Category Archives: Exhibition

TROVE call for videos for James Whale mini-festival

9 June, 2011

The Birmingham art space TROVE has put out a call for short film works based on the catalogue of legendary filmmaker James Whale. Side note: my favorite Whale film is The Old Dark House from 1932 (see image – that’s Karloff’s hand!). See the call below and also see a previous post on The Girl Who Knew Too Much about Spanish experimental filmmaker Ivan Zulueta’s seminal time-based work Frank Stein (1972).

TROVE call out for shorts film

TROVE is an independent art space in Birmingham, UK. They run a monthly changing programme of contemporary art.

This August (5th-7th August 2011) TROVE will be holding a mini film/performance festival based on the works of James Whale. A film Director born in the Black Country (Dudley, West Midlands) who moved to Hollywood, USA, and made several of the worlds most famous horror films, including Frankenstein (1931), The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and The Invisible Man (1933).

TROVE are inviting you to submit either proposals for or examples of finished short film pieces that fit the themes James Whale explored in his film back catalogue.

Please send DVDs, CV and a short personal statement by July 15th 2011 to

Kate Spence
TROVE
c/o 229 Dolphin Lane
Acocks Green
Birmingham
West Midlands
B27 7BL

For further info please contact TROVE on info@TROVE.org.uk
And see our website http://www.TROVE.org.uk

Thanks Darren for the heads up!

On the Desperate Edge of Now – Folkert de Jong

12 May, 2011

1 Comment

Dutch artist Folkert de Jong’s sculptural works are a grotesque and playful representation of international social histories. He establishes new narratives through the deconstruction of the past (referencing art history, warfare, colonialism, assassinations) assembled in figurative forms so that the viewer can recognize and remember our collective history.

His characters emerge through the time barrier like tarred ghosts, an evocation of negative energies brought forth to enlighten and entertain. These sculptures aesthetically ooze with attraction and repulsion; this push/pull creates a rupture that becomes our portal into an at once familiar and foreign struggle. Carnivalesque costumes, sickeningly sweet colors, and devilish grins are accompanied with barrels of oil, decapitated heads, and rifles. Humor is used to translate the horror and make it palatable. As the bad twin to characters in a Disneyland ride (think Haunted Mansion and Pirates of the Caribbean) De Jong’s figures urgently perform and unfold the history of human drama. These ‘tableaus’ are dropped directly into our present – the gallery, the museum, the studio are the background settings. Here is where time and space collapses as the past merges seamlessly into the now. These are not the desolate and isolated wastelands of Ed Kienholz, they are frighteningly alive ghosts beckoning us join their ‘danse macabre’.

As sheer material form, the sculptures are wholly hand-made and consist of Styrofoam, polyurethane foam, and occasionally clay. The usage of Styrofoam is significant beyond its easily modifiable form; it’s the same medium used in the film industry for architectural and stage design and it’s also produced by the same company who manufactures Napalm (that deadly chemical agent used prolifically in military operations). This subversive combination of fantasy (film) and reality (warfare) makes de Jong’s works resonant with power; an explosion occurs between representation and the acts being represented. And it’s within this space the horrors from the past emerge to haunt our present consciousness.

De Jong gives the viewer an arsenal of information. With just enough bit of candy coating, he coaxes us into our historical tales of terror that do not exist within the confines of film set but have been living amongst us within our everyday world. In his latest exhibition at James Cohan Gallery brings this forth via newer and older works including the large-scale and ominously fragmented Operation Harmony (2008). Titled after the contradictory name given to Canada’s 1992 military mission in Bosnia this sculpture references another political invasion, the lynching of Dutch political figures the DeWitt Brothers in 1672. Depicting five headless bodies strewn across the vibrant pink scaffold, only four heads (smiling, direct, sinister) look out at us. They represent men involved in various political assassinations and genocides. With title and source separated by hundreds of years we bear witness to the fact that “progress” often involves a sacrificial death. The conflation of these different historical events and geographical locations together with the present day makes for a curiously charged experience. These men are long dead but their stories have been re-animated.

