(Anderson, 2020)
Gail Pickering…
Moving image, performance and text. There’s always tension between the moving image and the live presence. Offering an instability showing throughout her work in a desire to position it and us within a temporal and spatial present.
Similar to my works and the perception of my work, Pickering tends to reconstruct and analyze alternative experimental filmmaking and moving image, as I capture the moment and dramatically shift levels of motion to the viewer and the intensity of the subject. My process involves collaboration with performers, maybe not dancers, but I allow my subjects to be expressive in relation to space, speculating the themes of temporality and presence.
She transformed the gallery space with a series of interconnected chambers where she has imagined a site for this cultural production and their social spaces to suggest a place of live transmission. Pickering uses montage within her videos to mimic the episodic and fragmentary character of both television and the video tape recordings.
Gail Pickering: Mirror Speech
BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead
31 October 2014 - 11 January 2015
The artist’s largest solo exhibition to date, this vast installation takes up the entire 7,800 square feet of BALTIC’s Level 3 gallery. The work takes as its starting point Pickering’s research into the histories of community video, participatory film and television production and their live transmission, producing a series of immersive time-based installations that focus on problematising the image of community and our own contemporary relationship to the moving image. (Mirror Speech [Solo Exhibition] - Goldsmiths Research Online, 2020)
Lucy Algar…
Artist – Designer – Educator, her work encompasses design for performance, both theatre and TV, and site-specific installation artwork.
“I rely on drawing to help me explore and understand place, space and the body in relation to performance, both as designer and director My ongoing enthusiasm for, and research into, drawing has led me to encourage a variety of other practitioners, including doctors and dancers, to engage with drawing as productive process. I hope in turn that my findings will feed back into all areas of my practice and teaching.” (Lucy Algar, 2020)
Algar’s drawing style and process is very similar to my very own practice as this is exactly how I portray motion through lines and sketch certain images and snapshots from a performance that is styled, directed with the use of only one word and shot by me.
The Dolls House
I think it is very interesting to think about these questions…Thinking about the space, the object and the image in relation to space. “By locating the dolls house in different spaces I have been encouraged, even forced, to consider the parallels between the different spaces in which I work. The performance spaces that exist in both the theatre and hospitals have become my artistic home. And yet, why? The dolls house, situated in isolation or congregated in the photographs, brings about affective responses, even practical insights, often unexpectedly.” (Lucy Algar, 2020)
Janine Antoni…
As she turns everyday gestures into sculptures and performances by the use of non-traditional materials (specifically chocolate and lard) and her use of the body and body parts as tools of communication (hair, teeth, tongue and eyelashes). In her work “Paper Dance” she portrays a dynamic retrospective spanning thirty years of photographs and sculptures by Janine Antoni and a solo dance performance by the artist developed collaboratively with pioneering dancer and choreographer Anna Halprin.
As an exhibition, Paper Dance consists of a wooden dance floor and thirty-nine crates containing a selection of Antoni’s sculpture and photography spanning from 1989 to the present, exhibited in three cycles focusing on the themes of motherhood, identity, and absence. Paper Dance is a dynamic exhibition that changes over time, and the works you will see are constantly shifting. Throughout the run of Paper Dance.
Antoni performs fifteen times throughout the exhibition for an intimate audience, exploring the materiality of brown paper and responding to her own artwork within the gallery.
(Janine Antoni, 2020)
Merce Cunningham…
The use of steps and body gestures in the form of dance to reflect movement, highlighting the subtle and weightless footwork has been used to form the dancer's movement.
Cunningham’s abstract dances vary greatly in mood but are frequently characterized by abrupt changes and contrasts in movement. Just how I interpret the way I work and treat my works of motion, reflecting the true geometrical dancing manner and using steps and body gestures in the form of dance to reflect movement.
