race You to the Bottom; moving past Gatecrasher, both a safety barrier and a drawing of a car that seems to have crashed into the gallery wall; and tracking the movement of the woman of Wind Down as she winds herself face first down into the gutter and receives a splash in the face.

Throughout the gallery, visual and verbal puns bring things together and apart, both simplifying and complicating your looking as you ’get’ – or maybe struggle to get – the idea. Multiple ways of looking at each sculpture emerge the more you look. This shift in viewpoints plays out in the dual meaning of words like viewpoint and perspective, which are both about actual processes of looking and also about one’s worldview."

I was fascinated to discover that Mamma Mia! is the result of a residency in Italy in which she had "access to lessons about the Milan Systems Approach, a systemic and constructivist method of family therapy at the Scuola Mara Selvini Palazzoli which involves physical re-enactments and the study of repeated actions. The body of work is the culmination of an investigation into pattern, from visual patterns to patterns of psychological behaviour. The work also looks at the design and rupture of pattern and the ruminations in between."

http://www.emmahart.info/HartBanger2018.html

http://www.emmahart.info/

https://www.whitechapelgallery.org/about/press/max-mara-art-prize-women-emma-hart/

Joseph Grigely

I was recently introduced to the work of Joseph Grigely, an American artist who works in a range of media including sculpture, video and installation. When Grigely was ten he was involved in an accident and he became profoundly deaf. He has since used this to fuel his artistic practice, commenting that he “want[s] to take people inside the experience of being deaf and share it with them.”




St. Cecilia 2007, paper

Grigely regularly communicates with other people by writing on scraps of paper and napkins. He collects these records of his daily conversations, and organises them according to different systems such as their size or colour.




167 White Conversations 2004
© Joseph Grigely

"When people who do not know sign language talk with me, I explain that I am deaf and ask them to write – a mode of communication that is simple without being simplistic, and generally inclusive. But what gets written is often quite unlike writing in the usual sense: there are gaps, crossed-out words, drawing, lines, all of which looks less like writing that it does talking on paper. It is by using these scraps of paper on which people have written notes, names, or phrases in order to 'converse' with me that I make much of my art, using such scraps of conversations to make wall pieces, books, and table-top tableaux that all take as their subject matter the ineluctable differences between speech and writing, and reading and listening."



The Information Economy, 1996, mixed media


https://www.artsy.net/artist/joseph-grigely

https://www.wnewhouseawards.com/josephgrigely.html

https://scpt209.wordpress.com/2012/10/22/joseph-grigely/

Taus Makhacheva and Tigran Geletsyan at Blackburne House as part of Liverpool Biennial

"Blackburne House, located in Liverpool’s vibrant Georgian Quarter, was the home of the first girl’s school in the country. The beautiful Grade II listed building is now a home for women’s education with services including a health spa, nursery and bistro. Blackburne house also hosts conferences and events, ensuring a space in the city for events that champion the voices of local women.



Taus Makhacheva has created a ruin-like sculptural installation that serves as a spa, in collaboration with artist Alexander Kutovoi. The installation incorporates ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) techniques and video. A new range of beauty products has been developed with Tigran Geletsyan from 22|11 Cosmetics for spa treatments. Throughout the Biennial, visitors are invited to book a facial treatment, which will be conducted by a performer and take approximately 30 minutes. In this passive state, the visitor becomes a sculptural subject. During the treatment, stories about artworks that have disappeared throughout the history of art will be told. The work reflects on our contemporary condition, dominated by screens and membranes, anxiety and loss of intimacy."

Visitors are able to be in the space to watch the facial treatments taking place. I arrived shortly after someone had left, so saw the performer clearing up. There were a couple of sculptures that contained a video screen. The audio was that which is spoken by the performer as they give the facial treatment, and so even though there was no treatment taking place during my visit, I was still able to be guided through the stories.

It was only afterwards, when I was talking to the performer, that I realised that this was the case. I had not been aware that the voice on the video was from the performer's perspective. I had also presumed that the person giving the treatment was a trained professional, and my thoughts about the work altered when I found out that performers were being used (there were 2 performers that shared the workload throughout the festival). I felt uneasy about someone 'pretending' to be a therapist.

Land Sand Strand by Suki Seokyeong Kang at Bluecoat as part of Liverpool Biennial

'Conceived as a visual translation of the Korean musical notation ‘Jeongganbo’, Land Sand Strand is a new multi-part installation by Suki Seokyeong Kang. The work transforms the exhibition space into a grid. 

Building on the concept of the hwamunseok – a traditional Korean woven mat, interpreted as the minimum space provided for each individual in society – it is activated by performers and the audience. 

The choreography, inspired by the Spring Oriole Dance and traditionally performed on the hwamunseok, is shared with visitors. 

The movements on the mat serve as the blueprint for the wider installation consisting of painting, sculpture and video.'

I found Suki Seokyeong Kang's installation at Bluecoat a visual delight. 

I took pleasure from the formal qualities in the work; the subtle use of colours and the combination of traditional Korean materials along with painting, sculpture and video. 

I appreciated the way that the video transformed my understanding of the work presented in the gallery space; static elements are activated through movement and sound.

'Suki Seokyeong Kang (b. 1977, Seoul, South Korea) lives and works in Seoul. Kang deploys various media including installation and video to seek a synesthetic expansion of painting. 





Through movement and rhythm, she creates an environment that guides the direction of her painting, which she uses like a visual musical score. 

Her practice is situated between the abstract and figurative, the organic and geometric, creating a visual language of balance and harmony.'

