Events

Illuminate Bath 2012

25-28 January 2012
A free festival transforming the city’s streets over four evenings

Alexander Cotterell, Will Kendrick, Lumen and OCD have created a brand new light installation for the festival. Bath’s most famous landmark, the Roman Baths, will be transformed for two nights into a colour-filled oasis by light projections onto the water of The Great Bath. As the steam rises into the cold January air, this promises to be a truly enchanting spectacle. The balcony area of the baths will open for audiences to view the projected experience for free for two nights during the festival.

Born out of a mutual love of colour and light, the project builds on Light/Space Collaborative by Alexander Cotterell and Will Kendrick, which was exhibited during Illuminate Bath 2010 and previous work by Tom Newell aka Lumen, a DJ/Audio-visual performer and collaborator Ollie Davies.

Archive

Chromadynamics

'System History' at MadeScapes

All is surface, but surface is not all.
A review by Trevor Smith

System History
Redcliffe Street, Bristol.  Sept 2011.

The urbanization of humanity is a story as old as civilisation itself.  Between 1801 and 2001 the portion of the world population living in built-up areas rose from 3% to 47%.  Now, for the first time in history, over half of all the human beings on the planet live in an urban landscape; in the UK that figure is projected to reach 92% by 2030.

In these urban environments our experiences, expectations and aspirations are born, fostered, and, sometimes, realised.

The need for year-on-year consistency of landscape and location, coupled with some of mankind’s more pressing non-biological dilemmas – strength in numbers, economy of travel and fortification – literally gave rise to the city.  Over the centuries the cities grew; some were abandoned, some burned and were rebuilt; the majority of them evolved to cope with the demands of an ever-growing urban population.  As alleyways became carriageways, wattle and daub gave way to brick, concrete and glass, and the tangled mesh of medieval cobbled streets became pedestrianized; usurped by the wide boulevards of the modern mega-cities, where forty-storey monoliths of ‘machines for living in’ answered the problem of surface over-crowding by reaching ever-upwards, in search of affordable living space.  The city now evolves to answer questions of a different nature: questions of administration, commercialisation and the further commodification of the time and space of its citizens.  Such planning is written in concrete and signed in neon.

System History is premised upon this very idea; the organic forms and milky night-skies of the pre-industrial world have been glossed-over.  Lines upon lines of clean, cold concrete dominate the landscape, their impressions traced out into the night by strip-lights and neon-signage.  The modern cityscape described by System History is the neo-natural.  It is the latest and most vivid manifestation of the attempt to accommodate the requirements of the great project of humanity.

So successful is the idea of the city that its blueprint has been reproduced, with minor adjustments allowing for cultural variation, across the globe.  Such difference in detail belies the familiarity of the layout – the city is stamped out of a standard model, re-designed to encourage consumerism and commerce – as citizens we are as ofay with the rhythms and nuances of the urban landscape as our ancestors were with its rural counterpart.  We still, in the main, work by day and rest and play by night, but it is no longer the campfire that keeps us warm, protects us from the unknown and mesmerises us; now these duties are informed and performed by the familiar primary colours of advertising billboards and roadside neon.

System History understands this.  It is in the loop; part of the feedback.  The main piece, a twelve-foot high, free-standing billboard like the ones you see by the side of the interstate in films that show the vastness of America, fills the double-heighted room.  Projected onto it, from the mezzanine, is a pulsating vision that feeds on its immediate surroundings and regurgitates them as an ever-decreasing/increasing series of shapes and colours.  Rectangles and squares dance around one another, occasionally invading and overlapping each other’s space.  They grow and shrink, emerge and fade while new images replace them, appearing almost in their shadows, as the world turns, they never skip a beat.  In the real, analogue world, things are not as clear cut as on and off, and while this creation is entirely digital, inspired by only faint memories of the tangible, Will Kendrick has achieved something entirely analogue in appearance.  These images have not been designed to look as they do, they are compositions let loose, to find their own way.  This is a process that comes to life when it is left to go about its business, like the neon city outside, they are ever-present.