The work done by the cooperation of both invites the spectators to experience something that has never been focused on before; which is the way the collaboration had presented joy and freedom through the context of the dancing steps of the dancers. (Merce Cunningham trust, 2020)
Dominique Gonzalez
Séance de Shadow II (bleu) 1998
This work consists of a long, corridor-like gallery fitted with a dark blue carpet, which matches the colour of one of the walls. A set of infrared motion detectors mounted close to the floor are connected to a series of bright footlights, which point towards the long blue wall. The lights are spaced at even intervals along the length of the room. When a motion sensor detects a movement the corresponding light illuminates, and only switches off again when that which triggered it has passed. As a result, if a viewer were to move from one side of the room to the other they would be bathed sequentially in a series of lights, which would cast shadows onto the blue wall. When several viewers occupy the room the lights can switch on and off in various combinations. The shadows that appear on the wall can also vary in intensity, becoming stronger when fewer lights are on and weaker when more are activated.
Séance de Shadow II (bleu) was made by the French artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster for the exhibition Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno, which was held at the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris in 1998. The exhibition aimed to show how each of these three artists, who emerged simultaneously in France in the early 1990s, made work that engaged viewers as participants in a social environment. In that it depends upon the presence of a visitor to be activated, and that the experience of the work is determined by the number and behaviour of people in the room, Séance de Shadow II (bleu) is characteristic of this approach.
The French word séance is often used to denote a film screening or theatre performance, and in relation to this work emphasises the way in which viewers are invited to become performers, enacting a shadow play by moving around it. However, séance, which literally translates into English as ‘gathering’, is also used to describe a meeting of people who attempt to communicate with spirits. This second meaning is evoked by the ethereal and eerie nature of the elongated shadows, which fade in and out of focus, and by the way the experience is affected by the presence of other people. The bracketed word bleu, meaning blue, refers to the work’s colour scheme, distinguishing it from several similar installations by the same artist, which include walls and carpets of different colours.
She produced large, immersive installations since the 1980s. Her works often defy the traditional separation between visual and time-based art by inviting viewers to explore them over time or having elements that operate across an extended duration. despite being a visual artist, her work has more to do with theatre and staging than making objects such as paintings or sculptures. Telegraph, 11 October 2020
Séance de Shadow II (bleu) relates directly to a series of installations made by the artist in the late 1980s entitled Chambres (Rooms), in which meticulously composed interiors bathed in light of a certain colour offered visitors a sensory experience of a particular mood or atmosphere. This work is also significant for the way that it combines the artist’s installation practice with her engagement with film, which became increasingly important in her work in the 1990s. Not only does the word séance allude to a film screening, but the colour of the wall and floor are also extremely similar to the hue of the blue screens often used as backdrops in studio shoots for film and television shows.
“I am interested in what we know about things through our bodies” -Simone Forti
In engagement with kinaesthetic awareness and composition, Simone Forti dedicated herself to experimentation and improvisation. She collaborated with dancers and musicians as she revolutionised the idea of dance and performance art by introducing movements from everyday life.
Forti choreographed works she called Dance Constructions (1960-1961) which included dances based around improvisation, ordinary movement, chance, and simple objects like rope and plywood boards.as she has explained, because they are “dances but they also can be seen as sculptures made of people.”
Sound is a central element in Accompaniment for La Monte’s “2 sounds” and La Monte’s “2 sounds”and Platforms. La Monte Young’s discordant recording, “2 sounds,” serves as the soundtrack for Forti’s “2 sounds” dance construction. To the loud, scraping tones of Young’s recording, one performer approaches a second performer, who stands in a looped rope suspended from the ceiling. The first performer turns the second one around in the rope. When it is tightly wound, the first performer releases the rope, sending the second performer twirling as he or she rides out its untwisting. Whereas in Platforms, the performers themselves provide the soundtrack. Featuring two plain wooden boxes, each propped up on one side by a wedge. One performer lies beneath each box, whistling, as if to communicate with the other.
Huddle, a piece performed in silence, involves six to nine performers interlocking their bodies in a huddle. Taking turns, the performers disentangle themselves one at a time and climb over the others, until reaching solid ground and re-joining the huddle. As each performer breaks away, the others react, coming together to close the resulting gap and re-form the huddle so that it can support the climbing performer, which focuses and expresses their aggregate forces.
