Breaking the Mirror of Silence presents new works by thirteen contemporary artists working with sound.
Lauri Achté | Giulia Cadau | Emanuele Cendron | Sunil Chandy | Qi Gao
Robbie Judkins | Howie Lee | Sophie Mallett | Peter McKerrow | Irina Zakharova
Yiorgis Sakellariou | ANY (Angela Nina Yeowell) | Aurélie Mermod
Opening Night: Monday 25 November, 6-9pm with a performance by ANY
Breaking the Mirror or Silence LIVE: Saturday 30 November, 11am - 9pm
Exhibition Continues: 26 November – 1 December
Opening times: Tuesday - Sunday 12pm-6pm; Saturday: 11am until late
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Works incorporating sound are rapidly becoming more entrenched in survey exhibitions of contemporary art. Yet, three years after the Tate dropped the “visual” from the Turner visual art prize, the relationship between sound art and visual art is still indistinct. Rather than accepting a submissive subdomain of a new visual art world, sound art has brought with it its own internal complexes and its inherently knotty relationships to such domains as performance, music, film and sound design. Now that the customary silence of the exhibition space has been decisively swept away by the proliferation of new approaches to technologies and domains of practice, Breaking the Mirror of Silence seeks to amplify crucial debates about sound in contemporary art.
The works in Breaking the Mirror of Silence each propose different ways in which sound in the arts can be a vehicle for exchange in gallery exhibitions. The artists come from a wide range of sound-based practices, linked by their involvement in the innovative MA Sound Arts programme at London College of Communication.
On the Saturday Breaking the Mirror of Silence LIVE will include a morning symposium hosted by CRiSAP (Centre for Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice) followed by a series of live performances.
11:00 - 14:30: Symposium
The symposium will include the exhibition's curator Mark Jackson in conversation with Martin A. Smith, a chance to talk to the artists about their work and a performance by Lauri Achté.
18:00 - 21:00: Performance Evening
An evening of performances by Robbie Judkins, Howie Lee and Yiorgis Sakellariou
Breaking the Mirror of Silence is curated by Mark Jackson, supported by London College of Communication and CRiSAP, and presents the final work of the MA Sound Arts graduates of London College of Communication. Entrance to the exhibition, performances and symposium is free.
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Works incorporating sound are rapidly becoming more entrenched in survey exhibitions of contemporary art. Yet, three years after the Tate dropped the “visual” from the Turner visual art prize, the relationship between sound art and visual art is still indistinct. Rather than accepting a submissive subdomain of a new visual art world, sound art has brought with it its own internal complexes and its inherently knotty relationships to such domains as performance, music, film and sound design. Now that the customary silence of the exhibition space has been decisively swept away by the proliferation of new approaches to technologies and domains of practice, Breaking the Mirror of Silence seeks to amplify crucial debates about sound in contemporary art.
The works in Breaking the Mirror of Silence each propose different ways in which sound in the arts can be a vehicle for exchange in gallery exhibitions. The artists come from a wide range of sound-based practices, linked by their involvement in the innovative MA Sound Arts programme at London College of Communication.
On the Saturday Breaking the Mirror of Silence LIVE will include a morning symposium hosted by CRiSAP (Centre for Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice) followed by a series of live performances.
11:00 - 14:30: Symposium
The symposium will include the exhibition's curator Mark Jackson in conversation with Martin A. Smith, a chance to talk to the artists about their work and a performance by Lauri Achté.
18:00 - 21:00: Performance Evening
An evening of performances by Robbie Judkins, Howie Lee and Yiorgis Sakellariou
Breaking the Mirror of Silence is curated by Mark Jackson, supported by London College of Communication and CRiSAP, and presents the final work of the MA Sound Arts graduates of London College of Communication. Entrance to the exhibition, performances and symposium is free.
The gallery space has been taken over by some form of alien presence. There is a slippage in time that is both uncertain and playful. A large photograph of a battleship from WW2, taken by the artist’s father, holds the stage, while scattered about the floor are boulders linked together by piping, as if breathing or communicating. One of the boulders is raised up menacingly on a watchtower-like structure. Within this theatrical flight of fancy is the suggestion of a primordial life support system. There is something of The Matrix here, albeit with a Flintstones’ touch.
