Trisha Baga: Rock, Benedict Drew: Gliss

TRISHA BAGA: ROCK 

Vilma Gold 5 APRIL – 19 MAY

'Baga is a young artist working mainly in video and performance. In terms of technology, plot and resources however, her approach to making is inclusive, playful and highly improvisational, so that her practice begins to unfix such distinctions. Though precarious by its nature, this tack also thrives on the possibility that arises when everything around becomes potential material for narrative making'. 


Benedict Drew: GLISS 
Cell Projects 20th April - 27th May, 2012

'This step by step visual account documents the artist's futile attempt to implant the living into the inorganic. GLISS is an immersive and visceral installation, which goes further to provoke human sensory and cognitive responses as sound and image induce sensory powers of calm and well being, but it also highlights our anxiety and rejection of technological systems. The exhibition features a chorus of melodic TV talking heads singing a version Cloud Busting, a Kate Bush track based on the bizarre cloud bursting machine of psychologist, Wihelm Reich,  to an enormous anthropomorphic lump of clay defiantly rejecting its relationship with technology. Drew’s unlikely material combinations are fused with the electrical pulse of computer technology to catalyse and transform the obsolete nature of analog media'. 
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Both these installations are indeed 'immersive and visceral' Baga's is much more random, intuitive and spontaneous and Drew's could be considered as far more orchastrated and slick ( perhaps to an extent the 'hers' and 'his' of moving image installation).

http://bigscreen-filmgallery.tumblr.com/

The Big Screen and Film Gallery at the Latitude Festival 2012 
Produced by Louise Colbourne with assistance from Jim Hobbs, Paul Burgess, DJ Harry K, and No.w.here. In association Cine-city film festival, LUX, Tank TV and the BFI

The Big Screen and Film Gallery will run for the three days of the Latitude Festival

from 13-15th July 2012.

The Big Screen presents a selection of different artist’s film and video work each evening, and will then go on to show-case experimental film, alternative sound-tracks and re-workings of classic cinema footage. Also there will be late night VJ’s and DJ’s.

The Film Gallery will focus on artist’s 16mm and 8mm film work and will include curated programmes and events by No.w.here, Jim Hobbs  and  Louise Colbourne 

ARTISTS: James Holcombe, Malcolm Le Grice, Jeff Keen, Laure Prouvost, Henry Hills, Tanja Goethe, David Blandy, Keran James, Philip Hausmeier, Karen Mirza & Brad Butler, Mordant Music, People Like Us, Stan Brakhage, Len Lye, Tracey Emin, Luke Losey, Jayne Parker, Zoe Brown, Semiconductor, Sebastian Buerkner, Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard, Squint, Jasper Goodall, Paul Burgess, Benedict Drew, Saskia Olde Wolbers, Emma Hart, Kevin Gaffney, Ian Helliwell, Oliver Bancroft, Tim Simmons, Graham Dolphin, Katy Dove, Jaye Ho, Tim Riley and Georgina Elizey, Vicki Thornton, Rosa Barba, Nick Collins, Annie Whiles, Toby Tatum

VJ/DJ by David Wilson, Jee Day (Dennis Mc Nanny), Don Letts and DJ Harry K

Delaine LeBas & Louise colbourne

          Figurine found in Robert's Curios in Hastings

Performance by Delaine LeBas and Louise Colbourne May 2012

Jack In The Green

Jack In The Green festval in Hastings

Towner Art Gallery

East Sussex Open exhibition.

'Reverberation'


Painting on milliner's stand with projection 2012

Small oil paintings on paper

Landscape at Dungeness

In the catalogue for the Graham Sutherland exhibition at Modern Art Oxford, George Shaw links Sutherland's landscapes to memories of  the 70's sci-fi drama Children of The Stones.


'The Children of the Stones helped me to identify more than a passing concern with the British landscape and the ancient presence of man and beliefs....but what is most compelling is the sinister atmosphere, the sensation of a world beyond ours...'

Visiting Dungeness recently, I thought about the dark brooding landscapes of Sutherland's paintings, and The children Of The Stones. This bleak and desolate location is also full of a sense of  other-worldliness through it's space, structure and the incidental remains of past human activities, pass-times, industry and creativity.

Graham Sutherland

An Unfinished World
Graham Sutherland at Modern Art Oxford
works on paper curated by George Shaw

Dark Hill 1940 water colour and gouache on paper

Little Mountain Study 1944 water colour, pencil and chalk on paper

'The concluding episodes (of The Changes )- set amongst the rocks of a Welsh quarry, which uncover the power that holds nature and the progress in balance- prefigures my interest in the concerns of the Neo-Romantic movement and Sutherland's work of the 30's and 40's in particular. Similarly the ITV series The Children Of The Stones helped me identify more than a passing concern for the British landscape and the ancient presence of man and of beliefs....Sutherland himself wrote somewhat mysteriously in 1973, conjuring up the ghost of Arther Machen, the Welsh author and mystic,in whose dreams and nightmares time dissolves and the ancients come calling: 'If I could barricade myself within a ring of rocks I would be pleased.'