Forti: “I wanted to see something where you could watch people moving in a way that wasn’t stylised, that you could just see what it was like to have somebody climb, and to have people support that climbing, and to watch people in action doing something kind of unusual.”
Thinking with the Body: A retrospective In Motion…
First major international retrospective of the dancer and choreographer Simone Forti. It overlooked her accomplishments within Minimalism and Postmodern dance (especially to the concept of a theatrical relationship between the viewer and object).
Everyday movements are typical motifs in Forti’s choreography. Her approach was also shaped by methods taught in the composition class of Robert Dunn (a student of John Cage) at the Merce Cunningham Dance Studio, especially the combination of strict compositional rules with generous margins of interpretative freedom. As well as objects, these rules became a second factor that coaxed a reaction from the dancers.
It is just how far ahead of developments in Minimal art and Postmodern dance she really was.
Explorations of the relationship between an object and the body, these early works by Forti highlight the interface between sculpture and performance.
Simone Forti, Slant Board, 1961, Performance documentation, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 1982
Forti: “Slant Board consists of a 45-degree angle usually made out of two [plywood] boards with rope along the top. Two or three performers [move] from side to side and up and down the inclined plane in a very task-oriented way.”
Slant Board suggests the playground and this idea of climbing or turning the sculptural object into a kind of architectural structure in which the participation with that structure is absolutely central to the work. Sculpture was no longer a static, remote form to be contemplated, but one to be actively negotiated.
Simone Forti, See-Saw, 1960
Forti: “At the ends of the plank that sits on the sawhorse, there were elastics going from the end of the plank to the walls so that as the see saw see sawed there would be this zig zag of elastics. I like that it works as a balancing tool for two people but that zig zag also happening on its own.”
Simone Forti, Floating Drawing, 1971
Simone Forti, Zero, Performance documentation, Parco Theater, Tokyo, Japan, 1975
Simone Forti, Platforms 1961, performed at Danza Volo Musica Dinamite Festival, L’Attico, Rome, 1969.
Forti: “One of my favorite pieces is Platforms. It consists of two boxes with an open bottom, big enough for a person to be in the box with the box set down over them. The two performers—each one in one of the boxes—whistle. A relaxed, good in-breath. Then on the out-breath, a tone. Then an in-breath. And then the next tone might be higher or lower. And then an in-breath. There are moments of silence if they’re both breathing in at the same time. Sometimes, there’s overlap. Sometimes it sounds like they’re answering each other. That, too, came out of a kind of a need, or kind of a feeling. I see it as a love duet. Where it’s like when you’re sleeping next to someone you love, and you’re in another place. The two of you are not in the same place, you’re each in your own dreams. And yet, you hear each other breathe. There’s that awareness of each other. It’s kind of a nighttime piece.”
Tarek Lakhrissi
Born 1992 in Châtellerault, France
Lives and works in Paris, France, Tarek Lakhrissi is a interdisciplinary artist and poet who works on the performativity of language through poetry, research and experimentations.
Out of the Blue takes place at a radical moment in time, when a politically conservative era is suddenly coming to an end. Lakhrissi avoids traditional apocalyptic narratives to meditate instead on the nature of transition itself. In the final scene, the film’s central character delivers a thoughtful speech exploring ideas of freedom and liberty, self-determination and queer futurity.
“Out of the Blue is a film that I produced and have shown previously, but for the Sydney Biennale I have created a new full installation for the movie. The installation consists of a blue velvet curtain, sectioned off, then some seats and blue lighting.” -Lakhrissi
When you walk into the space it is like you are in a labyrinth. In the space the viewer will encounter a lot of blue velvet curtains and blue lights, walk into the work space whilst in the dark and into a room where the film is played.
The whole idea of the threshold is exaggerated through the installation
Out of the Blue (2019), short movie, HD, 13min, Collection of Frac Aquitaine.
