Wednesday 23 November 2011

GSA video Archive

The entire GSA Video Archive is now at:
http://www.gsa.ac.uk/visit-gsa/video-archive/

The GSA Archive has grown to include 84 videos of public lectures and events organised by The Glasgow Urban Lab, Architecture Friday Lectures, Fine Art Friday Events, Exhibitions talks and events, and more!

You can now watch the entire series of Architecture Friday Lectures from 2010-11 and various Friday Event lectures dating from 2006-11 – including notable talks by architect Steven Holl, artist and kinetic sculptor Susumu Shingu, designer Ben Kelly, artist and GSA graduate Christine Borland, artist and GSA graduate Roddy Buchanan, Urban Lab lecturer Graeme Evans, artist Martha Rosler, and more! There are two talks each featuring Roger Wilson and Thomas Joshua Cooper, a fantastic research presentation by Alistair MacDonald, and two talks by recent UK Fullbright Distinguished Chair Ann Markusen.

Here is the very impressive full list of all that can be viewed:

Mackintosh School of Architecture Friday Lecture Series
2011
11 Mar Rick Mather, Rick Mather Architects Recent Projects
04 Mar Prof Robert Tavernor, LSE Cities Visualising the City
25 Feb Alan Pert, NORD Architecture Future Nostalgia
04 Feb Charlotte Frank, Schultes Frank Architekten The Lightness of Stone
28 Jan Neil Porter, Gustafson Porter Contemporary Landscape Design
21 Jan Jonathan Sergison, Sergison Bates Architects Concept Construction
14 Jan Julian Lewis, East Adjusting Places
07 Jan Emanuel Christ, Christ + Gantenbein Architekten Plans

2010
26 Nov Wiel Arets, Wiel Arets Architects Recent Projects
19 Nov Tom Emerson, 6a Architects We Were Never Modern
12 Nov Jonathon Woodroffe, S333 Architecture + Urbanism Projective Cities
22 Oct Stephen Witherford, Witherford Watson Mann Architects London Edges - The Adaptive City
15 Oct David Kohn, David Kohn Architects Jujitsu Urbanism
08 Oct Jonathan Speirs, Speirs Major Associates Light: Dark: Creativity
01 Oct Frank Barkow, Barkow Leibinger Architekten Digital Kraftwerk

Friday Event Lectures
2011
11 Mar Roderick Buchanan From USA '94 to London 2012
04 Mar Richard Layzell Falling Phoebe
04 Feb Louise Welsh Robert Louis Stevenson and the Theatre of the Brain

2010
26 Nov Madelon Hooykaas Revealing the Invisible
19 Nov Sonia Boyce LEAP into uncertainty
12 Nov Vanessa Place Notes on Conceptualism
29 Oct Professor Ann Markusen Creative Placemaking
22 Oct Eamonn McCann Putting the wrongs of the Northern Ireland conflict to rights
15 Oct Christine Borland SimBodies, NoBodies & Me
08 Oct Dr. Thomas Röske The Prinzhorn Collection - Past and Present

30 Apr Lewis Biggs Hello? Liverpool Biennial & the Visual Art Ecology of the City
23 Apr Maria Thereza Alves urgent and not so urgent possibilities
05 Mar Ben Kelly Ben Kelly Design: International Orange + Rural Studies
05 Feb Roshini Kempadoo State of Play: Photography, Multimedia and Memory
29 Jan Jimmie Durham The Usual Song and Dance Routine with a few...
15 Jan Steven Holl Recent Works
08 Jan Susumu Shingu How should we live tomorrow?

2009
20 Nov Siobhán Hapaska Artist Talk
27 Nov Mariele Neudecker The Air we Breathe is Invisible
23 Oct Kortney Ryan Ziegler The Creative Intellectual: Troubling the...
02 Oct Chris Wainwright, Thomas Joshua Cooper & Roger Wilson A Conversation Regarding Journeys

20 Mar Tetsuo Kogawa Pirate Aesthetics of the Mini-FM
06 Mar Faith Wilding Cyberfeminism Interrogates Biotechnology...
13 Mar Silvia Ziranek The Z of How
06 Feb Claire Doherty The Event of Situation: Contemporary Art, Place and Time
30 Jan Lauren Dyer Amazeen Art Performance