The text is barely readable in its light grey and lack of punctuation. Paranoia and unspecified surveillance permeate the spliced extracts from David Ike’s book The Biggest Secret and ‘clippings’ from the artist’s own spam box. Its Burroughs-like structure offers a glimpse into the overload of the economic, and its corollary, the conspiracy theory’s paranoiac escapism. Within its incoherence, in the absurdity of its own seriousness, there is also something tragically heroic.
At the heart of the installation is the conduit, the receiver, the prism through which time fragments, the HUM. Geometric, translucent, Modernist - it is a philosopher’s stone, contained by two speakers. The sound* is dissonant, uncertain: an electrical sub station, interference, the Mothership.
The small double self-portrait, painted on canvas, is based on a single black and white photograph of the artist as a young boy. There is nothing remarkable about the image except that the boy is wearing a shirt and tie and has a particularly unsympathetic haircut – it could have been any young boy from anytime between the 1930s and the 1970s. It is this out of time nostalgia that fascinates: the implications of the specific collide with a past that is constructed by history lessons, television, cinema, and WW2 battleships.
These elastic narratives within the autobiographical, of adopted memories and constructed myths, are locked into a spectacle of theatrical interplay. The sculptural object as staged prop, the linguistic deficit, and the curatorial directive of the private, all contribute to this brackish movement of history as fiction, making it both unstable and imprecise. With both recall and invention having its effect, it is the sense of ‘wrong place, wrong time', or in Giorgio Agamben phrase: ‘Out of joint-ness’, that prevails.
*Sound created by John Wynne.
Richard Ducker has exhibited widely through out the UK and internationally, including: Kettles Yard, Cambridge; Serpentine Gallery; Royal Academy, Edinburgh; Mappin Gallery, Sheffield; The Kitchen, New York; The Yard Gallery, Nottingham; Katherine E Nash Gallery, Minnesota, USA; Cell Project Space; Standpoint Gallery; Café Gallery; Anthony Reynolds Gallery; Coleman Projects; and dalla Rosa Gallery.
Information on Richard Ducker can found at www.richardducker.com (07957228351)
Photographs by Richard Ducker.
Images: Sadie Lee
"Figurative work and portraiture are outcasts, much out of fashion, for the most part overlooked. I'm addressing this by presenting artists whose work is challenging because of its direction of investigation, or challenging the world full of invention, creating their own journey through life. Portraiture need not restrict itself to painting, drawing, sculpture, the photographic and film - it can be sound or prose, leading me to think about the portrait meal, the notion of you are what you eat. Portraits relate to the layers of the soul." - William Angus-Hughes.
Perfromance 3pm Sunday 16th November
'KUNST-CLOWN DISCOURSE ON METHOD ≠3'
A Lecture-Action by Paul Sakoilsky
for the Finissage of Nuance Outcasts
A rare chance to participate in a Kunst-Clown performance, and the last chance to see this superb exhibition. Also on show: a new edition of Kunst-Clown photographic/mixed media works, and premier of the film 'Kunst-Clown: No-Body' a performance from this summer's 'Fete Worse Than Death (20th Anniversary)' at Red Gallery, London, made by Slack Alice Films.
About the performance:
Starting with a reading of a famous section of Rene Descartes' 'Discourse on the Method' (1637), the Kunst-Clown will attempt to deliver an extemporised lecture concerning concepts of art, politics, technology and economics in the age of integrated virtual networks and neo-feudal globalisation. As per usual, the audience will be invited to pie the artist-philosopher-clown with shaving-foam and sequined pies during the performance.
Paul Sakoilsky is a painter and poet, perhaps best known for 'The Dark Times' project and 'Kunst Clown' performance series. Since the first performance in Budapest, 2006, the ongoing Kunst-Clown series has taken various guises from the simple to the more elaborate. The common denominator is that the audience is invited to ‘pie’ the performer with shaving-foam pies. There have been attempted philosophy lectures, newscasts, portrait painting sessions as well as a banquet in Naples where food took the place of the usual 'pies' (‘Speculum Celestiale’, 2011, cf. link: http://www.frieze.com/shows/review/speculum-celestiale)
Product Placement brings together a range of artists and product designers who share an interest in how objects are made, displayed and sold in contemporary culture. The exhibition explores the processes of production and marketing commodities, but on a wider scale, how (and by whom) participation in consumer activity is structured or framed.