“My first intuition was thinking of those spaces as transitionary spaces, where the future can actually exist, where utopia can actually happen. The work was also really nourished by a couple of different texts. I've been very influenced by two authors. One is Audre Lorde, the black feminist and poet. She wrote a beautiful poem called ‘A Litany for Survival’ and in this poem she states, ‘We were never meant to survive’, which is basically a statement about how different bodies, and especially racialised, queer, trans bodies, were not supposed to be part of the plan.” -TL
“There are some connections to make around questions of how to survive; how to be; how to exist in a space where you're always at the periphery, when you don't have the right to be in the centre. Okay, but what does it mean to be the centre? Do we really want to be in the centre anyway?
And the second reference is José Esteban Muñoz, who is a Cuban American theorist. He wrote a book called Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009) and in that book he talks about this beautiful space that is the in-between space between two clubs. One is a gay club and one is a punk club. He uses this expression, like, this is the actual space of utopia, this in-between, this corridor between the two clubs. I think that this is a beautiful idea, because I feel like a lot of things are actually happening in these transitionary spaces. Like corridors, like halls, like the corridors around the whole of this hotel that we are in now. Like airports, these in-between spaces.” -TL
They are like passageways that allow movement, where things are not fixed.
Tarek Lakhrissi, Out of the Blue, 2019, single-channel digital video, colour, sound, 13:44 mins. Presented at the 22nd Biennale of Sydney with assistance from the Ambassade de France en Australie and Institut Français. Courtesy the artist. Video produced by La Galerie CAC (Noisy-le-Sec, France) with the support of the Département de Seine-Saint-Denis (France)
“Fabrics allow me to camouflage, conceal and clad the white cube of a museum, and thus change the system of values and the frameworks of thought. I use fabrics to create spaces in which we can apparently be elsewhere, in other words, fall into other worlds. (...) In a space where curtains have been hung, the separation between the interior and the exterior, or between different worlds, becomes blurred. And that blur makes us wonder where we are.”
-Ulla Von Brandenburg
Brandenburg invites the public to take part in an immersive and renewed experience of the themes, forms and motifs that feed into her work: movement, the stage, colours, music, textiles...
Installations, sculptures, performances and films specially conceived for the exhibition answer to one another and tangle together to form an open narration, between authenticity and artifice, the natural world and human activities, the interior and the exterior, fiction and reality.
Born 1974 in Karlsruhe, Germany. Lives and works in Paris.
Ulla von Brandenburg has a richly complex and multifaceted practice that is realised through a combination of black & white film, installation, performance, drawing, and painting. The vocabulary of von Brandenburg's work comes from a basis of using approaches and methods of the theatre, the stage, and rules of performance to engage with cultural or social issues from different moments in history to explore how stories, rituals, and symbols of the past have constituted our societies.
Brandenburg's practice cross-references back and forth between media creating a language that loops back on itself: endlessly repeating and developing. Concerned with 'the borders of different consciousness: past and present, alive and dead, real and illusionary', von Brandenburg creates work positioned uncertainly at the point at which reality ends and the illusion of life, emotions and events begins.
Her practice also reveals her formal training in set design and her interest in the history of film, photography, theater, and psychology.
She also employed this concept for Kugel 2007 which is staged in a garden, in which Brandenburg films a reflection of the figures in the curved surface of a mirrored ball. The artist and her camera are also reflected, emphasising the constructed artifice of the scene. The figures themselves appear to belong to the past, though it is hard to pin them down to any specific period, adding to the ghostly sense of frozen time.
Von Brandenburg’s Curtain 2007 is a reconstruction of the patchwork curtain specially designed in 1932 for the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratfordupon-Avon. A slight gap where the curtains meet in the middle heightens our sense of the divide between performers and audience, and raises the question: which side are we on?