George Shaw from the Sutherland catalogue ( Modern Art Oxford)

Pipilotti Rist, Emma Hart and Tacita Dean

PIPILOTTI RIST's Eyeball Massage at the Hayward is a visceral, bodily, cacophony of earthly delights. Intensely visual there's almost too much to see! It was well curated with the dramatic differing scale to the projections and installations. 

Beautiful and sensate the experience was indeed a good eyeball massage. 

EMMA HART's To Do at Matts Gallery was a truly unique experience, it was a bit like entering a raucous alien zoo! The sounds added to the anamorphic quality of the sculptural camera and tripod combinations. This installation really did turn the tables on to the audience, in a literal way, as some of the cameras were constantly recording the gallery and it's visitors. Also there were instructive statements that guided the on-looker towards certain directions or contemplations. I found it to be a compelling and ground-breaking combination of lo and hi-tech with an edgy sense of humour.

TACITA DEAN's Film at the Turbine Hall is an ode to the comendable work Tacita Dean is doing to campaign to keep the medium of film alive and appose the onslaught of the digital. This film is given Cathederal-like status in the form of an enormous, elongated, portrait-format projection at the Turbine Hall, and is simply called Film.
I admired the statement of it more than the actual visual impact, I found myself thinking of it as a kind of billboard advertisment for the beauty of film as a pose to actually engaging with the purity of the medium: it's quality of light, colour, form and subtle movement.
Maybe I should make another visit.

Rebecca Warren

Rebecca Warren at Maureen Paley Gallery 

"Warren's sculpture remains alien to postmodernism. Not only does it call attention to the expressive marks of the artist's hand, but it evades literary meaning: her sculptures cannot be read...Fundamentally, the avoidance of finish in Warren's work implies a swerve away, not only from form towards formlessness, but also thereby from meaning towards the ruin of meaning....
A sculpture may remind us of a human body but that does not necessarily mean it represents a body: a sculpture may mimic a female form or a male form but does sculpture really have a gender? It is probably more likely that we treat the person as an object than the object as a person, but in neither case is our behaviour based on any reality but that of our own desires. The intricate evasion of meaning in art is of value because it makes the object into a mirror.."


Fragments by Barry Schabsky for Rebecca Warren Serpentine Gallery Catalogue 2009

In my studio

Detail of video projection on to oil painting on paper, on hat stand. (30 x 150 cm)

Bronze (15cm x 7cm) and cardboard box (200 x 30 x 20 cm)

Printed paper and plasticine 30 x 20 x 7 cm

Becky Beasley and John Stezaker

Two Figures in Dense Violet Night, 
A conversation between Becky Beasley and John Stezaker,
Lido Projects 17/09/2011The talk Between Beasley and Stezaker centered mostly around the theme of materiality and the act of looking. Stezaker is obsessed with the possibilities of the 'image' as a channel for pure looking and not as a readable signifer. He finds looking at Becky Beasley's work to be a visceral, optical experience due to the quality and subtlety of her photographic prints.Stezaker's use of Photography is very different to Beasley's. He uses found photographs to act as material for simple decisive collages. Because of an intense dissatisfaction with any mark he made when painting or drawing, he discovered the only way he could be happy with an image was when it almost happened itself, by accident, and collage gave him that possibility.The pieces in the show were chosen with the horizontal and diagonal cut in mind, which make a strong link between the works. Stezaker's collaged prortraits nearly always have a vertical cut and his landscape's a horizontal cut. Beasley's Curtains, although drawn pertain to the verticle cut and the floor sculpture, Stumbling Block has a horizontal cut.Becky Beasley said of Stezaker's work that she found it intensely physical to look at, the act of looking at the work registered on her eyeball like a cut itself.

With Becky Beasley's work we are hovering between looking at, and seeing the materialty of the form. In her photographic prints, such as Curtains there is an opaic quality which acts as a filter, removing the form from it's solidity, which enhances the minute subtle terrain of the print itself. Very understated and reflecting their actual dimensions with-in the real world Curtains are rendered mute of their potential symbolism or narrative possibilities to become pure visual matter.

Two Figures in Dense Violet Night

Over four consecutive weekends,Becky Beasley hosted four conversations between two artists and two artworks. The artists included Michael Dean, Anne Hardy, Claire Scanlon & John Stezaker. The event took place at LIDO, Electro Studios, Seaside Road,St Leonards on Sea.