Each artist and product designer has been ‘paired’ in order to produce a new object, multiple or edition for the exhibition. Via their cross-disciplinary collaboration, new and combined working processes will be found and explored. The resulting objects (perhaps neither product or artwork) are placed in a specifically constructed installation for the exhibition. Through an architectural re-working of the gallery, the space will become a parody of 'catalogue' stores - mimicking their structure of experience with catalogue kiosks, service point (with uniformed assistant) and market hall/storage space. Merging this structure into the space intends to amplify and question the functional similarities and behavioral prompts of gallery, retail and warehouse spaces.
An accompanying publication will be launched on the opening night.
Further information on the collaborators and the project can be found on the Product Placement Website: www.productandplacement.com/
Supported by
Photographs by Mark Selby and Iavor Lubomirov
Shop front
William Smith
Catalogue Kiosks (2012)
Shop counter
Rachael Davies
Uniform Allowance (2012)
Felt, thread, tissue and double sided tape
Store room
Installation views
Products
Gordon Cheung + James Cadogan
Sundial (2012)
Laser cut sheets of glued newspaper (Financial Times)
Irene Alvarez
How To Sculpt an A4 in 67 Pages (2012)
Animated GIF (DVD transfer)
Rafel Oliva
Sculpting the Landscape (2012)
Tripods, fishing rod, binoculars, sunglasses and Polaroid
Silo Studio (Oscar Wanless & Attua Aparicio)
Mary and Eliza (2012)
NSEPS polystyrene and polyethylene with disperse heat transfer dye
Corinne Felgate (Factice)
Tenskwatawa, Osceola, Wovoka (2012)
Flocked ceramics and human hair
Kim Thome + Alex Chinneck
Wax Tiles (2012)
Melted wax crayons and board
Ludovica Gioscia (Factice)
Pan-Stäck (2012)
Screenprinted cardboard
Harry Meadows + Max Frommeld
Pop-Pop Boats (2012)
Boats produced by students from Bow School
Die-cut cardboard and plastic (Packaging)
Richard Cramp + Luke Smith-Wightman
Products 1-5 (2012)
Documentation Photographs by Nick Fox
Nightsong brings together a body of work created over the last four years, as well as new paintings, drawings and cyanotype prints, and will be shown simultaneously with Bad Seed (5 February – 27 March 2015), a major survey of the artist’s work at Sutton House.
The mainstay of Fox’s practice is his enduring fascination with social and symbolic codes of courtship, identity, culture, art history, myth and narrative. Quietly seditious, he explores these interests through a combination of painting, drawing, installation, sculpture, moving image, sound, live art and intricately laboured objet d’art. Through each of these mediums the artist finds contemporary currency, personal symbol and cultural meaning of longing, seduction, desire and romance, while also revealing a highly personal vision, fusing and transforming sentiment, wisdom and emotional experience into visual-art forms
Boat (2011) for example, takes its inspiration from Arnold Bocklin’s Painting Isle of the Dead (1883), and features real-time footage of a night ferry traveling across the North Sea in an endlessly repeating cycle. Close by sits a gold leafed Möbius strip. The video was made as a response to Fox’s repeat visits to Holy Island on the coast of Northumberland and Hå in Norway, representing mythological journey, emotional transition and transformation.
In Blue Moon: Knot (2012), one of a series of large-scale cyanotypes, the image of a ‘true love’s knot’ – once a common symbol on sailors’ wedding rings – has been developed overnight using the light of the full moon. All of me, Some of me (2014), a configuration of multiple close-up body images also presented in cyanotype form, reveals a simultaneous abstract and intimate portrait of the artist through a process of self-evaluation and analysis. Elsewhere, the image of the lovers knot in reiterated in the work Valency (2012) this time taking the form of a series of physical large scale “drawings” cut from acrylic paint.