Tableau vivant, or “living picture,”
The performance is music based and it’s a musical tableau vivant, so you will see like a domestic scene, five people, they are all from one family, on a stage, and there is somebody lying on a sofa, the old man, he is the father, his wife beside him, his daughter is in the space, his sister and his best friend. There will be music, Laurent Montaron and me, we did music together and I was singing all the voices of all the five characters. I don’t want to be on stage but this is for me a possibility to be on stage, it’s my voice on stage and the actors have to mime it so there is also this artificial aspect or this like absurd aspect also like a man has to mouth a woman’s voice, they are all about one narration but it could be that these five characters are also like different sides of yourself.
It is about what kind of relationship all the four persons have with this dead or ill or whatever person laying on the sofa, so it’s not really clear what it is about, he is dead and somehow they sing about perhaps he is poisoned perhaps, somebody wanted to inherit something, but these are only slight informations, never will something come out into the truth.
Michael Clark
Divine, demonic, dreamy, punk. These are just some of the words that come to mind when you watch any of Clark’s performances or choreographed pieces. His work is of a different timbre than the dancers and choreographers traditionally associated with ballet’s stiff decorum and heritage. Clark has redefined the meaning of dance as they tend to retain the intimate, intricate and technical demands of ballet. They’re as close to being works of art as dance comes. Yet this is intersected by elements of Dada, the absurd, the grotesque and bizarre.
Cosmic Dancer -1985
Movements “create a ring around you, something like Saturn. The dance is a microcosm for the societal rings in humanity. You are the centre of your own universe then you connect with other people… there is a sort of cosmic dance.” -MC
Michael Clark by Richard Haughton
Mmm... (1991)
The Michael Clark Company
Michael Clark’s Modern Masterpiece first toured in Japan in 1991 before travelling to King’s Cross London the following year. It was then performed over the course of nine nights under the acronym Mmm.... In both continents, the piece didn’t fail to shock audiences. Clark famously re-enacted his own birth on stage in the second act, with his Mother Bessie, appearing alongside him as a midwife. Fresh from the womb, accompanied by Sondheim's 'Send In The Clowns', he was nearly naked. Elsewhere Leigh Bowery tottered around in platformed heels, Bessie went topless and the other performers travelled across the stage in vinyl toilet costumes.
O (1994)
Michael Clark by Elizabeth Peyton
Inspired by Balanchine’s magnum opus Apollo, which is often referred to as the birth of modern ballet, O is one of Clark’s most critically praised pieces. It received rave reviews when it hit Brixton Academy’ stage in 1994. Like Mmm... which had come before it, O centred on the theme of rebirth. This time, Clark swaddled is white, battles with himself in a glass cage, yearning to be reborn.
Who’s Zoo (2012)
Cosmic Dancer installation by Tim Whitby
Set to music by Jarvis Cocker (from both Relaxed Muscle and Pulp), Who’s Zoo was a 40-minute production that occupied the airy fourth floor of the Whitney Museum for its 2012 Biennial. Traditionally, the Whitney Biennial is reserved for pieces of contemporary art thus Clark’s commission re-affirms the value of his work and his well-deserved standing in the contemporary art community.
Charles Atlas' light and film designs were projected across a huge wall of the museum, creating a backdrop for the work. Voguing and thrusting a chair between his legs in a phallic motion to live rock songs, Who's Zoo? is less of a “dance” and more a series of moves accompanied by music.
Is it meant to be a concert featuring live dance or vice versa? Does it even matter? The production challenged viewers, forcing them to question their pre-existing notions on the limits of dance, like all great pieces of work by Michael Clark.
Maria Lassnig, Self-Portrait with Saucepan 1995, oil on canvas, 125 x 100 cm
Maria Lassnig, Self-Portrait with Stick 1971, oil and charcoal on canvas, 193 x 129 cm
Maria Lassnig painting in her studio in Vienna, 1983, photographed by Michael Westermann
Maria Lassnig 1919-2014
Body Awareness
The Austrian painter explored what she called ‘body awareness painting’, much of which was savagely observed self-portraiture. Her paintings, drawings and films reveal an artist who was relentlessly devoted to examining the very human sentiments of being exposed and feeling vulnerable.