2008
05 Dec John Morrison Autonomy & Identity : Independent art in Glasgow 1955-1965
28 Nov Ron Broglio Minor Art: Becoming-Animal
14 Nov Martha Rosler Artist's Talk
31 Oct Craig Richardson Landscape as Conceptual Art
24 Oct Thomas Joshua Cooper The World's Edge: The Atlantic Basin Project

25 Apr Melanie Gilligan Recent Writing and Performances
22 Feb John Smith Lecture and Screening
25 Jan Yvonne Spielmann Video: A New Technology & a New Medium
18 Jan Ursula Biemann The Maghreb Connection: Counter-Geographies in the Sahara

2007
23 Nov Joanne Sharp Imagining the Subject of Geopolitics
16 Nov Damian Sutton Time (and) Travel in Television
09 Nov Jan Verwoert From Appropriation to Evocation
26 Oct Hayley Newman Performing Performance
19 Oct Eyal Weizman The Architecture of Occupation (Presentation of 'Hollow Land') (audio only)

02 Mar Chantal Mouffe Agonistic Politics and Artistic Practices
02 Feb Stephen Graham Dreams of Omniscience: Urbanization & the US Revolution in Military Affairs (audio only)

2006
1 Dec Oliver Ressler An Ideal Society Creates Itself (audio only)
24 Nov Andrew Hussey Paris Underground: Reading and Writing the 'Situationist' City
17 Nov Chad McCail Work
27 Oct Simon Starling Autoxylopyrocycloboros (audio only)
20 Oct Michael Albert Realizing Hope: Life Beyond Capitalism

Research Presentations and Collaborative Events
2011
18 May Stephen FarthingThis is Drawing
6 Apr Ann Markusen 'Arts & Culture as Regeneration: Four UK Cities Experiences'
21 Feb Graeme Evans Creative Cities, Creative Spaces? Form and Function
02 Feb Ülar Mark, Toomas Tammis, Martin Aunin, Margit Aule
BOOM. ROOM. New Estonian Architecture
26 Jan Claudia Zeiske with Nuno Sacramento the town is the venue


2010
24 Nov Art and Activism: The Aberdeen Climate9 jury trial
20 Nov Roger Wilson An Art School Perspective
17 Nov The Nine Trades of Dundee
28 Oct Simon Manfield in conversation with Joanne Tatham and Tom O'Sullivan (audio only)
10 Nov Barry Esson Music is about more than just music
06 Oct Henry Coombes Artist's Talk

26 Apr Simon Critchley Symposium: The Infinite Demand of Art
16 Apr Jan Verwoert Why are conceptual artists painting again? Because they think it's a good idea
15 Apr Joseph Leo Koerner Hieronymus Bosch: Enemy Painting
1 Mar Alistair MacDonald Designing with Ageing Populations: UK/Japan research Dialogues

14 Dec 2009
The Mackintosh Symposium Lectures and Panel Discussions
Andy MacMillan The Building as Document
Benedetta Tagliabue Mackintosh and Miralles
Pamela Robertson Mackintosh and Glasgow
Professor William J. R. Curtis Materials of the Imagination : The Glasgow School of Art
The Mackintosh Symposium Morning Panel Discussion - Part 1
The Mackintosh Symposium Afternoon Panel Discussion - Part 2

2008
7 May Chandraguptha ThenuwaraSpaces Giving Shade (audio only)

2006
16 Oct Dan Graham Pavilions

Tuesday 22 November 2011

what to draw

I often have an urge to draw, but then don't know what to draw...

Now I have the solution, kindly suggested by Amy from Pikaland:



genius!

Monday 21 November 2011

Mindy Shapero

My good friend Gary often sends me information about other artists, the most recent being Mindy Shapero who just had an exhibition at Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York.




Breaking Open The Head
September 10 – October 22, 2011


Marianne Boesky Gallery is very pleased to announce Breaking Open The Head, its first solo exhibition of new work by Mindy Shapero. Featuring large sculptures, a grouping of smaller objects, and works on paper, the exhibition locates Shapero's labor-intensive process at an intersection where narrative and formalist impulses collide. In her practice, visual intensity often overrides the very forms it has been used to create, resulting in objects that dare to contradict their reasons for being. Accordingly, Shapero operates in a zone that can be read in relation both to art historical tradition and to outsider tendencies predicated on visionary experience.

The exhibition's title, borrowed from writer Daniel Pinchbeck's treatise on psychedelic shamanism, suggests the otherworldly qualities readily associated with Shapero's work. But it also refers more directly to the head-like forms that recur throughout the show. The head functions here as a primary symbolic representation of imaginative flux. When it is 'broken open,' it is revealed as a profoundly physical thing that has the paradoxical ability to transcend the physical plane –– by thinking, dreaming, and hallucinating.