The paintings featured in the show consist of a suite of highly polished circular paintings, including the eponymous Nightsong (2012), each of which indicate Fox’s fascination with the gaze either as active voyeur or as passive witness. As always, his works are layered with literary references, in particular the writings of French novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans and Oscar Wilde, giving rise to a keen sense both of the pleasures and the limits of double meanings in the construction of codes. For Angus-Hughes Gallery, Fox has also produced a new series of small-scale paintings which quietly reveal fragments of hope, promise, love and lust through an overabundance of decadent botanical forms.
Close to the paintings sits Murmuring (2009-2015) a pool of paint which in previous displays has resembled a dark oily stain of water, around which stand a collection of sculpted glass objets d’art that are simultaneously reflected both in the pool, and the mirrored paintings, fusing a symbolic role of botanical imagery to Fox’s themes of desire, longing and loss. For Angus Harris, Fox has revisited the work, producing a site responsive golden pool of paint which flows across the gallery’s floor, introducing references to inside and outside, artifice and the natural.
Another work, Come Undone (2011) appears at first sight to be an intricately crafted lace object tantalisingly draped over a piece of furniture. In fact the object have been carefully cut from acrylic paint and the furniture elaborately sculpted from glass, the individual works revealing a devotion to labour in their process, prompting discussion about the subtle relationship between art and craft.
In his series of delicately observed figurative drawings, Fox transforms the found taboo image into one of intimate and emotive experience in which languorous male figures emerge from the surface of the paper. Elsewhere, in his carbon paper drawings this emotive role is applied to a range of eclectic images given a symbolic dusting of gold; the gold dust used being a gift from Fox’s first lover almost twenty years ago.
Meanwhile, a version of Walter Dana and Bernard Jansen’s song, Longing for you, popularised in 1951 in a Vic Damone recording, and here re-configured as a repeating purely vocal track, drifts mournfully through the gallery, echoing the complexities and struggle to communicate across the emotional spectrum.
“On the face of it, Nick Fox’s Nightsong installations hark back to the romantic symbolism of such legendary late-19th century decadents as Oscar Wilde and Joris-Karl Huysmans. A drawing is adorned by gold dust that was apparently gifted to the artist by his first lover. A nocturnal film, The Holy Island of Lindisfarne, plays against a lyrical backdrop of the 1951 Teresa Brewer song Longing For You. It’s intimate art, half in love with heartbreak, longing and loss. In the hands of less skilled artists, such unashamed use of personal confession might come out all clichéd. However, with Fox it comes over as distinctive, and deeply lovely. “
Robert Clarke, The Guardian (10th January 2013)
Nightsong is a touring show which has already been displayed in Norway and Newcastle,
For further information, please contact:
Mark Inglefield, Albany Arts Communications.
E: mark@albanyartscommunications.com
T: + 44 7584 199 500
EVENT: Nightsong Publication London Launch: Friday 6th February 6:00-8:00pm
Special launch price of £15 (usual price £20)
This comprehensive volume is dedicated to artist Nick Foxʼs body of work, Nightsong exploring the physical and emotional instability and the bittersweet intensification of longing that comes as a result of rejection and loss. Published by Art Editions North, edited by Matthew Hearn, with texts by Grainne Sweeney and Nick Fox (interview), Matthew Hearn and Michael Petry. ISBN 9781906832070
Extensively illustrated with 65 colour images.
Further recent publications include
Wicked Game, Society Issue 17 Garageland 2014
Nick Fox Phantasieblume, published by C4RD and AEN, 2010
Biographical Notes:
Nick Fox was born in Durban, South Africa in 1972 and lives in Newcastle upon Tyne and London. He attended John Moores University, Liverpool (1992-95) and Royal Academy Schools, London (1998-2001). Fox was a prize winner in the John Moores Painting Prize, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool in 2010. Recent group exhibitions include A Union of Voices: HORATIO JUNIOR, London, Sex Shop: Folkestone Fringe, Folkestone, In and out of windows: Vane, Newcastle upon Tyne, Eulogy: Vane, Newcastle upon Tyne, Between fact and fiction: Vane, Newcastle upon Tyne (2014), Winter Show, September, Berlin, Germany, Gifted: Chart, London, Luminous Language: Launch F18 (2013), New York, USA The Dorian Project, SecondGuest, New York, touring to Ana Cristea Gallery, New York, Anschlüssel: London/Berlin, C4RD Centre for Recent Drawing, London, International Print Biennial, Hatton Gallery, Newcastle (2012) (2012), THE FUTURE CAN WAIT presents: Polemically Small, Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, California, touring to CHARLIE SMITH London, 40 Artists 80 Drawings, The Drawing Gallery, London, touring to the Burton Art Gallery and Museum (2012), Baltic Square, Arena Gallery, Liverpool Biennial (2008), and Jerwood Contemporary Painters, Jerwood Space, London (2007).Solo exhibitions include Nightsong, Vane, Newcastle Upon Tyne (2013), Phantasieblume Nåchtlied, Ha gamle prestegard, Håvegen, Norway (2011), Phantasieblume, Vane, Newcastle upon Tyne (2010) and C4RD Centre for Recent Drawing, London (2009) and Unveiled (with Francis Picabia), MOCA London (2006).