Themselves Here Together at The Word

Preview: Thursday 10 May, 4-7pm

Performance at 6pm

Exhibition open: Sunday 13 May - Thursday 21 June 2018

Join artist Helen Shaddock as she incorporates video, sound and performance in her latest exhibition, Themselves Here Together – part of Voices: Within and Without.

Helen uses her personal experience of mental illness to inform her work and seeks to immerse the audience in multi-layered psychological and physical situations.

Themselves Here Together will be on exhibit in StoryWorld from Sunday 13 May to Thursday 21 June.

Please note: the exhibition will be on display at the following times:

• Monday – Thursday: 4–6.30pm
• Sundays: 1–4pm

ABOUT HELEN SHADDOCK

Helen Shaddock’s audio visual installation is the culmination of a project funded by the Arts Council England Grants for the Arts in which she is has worked with other voice hearers, artists, researchers, academics and Mental Health organisations to investigate visual and auditory hallucinations.

New test projections at The Word

When I last visited The Word a number of days ago to investigate the technological setup, I was shown how, without appropriate masking or shaping of the video, the projection would spill onto the floor and ceiling. I was able to obtain the template used to make photographs fit the screens, and have spent the past week trying to figure out how to apply the template to videos.

 

After a few attempts that were in the right direction, but not quite right, one of the technical team at The Word discovered a fairly straightforward method to follow using Photoshop. I followed his instructions using the templates for each wall and exported 5 versions of a test video, one each for walls 1, 2 and 3, and two videos for walls 4. He kindly tried projecting the test videos in the Story World space, and sent me these photographs to confirm that applying the templates to the videos had been successful. I will follow this method when exporting my final videos.

Testing projections at The Word

On Friday I visited The Word to do some technical research in preparation towards my forthcoming exhibition in the Story World area of The Word.

Story World is a white space with four slightly curved walls and four projectors that project onto each of the four walls to create an immersive environment.

I had prepared a number of videos and still images with different aspect ratios and wanted to establish which format would be the best for the room, and whether I would need to create masks in order to avoid any of the projections bleeding onto the wall or floor.

The image above was an animation made on clear 16mm film stock. The colours were not as vibrant as I had expected, possibly because the room is not totally dark. There was some bleed on the floor, and when the projection went to the ceiling, the projector shadow was visible.

I also noticed that the edges of the shapes in the animation did not seem as crisp as they appear on the original film, but this will be because of the amount that the image has been enlarged by.

The image below shows a projection of an animation that I made using the black 16mm film strip.

The image above shows a panoramic view of the 3 walls with the same projection on.

In these images, the projections with the hexagonal patterns have been applied with a template so that the top part of the wall is not projected on. This eliminates the shadow from the projector from being in sight. The other wall with the black film image still has the bleed on the floor, but the image goes all the way to the top of the wall.

These show the projection with the template applied reducing bleed to the ceiling and floor.

My mission now is to decide what I prefer and create an appropriate template for my footage prior to creating the video file to be projected. Wish me luck!

No Niceties contributing artist - Rosie O'Grady

Rosie O'Grady's contribution to the No Niceties exhibition was a short video titled Job Seeker. 

Rosie O’Grady lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland. She graduated from Glasgow School of Art and University of Glasgow with an MLitt Curatorial Practice (Contemporary Art) in 2015, and from Glasgow School of Art with a BA(Hons) Fine Art (Painting & Printmaking) in 2013. O'Grady was selected for a Graduate Residency at Hospitalfield (2015) and was awarded a special commendation as a Finalist in Saatchi’s New Sensations (2013). She was a committee member at Market Gallery between August 2014 - August 2016 and recently worked as Programme Coordinator at Glasgow Sculpture Studios.



"The video Job seeker responds to the biographical snapshots and colourful designs of Helen Shaddock's publication A lot can happen in fifteen minutes. Advertised job titles flash in succession over footage of rock pools, fluorescent buoys, and seaweed-clad boats. These coastal scenes operate like stock imagery of a beach holiday, although the hand-held camera, white skies and water surface – unsettled by high winds – bely a reality altogether less glossy and tropical."



"The role titles for jobs in various fields and industries briefly become suggested narratives, characters or extracted insights into a range of daily experiences."



"The accounts of simultaneous anxiety and absurdity within Shaddock's publication are mimicked in the video through the pace at which it offers a diverse selection of career paths to an accompanying soundtrack of song introductions relating to freedom, the weekend and a reluctance to work nine 'til five."



For more information about Rosie O'Grady's work, please visit her website: www.rosieogrady.co.uk (currently under maintenance)

No Niceties Contributing Artists - Jez Riley French & Pheobe Riley Law

'not much is a lot that can happen in fifteen minutes. its a question of scale & position'

the sound of 15 spaces that fit inside 7.1 x 4.8m

its possible to hear inaction, we don’t listen (really)

in each minute so much is happening     breaking narrative

a story often says ‘here, this happened’
a story doesn’t often say ‘all this happened’

its a matter of scale and position

'not much is a lot that can happen in fifteen minutes. its a question of scale & position'

Jez riley French (b. 1965)

working primarily with sound, photography and video, Jrf is particularly associated with developing extended field recording and listening techniques as a key element of sound art and performance, alongside photographic scores and work involving various other media. His work has been exhibited and performed widely in various countries inc. at Tate Modern & Tate Britain here in the UK.

Pheobe riley Law (b. 1997)

my work explores play, digital folklore, psychogeography, the curated space (physical, audible and psychological) and aspects of nurtured personality - I currently explore with photography, text, video and performance