Maria Lassnig used to describe her art as art of immersion. The immersion down through the nerves, underneath the skin. So what the nerves are being fed. This is what she was feeling. When the chair touches her body and when there’s pressure coming from the outside. Body awareness in the sense of the presence of the body and the physical sensation. The body’s feelings in its own. Physical presence rather than appearance. Often painting with eyes closed because seeing isn’t as important as sensing. Painting naked so the connection with the body is more direct. It is the physicality not really the appearance but what is felt when painting is more important than how the painting actually looks.
Portraying not how the body looks, but how it feels to be inside one. In her effort to capture bodily experience; its flaws, functions, gestures and moods. Sometimes worked lying down alongside the canvas, or leaning against it, even sitting on it. She never worked from photographs, but relied solely on inner sensations, sometimes closing her eyes while painting.
‘The hardest thing is really to concentrate on the feeling while drawing. Not drawing a rear-end because you know what it looks like, but drawing the rear-end feeling.’
Maria Lassnig, Hospital 2005, oil on canvas, 150 x 200 cm
Presents a row of half-naked aching bodies, their exposed state instantly bringing to mind those awful back-to-front, neck-tied hospital gowns that leave their wearers worryingly unprotected from behind. That queasy emotional cocktail – vulnerability, powerlessness, fear – was the mainstay of Lassnig’s art.
Maria Lassnig, Frog Princess 2000, oil on canvas, 125 x 100 cm
The eyes in her works are veiled, pierced, shut tight, masked, encased and blindfolded. Particularly in the late works, they can be erased altogether. However, the absence of any background means the figures inhabiting her canvases are always in plain view: she offers them nowhere to hide from us their candid display of human imperfection.
Maria Lassnig, Two Ways of Being (Double Self-Portrait) 2000, oil on canvas, 100 x 125 cm
Embarrassment is a uniquely human phenomenon, mysteriously conjoining body and mind. Our awareness of having exposed ourselves to ridicule prompts an uncontrolled physical response: we sweat, fidget, tremble and blanch. We quiver, fumble, twist our fingers and lower our eyes – all actions inventoried in Lassnig’s canvases.
Like art itself, embarrassment requires being seen. Perhaps for this reason Lassnig pays so much attention to the eyes. They are enlarged, crooked, bloodshot and bulging. They are too close; too far apart; mismatched; lost in shadow.
Lubaina Himid “Naming the Money”
The piece consists of nearly one hundred life-size painted plywood cut-outs that bring to life African servants depicted in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European court paintings. The artist’s practice explores the marginalisation of the black diaspora in contemporary society. What really interests me in this piece is the display and execution of using the figures/characters in relation to the gallery space. This type of display is very similar to one of my works in which the viewer gets to experiment the energy and really look at the body in relation to space.
“Dance as means of empowerment”- Paul Maheke
I Lost Track of the Swarm, installation view at the South London Gallery, 2016.
“The idea of something swarming over me, the light, the camera.” Being as experimental as you can is the key.
Illuminated by a torch attached to his body, he creates a spotlight at the South London Gallery. He appears on-screen, in the first of two rooms, where fragments of a dance sequence appear across three channels facing different directions.
The dance explores literal and metaphorical visibility, of bodies taking up space as political presence and resistance. The scanning spotlight suggests both the stage and the dance floor, and speaks of acts of collectivity and survival or “gestures of remembrance”, where movement is both expressive and transformative.
The moving body in the videos and the beat of its soundtrack, in contrast to the quietude, the calm of the the floor rug and the inanimate debris collected in the ceiling tile.
The animation of the gallery through light and music is undercut by discomfort, from looking up and seeing outlines of cockroaches, and hair, and leaves, and dirt from the street suggesting different realities behind the facade.