new and refigured work by Simon Lewandowski
Simon Lewandowski makes useful things that look useless and useless things that look useful: things that move and things that look as if they are moving: things that are there and things that look like they should be somewhere else. In the past he made machines that manifested “artificial stupidity”, a book combining the heuristics of overcoming a creative block with a fictional language of real objects and hypnotized spectators in an empty gallery, publishing the transcripts of what they “saw” .
For Angus-Hughes Gallery he will revisit the familiar - including the repeated, the reversed and the mesmeric – as well testing the going on some new ground.
The Palindrone Dansette is a portable device that plays vinyl records backwards and forwards at haphazard intervals and was originally made as a test rig for The Reversing Machine (an attempt, with Sam Belinfante, to build a functioning time machine).
Another, as-yet-unnamed, piece references a long history of patent devices for mechanising altered states of consciousness – purporting to induce a trance-like state in the complicit user.
Also included is a selection from a body of drawings made under self-hypnosis over the past seven years and shown for the first time; these may reveal something about what is going on in the rest of the work (or just what was going on in the artist’s mind the day they were made).
Finally, new sculptural objects that link form and language in oblique but telling ways. A New Word Order and ShankForce – show another strand of the Lewandowski’s practice in which text becomes a part of objects which remind us of the complications that can arise between what we write, what we mean and what we do.
Angus-Hughes Gallery presents Up the Duff London, an exhibition by Rosie Leventon and Leandro Lottici, curated by Miguel Mallol. The exhibition represents a dialogue between Rosie Leventon’s architectural sculptures and Leandro Lottici’s urban landscapes.
Rosie Leventon reflects in five sculptures, the experiences accumulated from her travels in the Middle East linked with the immediate reality of the London borough of Brent, where she lives and works. From pigeon cots to Buddhist temples, she refers to the sort of structures that we do not see in our everyday lives.
Leandro Lottici represents in three large paintings the contemporary human being, dispersed in his frenetic wanderings of the urban environment in a city like London. Geometrical visions of apparent abstraction bring the spectator to an impossible point of view, with a combination between primary colours in the middle of greys and blacks.
The sculptures and large paintings are created with the main material, called celotex, which can be found just about everywhere, used for insulation, but is difficult to notice because it is inside the structure of buildings. Raw pigment and other materials have been used as a coating and base for all the pieces.
They create an analogy between the industrial mass produced material and the hand crafted objects, to combine raw materials and industrialized ones changing roles and mixing them smoothly. Rosie Leventon and Leandro Lottici allow us to look through the lens of our everyday Junk Culture of concrete blocks, hamburgers and car parks to see the evidence of other cultures only dimly perceived and often misunderstood.
About Rosie Leventon: Rosie Leventon is a British artist based in London. She works internationally and has exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona, the Arte Laguna Prize at the Arsenale, Venice, Dostoyoyevsky Museum St Petersburg and the Serpentine Gallery in London. She has recently completed an Arts Council funded commission for the Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Woods, Normanton le Heath, in Leics (The Woodland Trust). Her work can also be seen at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, in the Queens House, and Kings Wood, Challock, Kent UK.
