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An exhibition on forests, memory, and social and natural history, Curated by Amy Cutler

“But, mean glory of the world, misshapen memory of other seasons, the forest remains”, Andrea Zanzotto

A candle-lit collection on forests, memory, and social and natural history.

Cabinets of book works, wood works, paintings, drawings, prints, film projection, and music;

Wood specimens and photographs from Kew’s Museum of Economic Botany, English Heritage, the Epping Forest archive, the London Metropolitan Archives, and local collectors;

Tree ring slices and materials from dendrochronology labs.

The exhibition investigates the properties of forest memory through text, archive, and ‘xylarium’, or wood collection. Art works examining the cultural expression of time and history in the forest are placed here alongside archival photographs, small press texts, artefacts, and museum objects, in the atmospheric Belfry of St John on Bethnal Green.

This exhibition is taking place with the support of Landscape Surgery at Royal Holloway.

Curated by Amy Cutler

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http://amycutler.wordpress.com/2013/05/14/time-the-deer-is-in-the-wood-of-hallaig-6-11th-june/

The Tree Of Thinking – Mona K

Hayley’s Cave – Hayley Brown

Thirty Six Views of Disaster – Oliver Knowles

Wanderlust – Natalie Bothamley

Pulse Samuel Webster

Traditional Control – Georgina Sansom

Archive – Jenna Norton

Dirty Church – Ashley Hodges

New Hunt – Lavinia Ewan

System – louise Bradley

The Floating World – Oliver Knowles

https://www.facebook.com/InsolentArt

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The Chapel of Frustrated Actions and Futile Gestures (2013), from which the exhibition derives its name, incorporates a grid of nine horizontal screens that depict figures perpetually repeating various activities. Presented in real time, we witness a man pulling a cart up a hill, only to let it roll back down again as soon as he reaches the top – a palpable reference to Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, a philosophical essay based on the Greek myth, which calls into question the significance of our daily accomplishments. In another screen, we observe a man continuously digging and refilling a hole in the ground at night.  The central panel shows a glass bowl being filled with water from a jug, which slowly seeps out through a crack in the glass until it has emptied – at which point the bowl is then refilled. Every action is repeated in ritualistic fashion, gradually and purposefully, rendering each unsuccessful endeavour all the more poignant.

The three works that complete the Frustrated Actions series engage with ideas relating to the subconscious, the perception of ‘self’ and the ephemerality of life. In Man Searching for Immortality/Woman Searching for Eternity (2013) a man and woman in the later stages of their lives emerge out of the darkness, pausing to explore their own naked bodies with torches, a daily routine search for disease and decay. The figures are projected onto two seven-foot high black granite slabs, suggestive of tombstones, which evoke a sense of impending mortality. The diptych, Man with His Soul (2013) presents us with a man sitting on a chair, waiting, though we will never discover exactly what he is waiting for. The left hand screen – in high-definition video – depicts his conscious self, while the right – shot in grainy black and white – portrays his soul, his inner being. Thus, the viewer is confronted with a juxtaposition of physical and psychological realities. Angel at the Door (2013) continues to explore this theme of the ‘inner self’; a cycle develops whereby a man hears a knocking at the door, but each time he opens it, he finds no one there – only a dark void. When he opens the door for the final time, however, there is an explosion, revealing a mirror image of himself – offering a thought-provoking insight into man’s inevitable and unavoidable confrontation wtih his ‘inner self’.

Four works from the Mirage series, Ancestors (2012), The Encounter (2012), Walking on the Edge (2012) and Inner Passage (2013), were recorded at El Mirage – a six-mile long, dry lake bed in the Mojave Desert. Presented in horizontal and vertical formats, they portray figures from a distance through the distorting haze of a mirage, becoming increasingly visible as they walk towards the camera. Shot in high definition and slowed down, the vast arid landscape takes centre stage, as the travellers navigate the strong winds and the searing heat of the desert.

The Dreamers (2013) consists of seven individual screens, which depict underwater portraits of people who appear to be sleeping. Presented in the gallery on the lower-ground floor, and accompanied by the gentle sounds of water, the viewer is led to feel as if they themselves are submerged with these figures. In this spiritual, immersive subterranean environment, ultimate interpretation is left for the viewer to define, through the lens of their own experiences.

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http://www.blainsouthern.com/exhibitions/2013/bill-viola-frustrated-actions-and-futile-gestures

http://www.wilkinsongallery.com/artists/28-Elizabeth-Magill

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Project RED BALOON 86 consists of a series of large-format photographs and a five-screen video installation. It is a fantasy work about a ghost boy wandering around an abandoned city in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. One day he encounters a red balloon that becomes his only companion in this quiet, sleeping place. The project examines classical childhood story from different points of view, and in particular the relationship the story could have with the contemporary adult world.

The project is inspired by documentary footage found in the archive of a former CCCP television channel and by Albert Lamorisse’s classic children’s film The Red Balloon.

The footage shows a little boy chasing a football in Pripyat, a prominent town just two miles from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. It was recorded in 1986, shortly before the Chernobyl explosion, which left the area around the plant, including Pripyat, completely uninhabitable. Pripyat remains as it was when it was evacuated more than two decades ago. The photographs of the city in its present-day condition reveal a place that is frozen in time and history.