The exhibition looks at the production and articulation of subjectivity in relation to the collective or said ‘swarm’, and the use of bodily comportment in relation to self-expression and desire. Through the diffused purple lighting and materials, it explores what the accompanying text calls ‘black femme’ subjectivities within a wider exploration of the position of Black artists in the West, in the face of institutional racism, gentrification and cultural appropriation.**
Jacolby Satterwhite -Virtual Reality works
There’s a lot going on, to say the least, in the new video for “Rain Vs Sunshine,” a song from his recently released album Love Will Find a Way Home, which he recorded under a collaborative project with producer Nick Weiss, one-half of electronic music duo Teengirl Fantasy.
The screen is split down the middle; on the right, an animated pegasus with laser bright wings flies above a burning forest, and on the left, dancers vogue in a spiderweb matrix resembling a spaceship as turquoise trails extend from their bodies.
The visual is just a taste of the South Carolina–born, New York–based artist’s carefully rendered, hallucinatory world. His animation for Solange’s song Sound of Rain, proved to be the stunning visual’s most idiosyncratic moment, he built out a coliseum of dancing, almost beatific, figures while a floating horse in the sky referenced Solange’s investigation of the trope of the black cowboy in contemporary culture.
Also influenced by late mother, Patricia’s works and drawings, who passed away in 2016 after battling schizophrenia for much of her life.
What does freedom look, sound, and feel like to you?
Rain Vs. Sunshine
Works show full expression to the many mediums he’s mastered. He’s created sculptures that adorn the walls, themselves plastered with large-scale C-prints, which are the building blocks of his animated films: “I make these very dense still images that look like Renaissance paintings.” -Satterwhite
“I collect motifs and moodboards until they begin to form their own language and then I move forward with translating those motifs with the given medium I think resonates the idea well.”
“I was more interested in the concept of a photograph created 40 years ago as a material to be repurposed and expanded in virtual reality. The gesture seemed to articulate the way we process memory as human beings. I wasn’t using my own family photos with sentimental purposes.”
“Either become really zen or a headless party queen.”
“Given the terms ‘weightlessness’ and ‘freedom’ as the conceptual framework for the piece, I wanted to focus on ‘memory’ as a weightless medium to store time. Compositing a collection of family photos into a virtual reality den and filtering out the negative space of their bodies with a more appeasing digital decoration felt like an appropriate depiction of memory as a weightless coping mechanism. Scientifically it is proven that our brain documents the past in a way that helps us function in the present.”
Ann Veronica Janssens - To Walk Into a Painting
Monika Grzymala
Polish artist dances and draws in space using 10 kilometres of tape!
If drawing, as Paul Klee famously said, is ‘taking a line for a walk’, Monika Grzymala’s installations are more like taking a line on a high-energy gymnastic marathon. She has travelled the world only with adhesive tape to create works whose expressive power and energy belie their banal origins. Currently based in Berlin. In drawing, she found that her line works escaped the page, migrating onto gallery walls and then into space using adhesive tape.
‘The moment when a drawing becomes a sculpture, I am not filling space; I am more transforming it according to a personal point of view of how human interaction with the space might be visualised.’ -MG
“I use a German term I coined myself, Raumzeichnung. It means ‘spatial or three-dimensional drawing’, and it’s a logical continuation of my drawing practice as a sculptor. I never correct my work, so the outcome is a linear 1:1 translation of the process. Every work is about the authentic dynamic in the process and how I deal with it in a site-specific piece.”
"My hands and my body are the most important ones – in connection with my mind, of course, and how it perceives a place.The works are all temporary, organic interventions in space and thus ephemeral.” -MG
David Noonan
Noonan presents a series of works comprising monochrome silkscreen on linen collages and clusters of freestanding figurative sculptures which expand his graphic images into a more theatrical space of display.
Noonan often works with found photographic imagery taken from performance manuals, textile patterns and archive photographs to make densely layered montages. These works at once suggest specific moments in time and invoke disorientating a-temporal spaces in which possible narratives emerge. The large-scale canvases framing this exhibition depict scenes of role-playing, gesturing characters, and masked figures set within stage-like spaces. Printed on collaged fabric, elements applied to the surface of the canvases further signal the cutting and splicing of images.