This exhibition is both a product and a part of its environment in equal measure, it slots in neatly alongside a terrace of empty shops and thriving fast-food joints.  The terrace supports a towering apartment block, the view from whose windows displays more of the same: Bristol and its glowing suburbs.  It fits in almost too well, as most passers-by don’t give the exhibition a second look.  Some of the more curious ones wander in; a teenage drunk asks, ‘is it porn?’, and I want to shout, ‘Well, kind of.’

The projection on the billboard, like the signs of the shops and the traffic lights beyond, succeed in pulling you in and ensuring you never drop your gaze.  There is a sense of it being half-created and half-evolved, like the city I drove through to get here it feels like a looped film, rolling past block after block of empty units, kebab shops and tower-blocks.  Although it feels like I’m seeing the same thing over and over, I can’t honestly say it’s the case, so I stick around: whatever is on that billboard, I want to see it.

The fact that the main piece in the show is a projected flash file reproduces the emptiness behind the premise of the modern cityscape.  Turn off the power and it’s all just wood, brick, metal and glass.  Those are the real surfaces of the city, so empty are they that we fill the void with projections of something even more shallow; the ubiquitous imagery of advertising.  Without the projection, there is no artefact.

The urban landscape is the neo-natural, but it is more complex than that.  It is a neo-natural which is layered in artifice.  It is not the urban environment that diverts and occupies the mind of the modern city-dweller, it is the imagery depicted upon its surfaces.

Lacan says that post-modern aspirations, built upon a world fixated with appearance and lacking in any real value, are reflective of that world, and as such are as shallow and as devoid of substance as the world in which they are built.

The idea that the city feeds and feeds on itself is reflected in the billboard piece as it records and plays itself back, leaving traces of its former manifestation to mess with its ever-changing form.

System History brings together artists who have considered the position of humanity from within these urban landscapes, yet the success of the show is its inhumanity.  It is this that it renders it – on the surface at any rate – as anonymous as the rest of the shop-fronts on any street, in any city.

Press release

System History

Natural order offers the primary ideal from which the constructs of human society derive. Forms. Colours. Spaces. Flows. Differences. Repetition. Systems grown out of a history inherently connected with universal balance.

The urban infrastructure, with all its concrete, congestion and commerce, seemingly contradicts its systematic origins through an absence of the natural. Yet this contradiction, this detachment, is only perceived.

Urban spaces have become the neo-natural, the landscapes of progression, and the contemporary fields of connection. Spaces punctuated with a kaleidoscopic sensory overload of ideas, images and messages.

The dynamic and fluctuating signage of places built on consumption, narrate the vivid hues, digital compositions and fluorescent filled inspirations of those who reside within the cities ceaseless boundaries.

System History draws together three artists who have considered the position of humanity from within these urban-landscapes, from the physical to the virtual, through the petro-plastic to the packaged and pixelated. Vibrant. Ecstatic. Eclectic. Immediate.

Archive

'Circumference' Summer Exhibition

We Live In Public

As part of the FAB 2011 programme Lucy Odlin will be curating ‘We Live in Public’. Inspired by Ondi Timoner’s award-winning documentary based on the life of internet visionary and entrepreneur Josh Harris, ‘We Live in Public’ aims to examine the various ways in which artists are responding to a culture of ever-increasing surveillance. Soon it will be a decade since 9/11 changed global attitudes to safety and security and has made us the most heavily monitored nation in the world. This decade has also witnessed the lifespan of phenomenally popular Orwellian television series Big Brother, as well as such advances in technology as Google Street View, giving us all the possibility of becoming both peeping Toms and global travellers.

‘We Live in Public’ hopes to reveal the sometimes futile nature of surveillance and the absurd fact that playing reality back to ourselves, as is, becomes a form of entertainment. We comb through the minutiae of our lives fed back to us, hoping to find some sort of meaning that seems to constantly evade us in first-hand experience. 