This can be seen clearly in three new sculptures that treat the head as a state of becoming and/or dissolution. In one, a large shell-like form has been filled with small pieces of cut paper arranged into swirling rows; before cutting the paper, Shapero paints each sheet black so that hints of its original color can only be seen at the edges. While peering into the piece can feel like staring into a limitless void, upon further viewing it becomes apparent that its shape is in fact based on a giant face, and new questions about what it depicts begin to arise. Looking itself is treated as an ongoing process of transformation, a state of mind that allows interiority and exteriority to mix and become a single metaphysical continuum.

A second work features a similarly shell-like form with a luminous gold-leafed exterior, recalling a variety of ancient art historical antecedents. The interior, however, is filled with maze-like concentric rings of puffy paint in an array of colors. Though it has sculptural dimensionality, the paint flattens out the relief of its supporting surface and prevents it from being read as a head or face. If this is a representational artwork, its subject seems to be the interior of the imagination rather than an outwardly recognizable figurative form.

The third sculpture in the series completely inverts the relationships between form and formlessness proposed by the other two. Here, the exterior of the object is covered with barely translucent pieces of cut white paper that resemble feathers or fur. As they capture and reflect light, they obliterate the sculptural face that gives the piece distinctive form. Throughout these works, Shapero treats the absence and abundance of color as companion states in which the visual field is overwhelmed, and the viewer is forced to look beyond immediate physical reality into a space redolent of the unknown.



In another pair of sculptures that also make use of imagery based on heads, arrangements of bent metal rods introduce line, and therefore an element of drawing, to the work. One features a central form covered in colored paper; surrounding it are a series of stylized profiles formed from the metal rods. Gradually the central form reveals itself to be a continuation of the 'spinning' silhouettes, and the illusion of movement is juxtaposed with the teeming array of color that animates the work's visual anchor. The other piece reverses this arrangement, so that its striped, painted center recalls a spinning profile, while the rods that surround it continue the 'drawing' of the back of the head in space. Figuration, abstraction, flatness and volume switch places, and seem to illustrate the transaction between an object and the mental processes of the observer who perceives it.

The use of metal rod carries over into a group of smaller sculptures arranged together on a large pedestal installed in the gallery's front room. Reminiscent of arches, thresholds, and molecular structures, they take on performative characteristics when seen in combination, and create narrative associations that are indicative of Shapero's ability to use language as a generative tool. Because they recombine materials and techniques seen in the larger works, they also suggest that her practice draws in part from modernist notions of pure formalism. In the studio, the artist reconciles these two tendencies by developing fictional narratives as she works and allowing them to influence subsequent formal decisions.

Like Shapero's often elaborate titles, which allude to the evolution of such narratives, the works on paper on view reflect accretions of material and process. Stencil-like remnants of cut paper used to make sculptures are laid down as templates; after spray paint and leafing are applied, the negative spaces left in their wake demarcate dense layers of grids that confuse foreground and background. Though Shapero traces visual histories of materials being put to use, her relationship to the material world is not defined by sheer pragmatism. Rather, she perceives how tangible things are capable of transporting us beyond ordinary experience, so that the intangible is just within reach.



Mindy Shapero lives and works in Los Angeles. Her work has been featured in Like Color in Pictures, Aspen Art Museum, 2007; Diptych: Jockum Nordström and Mindy Shapero, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, 2006;The Uncertainty of Objects and Ideas, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, 2006; Thing, New Sculpture from LA, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2005. Her work was included in Vitamin 3D, published by Phaidon Press in 2009.


Marianne Boesky Gallery is located at 509 W 24th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues. Our hours are Tuesday to Saturday from 10am to 6pm. For further information or images, please contact Annie Rana at 212.680.9889 or annie@marianneboeskygallery.com.

Thursday 3 November 2011

Moving studio

The time has come for me to bid fairwell to studio 122 at the Briggait and move to pastures new. I will miss the beautiful studio, Steph, Sparkles and Mungion, the new addition to the Spindler-Bell household, but I am looking forward to having my own studio at Osborne Street.







The address of my new studio is:

South Block
Studio 312
64 Osborne Street
Glasgow
G1 5QH

I will let you know once I have moved in, set up and am ready for visitors!

Wednesday 2 November 2011