Noonan’s new suite of figurative sculptures, comprise life size wooden silhouettes faced with printed images of characters performing choreographed movements. While the figurative image suggests a body in space, the works’ two dimensional cut-out supports insist on an overriding flatness which lends them an architectural quality – as stand-ins for actual performers and as a means by which to physically navigate the exhibition space.
Rebecca Allen - Life Without Matter
Life Without Matter considers a future life in virtual reality where material things - physical matter - have mostly disappeared and our identity must be redefined.
Within the virtual world we find ourselves in a mythic place. A mirror appears and the viewer confronts their digital reflection. And since a virtual world is immaterial, a virtual mirror need not reflect one’s physical appearance, but rather the female, male and animal in all of us.
While the viewer is interacting with their virtual reflection, their shadow is projected on a special screen in the exhibition space, revealing their actions to the audience. This presents two components to the art experience; the intimate, self-reflective experience in the virtual world and the projected, public experience via the shadow screen.
This artwork goes beyond the solely visual aspect of perception to engage the viewer in a multi-sensory experience that affects the whole body, evoking core questions about human identity. Meanwhile, the audience, like the prisoners in Plato’s Cave, can only see this world as shadows as they eagerly await entry into a world without matter.
Yvonne Rainer - Convalescent Dance
1967, Yvonne Rainer performed a version of her signature dance, Trio A at The Playhouse at Hunter College. This time, she performed alone and called itConvalescent Dance. It was so named because Rainer performed the dance in a “convalescent” condition. Meaning expressing weakness, after her slow recovery from a serious illness that she undertook abdominal surgery a year earlier.
Slowly and deliberately performing the movements of a dance designed to be a statement against spectacle while her body was in a debilitated state. Dismissing questions of what pain looks like, a search for symptoms in which diagnosis and representation are parallel as the work raises the question of what pain does, of how we reconcile this action—not through the performance of pain, but performing in physical pain.
“It served as an applied philosophy for disentangling the emotional response of my mind to my symptoms and from the ‘physical fact’ of my body. I learned that more aggressive actions of forcing movement only increased my muscles resistance.” -YR
Maya Deren
“Mother” of American avant-garde filmmaking.
Film philosophy - Time and space
Her interest in amateurism, the human body and the manipulation of reality. The freedom of pursuing any artistic style. “I am firmly convinced that a prerequisite of really original and creative work is that a production be scaled modestly enough to “afford” failure.” -Maya Deren “Planning By Eye”
She was interested in the cinemas ability to construct and manipulate space and time.
Her films are not only poetic but instructive, offering insight into the human body and physique and demonstrating the potential of film to explore her subjects.
Deren’s main importance is the role of movement, reflecting on her film A Study in Choreography for Camera, she writes:
“This principle — that the dynamic of movement in film is stronger than anything else — than any changes of matter… that movement, or energy is more important, or powerful, than space or matter — that, in fact, it creates matter — seemed to me to be marvellous, like an illumination, that I wanted to just stop and celebrate that wonder, just by itself…” Popova, M., 2021
Daria Martin
Her films aim to create a continuity between distinct artistic media (such as painting and performance), between people and objects, and between internal and social worlds. Human gesture and seductive imagery meet physically mannered artifice to loosen viewers' learned habits of perception. Mistranslation opens holes for the imagination to enter or exit.
Subjects such as robots, an archive of dream diaries and close-up card magic, are explored within isolated spaces such as the wings of a theatre, a military academy, or a scaled up modernist sculpture. These protective yet fragmented settings, full of seams and shadows, stand in for the capacities of the film medium itself, a permeable container that consumes and recycles the world at large.
In The Palace 2000
© Daria Martin
Daria Martin, Subjects and Objects, installation view at VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art, Carlow, Ireland, 2017. Photo by Ros Kavanagh. Courtesy the artist, VISUAL, Carlow and Maureen Paley, London
Research Reference…
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(Mirror Speech [Solo Exhibition] - Goldsmiths Research Online, 2020)
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