RED BALLOON 86 relates to the original documentary footage of the child chasing the football, while also referencing Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 classic short film, The Red Balloon, in which a little boy follows a helium-filled balloon. Lamorisse’s film was shot in the Belleville area of Paris (an area which was subsequently destroyed, and remained untouched, like Pripyat, for another two decades.)

The project involved creating a fantasy story inspired by elements in the two sources that seemed to complement each other. The wandering boy with a balloon is designed to reconcile a West European audience with an East European motif, and vice versa.

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http://www.museumofchildhood.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions-and-displays/red-balloon-86

http://www.hanavojackova.com

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The Double Session is part of an on-going performative reading of Jacques Derrida’s 1969 lecture of the same name.

Koether has already explored Derrida’s idea of doubling within the artist’s Marriage Paintings – presented this year at Dundee Contemporary Arts and currently
on show at Arnolfini, Bristol. By reproducing the subject again the artist relates it to the philosopher’s comments on Mallarmé’s mime, where the supplement
constitutes the original and denies the difference between a first and a secondary truth.

Unorthodox, unruly readings and other strands of theorizing in and through painting have informed a specific kind of production within Jutta Koether’s practice.
Although the format of this production for The Double Session is mainly sculptural, painting is present in a deconstructive, fluid way.

Viktoria (2013) and Luise (2013) are two works that each comprise hand-shaped basins that contain gift shop jewellery, bugs, glitter, faux-gold bars, and glass
objects that float stranded in clear liquid acrylic. Streaks of colour on torn canvas strips serve to hint at painting and (what Derrida would term traces) hold within
themselves the mark of a past element already marked by a relation to a future element. Mirrored walls behind Viktoria enforce a doubling of the viewer and
object – prompting us to consider the literal framework through which we see and interpret the work.

Suspended in mid-air, Isabelle (2013) is a depiction of a large phallus of exaggerated proportions that are furthered by the appropriate shape of the
paper and frame. Pointing from one room to another the phallus has similar dimensions to the sculpture that Louise Bourgeois holds in Robert Mapplethorpe’s iconic portrait
that evokes the same outspokenly and humorous approach towards the phallic object.

Within the gallery’s stairwell, Koether has positioned a group of ‘plank paintings’ of which can potentially be positioned (viewed) horizontally as well as vertically. In the past,
similar planks have constituted performative objects and here they continue their role to be physically negotiated escaping their pictorial limitations. The Double Session
considers painting as an unresolved category, a broader praxis. The meaning itself of painting disseminates, as it generates an irreducible and generative multiplicity
of semantic effects. It does not rely on oppositions between original and version, natural and artificial, masculine and feminine, but rather on their re-articulation.

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http://www.campolipresti.com/the-double-session-@/index.html?exh=87

http://www.solent.ac.uk/events/events-articles/2013/seven-billionth-citizen-exhibition.aspx 

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The exhibition is a direct response to an announcement by The United Nation of the world’s seven billionth citizen being born on 31 October 2011; drawing attention to the rapid global growth in recent years. The exhibition seeks to address the ambiguity of our era featuring themes of awe, tranquility, collectivity and isolation from a collection of international artists.

The exhibition revolves around five videos – each of which were made by different artists in densely populated zones of the world: America, Europe, Middle East & North African region, sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia & Oceania.

Each artist’s contribution follows an agreed formula, inspired by the nineteenth century landscape paintings of Caspar David Friedrich that show a lone figure facing away from the viewer gazing upon a sublime landscape. In each video, the figure holds an hourglass, an acknowledgement of our urge to measure the immeasurable.

The collaborating artists include:

- Ayman Ramadan whose video work reflects the life of Cairo

- James Muriuki who customarily works with digital media, investigating transitions in contemporary society in Kenya

- Naoya Hatakeyama, a photographer who has most recently engaged in documenting the effects of last year’s tsunami which destroyed his hometown of Rikuzentakata in Japan

- Brazilian printmaker and video artist Maria Lucia Cattani, whose work habitually engages repetition to reveal unseen pattern

- Nick Rands who works in a variety of media to understand the relationship between human scale and the planet

- John Gillett, a local academic, curator and artist interested in the ambition of scale which digital media makes possible

- Beth Harland, a local academic who works in painting and video, analyses time in the texture of the visual.

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http://www.carrollfletcher.com/exhibitions/11/overview/

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http://www.blainsouthern.com/exhibitions/2013/mat-collishaw-this-is-not-an-exit

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For his second solo exhibition at Blain|Southern, THIS IS NOT AN EXIT, the British artist Mat Collishaw returns to the medium of oil painting. However, as is usual with his practice, nothing is literal; the primary source material – magnified images drawn from the pages of glossy magazines – is a simple metaphor, one part of a prism conceived to examine moral questions provoked by the excessive binge culture that preceded the global financial crisis.

When seen from a distance, these large-scale works appear to be abstract paintings constructed on a classic modernist grid; closer inspection reveals them to be scraps of advertisements for luxury goods culled from ‘lifestyle’ magazines like Tatler and Vogue. But this is only partially the case; they are in fact facsimiles of the precisely folded, origami-like ‘wraps’ used by drug dealers to package cocaine, complete with powdery traces of the narcotic.

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