A newer installation is The Balance II: Trader’s Deal 6-9  (2010) featuring a vignette of proud Dutch traders prance with their treasures of beads and whiskey from Manhattan’s Native Americans. Place in the front portion of the gallery and directly facing the street, these men beckon viewers to share in their spoils. However unlike the charm from the buccaneers in Pirates of the Caribbean, we are more suspicious of these fellows and their inviting presentation of swindled goods. Other works like Business As Usual: “The Tower” (2008) the “No Evil” or “Morality Monkeys” remind us of our ability to look the other way and even perhaps America’s obsession with eliminating anything sad from our thoughts.

Seeped in the significant role art has played in the expression, sublimation, and manipulation of war and terror, de Jong continues the art historical tradition of bringing atrocities to light. In this sense he also acts like a skilled horror film director whose purpose is to manipulate reaction and produce affect. Tackling a myriad of historical traumas, like horror cinema, de Jong exposes universal truths to engage the viewer in a proactive remembrance.

Images (top to bottom):
Halleluja, 2007
Installation view:  Operation Harmony (2008) and Business As Usual: “The Tower” (2008)
Detail view: Operation Harmony (2008)
Installation view: The Balance II: Trader’s Deal 6-9  (2010)
Business As Usual: “The Tower” (2008)

Photos: Jason Mandella / James Cohan Gallery

Vincent Price Art Museum preview on Rue Morgue

11 May, 2011

While recently in Los Angeles I had the pleasure of taking a sneak peek at the insanely big and beautiful Vincent Price Art Museum as well as meeting with Director, Karen Rapp. You’ll find out all about the museum, its first series of exhibitions, and Price’s infectious mission to get art into the public arena on my piece for Rue Morgue – Vincent Price Art Museum set to re-open.

‘Hiker Meat’ (Jamie Shovlin) at Milton Keynes Gallery

20 April, 2011

2 Comments

UK artist Jamie Shovlin ongoing installation on Jesus Rinzoli’s 1981 Hiker Meat is the best slasher film never made. Featuring scripts, posters, drawings, and thousands of culled horror clips, Hiker Meat is a celebration of a memory that didn’t happen except for in our generation’s joint enthusiasm for campy killer classics.

Hiker Meat has been shown in various incarnations recently in London at IBID Projects, New York at Horton Gallery, and will be at MACRO this fall. However this Thursday Milton Keynes Gallery will be showing the film’s ‘rough cut’, along with a live performance by Lustfaust, as part of their Scratch Nights series.

Sue de Beer – 500 words on ‘The Ghosts’

19 April, 2011

One of Artforum’s February ‘500 Words’ was artist Sue de Beer talking about The Ghosts, her film and installation for the Art Production Fund. De Beer has continuously folded horror and gothic influences into her photography and films through a cinematically macbare representation of the past, the historical, memory, and youth culture.

ORIGINALLY I WANTED TO MAKE A GIALLO––a very classic version, with ghosts in it. During the course of the narrative development I began to undergo a series of hypnosis, and I also started going to a sensory deprivation tank in Berlin. So I began to wonder about intersections between the physiological and the psychological, or about ways to take your conscious mind to a place that is unconscious but still visible––a place that produces images. It was then that I began to conceive of a character that was very much in a giallo––an occult hypnotist. After I completed the basic outline for the script, I asked Alissa Bennett to write a text for the hypnotist, where the hypnotist talks about ghosts and the way ghosts inhabit a room––leaving traces of its former occupancy, clues for present and future residents. I also asked her to write a text for a character who repeatedly visits the hypnotist, to experience a more vivid sort of “recollection.” Alissa named this “the material recollection.”

Visit: Recent exhibition at Marianne Boesky gallery Depiction of a Star Obscured by Another Figure

Tick Tock: Christian Marclay’s “The Clock” at BAS7

7 March, 2011

Brief writing on Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010) as seen in the British Art Show 7 (currently on view at the Hayward Gallery).

Christian Marclay’s The Clock is so much more than an awareness of literal time. Certainly, the onscreen images constantly remind us that we’re in the here and in the now. In the theatre we become weighted in this moment through the succession of each passing minute flickering before us. Something occurs beyond this explicit notion of the clock ticking however, something that extends out of the undercurrent theme of death and waiting. What unfolds is an idea of time as a (pop)cultural marker and reference point for the viewer that gives The Clock its pulse.