The Nature of Change: Hybridity and Mutation

The Nature Of Change: Hybridity And Mutation

Private View 29th March

Bricklane Lane, London

Nothing in the entire universe ever perishes, believe me, but things vary, and adopt a new form 
(Ovid, Metamorphoses)

Venue: The Old Truman Brewery, No. 4 Wilkes Street, London, E1 6QL
Dates: Tuesday 29th March - Sunday 17th April 2011
Private View: Tuesday 29th March 2011, 6 - 9 pm
Symposium: Saturday 16th April 2011, 11 am - 5 pm

Hybridity and mutation are forms of change with particular relevance to post-modern culture. They inform everything contemporary society consumes and produces, from food and technology, to music and art. In the absence of conditions such as collectively agreed shape and direction disparate sources, such as imagination and practicality, are conflated to intriguing effect.

The Nature of Change brings together a group of talented emerging and mid-career artists, whose work identifies with the notions of hybridity and mutation. In some instances hybridity defines the manner in which they use their chosen medium; Piers Secunda's use of paint refuses to conform to conventional expectations of painting or sculpture. In others, the theme pertains more directly to their chosen subjects. James Drew investigates and documents the lives of individuals whose identity is an intentional hybrid of different personalities and ages. Kazuya Tsuji’s bronze sculptures are grotesque mutations on a disorientating miniature scale and espouse a poignant comedy in their monstrosity. In the hands of Alice Bradshaw, normal household objects undergo a physical and conceptual mutation to become art/object hybrid versions of their former selves, which are defined by a curious sense of the uncanny. Alex Kyriacou's subjects cavort and perform in front of the lens; their carnivalesque forms often disturbing and abject combinations of man and beast, desire and repulsion.

The theme of this group show is intended to provoke discussion regarding the nature of change in the current cultural moment. As Ovid suggests, change is an eternal condition of life, yet this exhibition offers examples which actively investigate the creative character, motivations and attitudes towards change today.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a full catalogue - please contact us to order an advance copy.

Artists: Kayde Anobile, Alice Bradshaw, James Drew, Gabo Guzzo, Sadie Hennessey, Will Kendrick, Alex Kyriacou, Jan Manski, Amy Moffat, Piers Secunda, David A Smith, Kazuya Tsuji and Sam Zealey.

White Colour

View Gallery

159-161 Hotwell Rd, Bristol, Avon 
056 0311 6753

These Words I Seek Are Not My Own

Motorcade/Flashparade Gallery

37 PHILIP STREET | BEDMINSTER | BRISTOL | BS3 4EA

Charlotte Bartrop – Darragh Boyd – Anna Borowicz – Jenny Cooper – Megan Hoyle – Tom Johnson – Will Kendrick – Vicki Ley

These Words I Seek Are Not My Own: presents new work by eight artists whose practices are imbued by a specific interest in extended painting. The exhibition attempts to address the continually evolving collective understanding of painting through a diverse range of outcomes and installational elements.


Accompanying the exhibition is an essay by Linda Khatir.

PRIVATE VIEW - 25th February 6.30-9.00pm
Exhibition open - 26th & 27th 11.00am-9.00pm

Motorcade/FlashParade, is an independent gallery space located within BV Studios. 

Oblong Represents

69a Southgate Road
London N1 3JS
020 7354 8330

Open Studios - BV Studios

PREVIEW Friday 19th November-6.00-9.00pm
Saturday 20th & Sunday 21st-11.00-6.00pm

Entry to the Open Studios and BV Gallery is free.

BV Studios, a new and exciting development of artists’ studios in Bristol, is opening its doors to the public for the first time with an Open Studios event in November 2010. The converted 30,000 square foot warehouse is located in the heart of industrial Bedminster, in the space formerly occupied by the Wiltshire Print Works.

The studio building currently houses around 80 professional artists who have been selected based on the quality of their work and commitment to their creative practices. The artists, range from recent promising graduates to award winning, international and established artists.

BV Studios, 37 Philip Street, Bedminster, Bristol BS3 4EA

Illuminate Bath Festival - Milsom Place, Bath - 1st - 13th November

Rising Stars - October 22nd- November 13th

Islington Contemporary Art and Design Fair

97 Miles West

Bath School of Art and Design Degree Show

Constructing Current Painting