About Leandro Lottici: Leandro Lottici is an Italian artist based in Rome. He has an exhibition in April 2015 with Fabio Mariani in Le Dame Art Gallery Ltd (www.ledame.co.uk) London, which represents the artist in UK. He participated recently in Fiume Tevere, Art 6 Gallery Hangzhou, China, ArtRooms2015 Art Fair, London and MACRO museum of contemporary art, La Pelanda, Rome. He has works currently in Vatican City, Rome and National Art Museum of China, Beijing, China.
About Miguel Mallol: The exhibition is curated by Miguel Mallol. With a degree in History of Art from the University of Valencia and from the Lancaster University, he spent 6 years in Venice where he collaborated with several artists curating exhibitions at the Diocesan Museum and at International Modern Art Gallery Ca’ Pesaro. He also worked for Querini Stampalia Foundation, Venice Biennial - the Spanish Pavilion and Matteo Lo Greco Art Gallery. In Spain he worked with curator Carlos Pérez at MUVIM, Valencia. Since 2014 in London he has been working at ARTROOMS 2015 and Le Dame Art Gallery among other projects.
A small embroidery ring morphs into geometric heavy steel shapes. A large wet black and white photograph is draped and compressed into a sculptural sphere, a photograph rests horizontally supporting a constellation of delicate glass objects. part of the equation is an exhibition that hinges on cerebral games that deliberately rely on human play – a knowing appreciation that making by hand brings mindful thinking to the conceptual table.
The photographs, sculptures, videos and installations have their origins in a medical museum established in 1787, which is especially echoed in several human-sized handmade silver gelatin prints – antiquated analogue photographs in a digital age. Since Hippocrates, silver has been associated with healing, but today antibiotics have replaced its medical use; although, a very human reluctance to surrender the idea of silver’s healing properties, has led to ongoing research into its clinical potential. Andrea Jespersen’s interest in medical museums relates to the simple fact that we all have some personal lived knowledge about the subject matter – opening the door for us, with our experiences, to query what human knowledge our society chooses to venerate.
The knowledge of craftswomen, like the glassmakers or patchworks made by mums, are presented in the exhibited works on an equal footing with the cerebral pursuits of academia that the photographs reflect. Curiosity-driven sciences like physics and
neuroscience seep into both concepts and titles. There is no revolution in sight, perhaps ins tead a utopian wish to flatten the hierarchy of knowledge – building bridges between all knowledge, especially those missing academic labels.
part of the equation is the final exhibition in a trilogy that began with the exhibition Human Silver Halo at Medical Museion in Copenhagen (Denmark), followed by Mind Circles at BALTIC’s project room in Newcastle upon Tyne. The large-scale silver gelatin prints were all made during an artist residency at the Danish Art Workshops,Copenhagen, Denmark.
Andrea Jespersen is a graduate from the Royal College of Art and part of the equation celebrates the culmination of a practice based PhD at Northumbria University. Her research focuses on art grounded in conceptual deliberations that incorporate handmade methods. She lives and works in London.
‘It’s A Hard World For Little Things’ comprises two multimedia exhibitions, by C.A. Halpin. The first runs between 4th July - 2nd August 2015 at Angus-Hughes Gallery, London E5. The second is at the V&A Museum of Childhood, London E2, between January-July 2016
hundreds and thousands is a collection of editions and small works gathered over the last five years by William Angus-Hughes and Iavor Lubomirov. Angus-Hughes and Lubomirov are artists, gallerists, curators and organisers. Throughout their engagement with artists, they have held onto, asked for, commissioned, cast their eyes over and sometimes simply been brought a variety of artworks, which, like a trail of mementos from exhibitions and projects, are both a kind of show-reel of their curatorial history and a path pointing to their future. Although some of these artworks have featured in shows in their respective galleries, most have not and it is the artists represented in this exhibition that constitute an indirect record of the past and signify Lubomirov’s and Angus-Hughes’ ongoing interests.
Paul Carter’s practice investigates aspects of the built environment and architectural structure through sculptural assemblage and immersive installation. He exposes a state of constant contradiction between dereliction and construction, expansion and contraction, a claustrophobic entropy and a functional reordering of the world around us. His processes, of collaging urban detritus and utilitarian construction materials, veer between a carefully concocted artifice and a seemingly accidental coagulation of abject matter.