The Clock is a 24-hour single channel video that includes thousands of scenes from film and television (silent era to the very recent) that reference the time, each minute that passes on screen in the same minute passing for us in the audience. Fragmented time becomes a synchronized event. It’s a powerful and enjoyable experience to watch briefly our favorite movies, bask in recognizing certain actors (Vincent Price, Peter Falk!), episodes, and places; Marclay’s fluidity in joining these scenes definitely makes for highbrow channel surfing sensation. Because of this, a question is posed: is it our familiarity with these references that signifies the true relationship to time in The Clock? In thirty, fifty, eighty years from now viewers will view The Clock as its own frozen moment in time without any filmic sources of that particular future time? Will the work become pastiche or evolve in meaning?

Time is very much a universal construct and personal experience, changing as we get older and our life evolves. Boredom, love, hate, youth, excitement, all effect our perception of how long or short any given period of time feels to us. In this way, I would think of The Clock as being eternally temporal. A post-modern composition of familiar faces, places, and films that itself will change in its meaning throughout the decades, always with the grounding reminder of finitude, to become an object to be absorbed by future artists, watchers, and nostalgic revelers.

 

Horror films and art museums

3 March, 2011

Early this week a friend of mine sent me this photo he had taken of a street poster in Paris for the Musée d’Orsay’s In the Night of Hammer (a two-week screening series of classic Hammer Horror films) and it got me thinking about how horror cinema often finds itself situated in an art institution. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) founds critical stature in the United States after a screening at the Museum of Museum Art, an institution who has shown the film throughout the decades and who acquired a print for their collection in 1980. Recently it’s become noticeable that in London there have been frequent showing of horror films in galleries. Inspired to dig a little deeper as I explore the relationship between horror and art, I’ve compiled a [growing] list of non-Halloween related horror screenings in art and film institutions (after the jump):

Continue reading →

Brendan Flanagan

28 February, 2011

I’m really interested when filmic influences, particularly horror cinema and B-movies, manifest themselves into static images. The paintings of Canadian artist Brendan Flanagan are a recent discovery. The works are architectural, structured, and extremely painterly. Culled from film, photographic, and archival images they are set within a cultural framework yet still quite unsettling.

See his Sightlines solo exhibition that just closed at Thierry Goldberg in New York.

Image: Landing, 2010 – 0il and acrylic on board – 20 x 25 inches (Courtesy of Thierry Goldberg)

 

Mike Nelson

21 February, 2011

Mike Nelson scares me. His installations are claustrophobic and isolating and while no one thing in the elaborately constructed spaces is particularly frightening (clown masks aside), it’s the immediate convergence of all the things that produces an overwhelming intense experience. And I can’t get enough.

I feel like I shouldn’t be in one of Nelson’s rooms, touching and opening doors, searching my way through the maze (not in the literal dark but the tension is just the same). The sense of something being off is palpable and yet, during this feeling of disorientation, I feel totally within my element. Like a good horror film, I feel both displaced and engrossed, enjoying not knowing my way and appreciating the sensory overload provided to me. Indeed, Nelson’s work has a lot in common with the aesthetics and structure of horror cinema such as his employment of architecture and interiors, particularly in the usage of a succession of rooms.

In her essay on Nelson’s Coral Reef (owned by Tate and recently on display at Tate Britain), Helen Delaney says: “Nelson’s use of suggested, open-ended narratives is influenced by filmmakers Sergei Parajanov and Dario Argento, whose ambient, non-linear films present tableaux that absorb and envelop the viewer. The movement from one room to another produces a kind of filmic ‘cut’ between one scene and the next, allowing narrative possibilities to proliferate without coalescing into anything fixed. It triggers a growing sense of unease.”

I could only wander, stop, and stare when encountering his Studio Apparatus for Camden Arts Centre… (1998/2010) at Camden Arts Centre’s now closed exhibition Never the Same River (Possible Futures, Probable Pasts). Consisting of three rooms (dirty entrance walkway and a small reception/office room that led to the larger backyard object extravaganza. In an attempt to focus, record, and re-live the experience I just wrote down all I thought I saw: selection of motorcycle helmets with raccoon takes; slices of science fiction mags; fake flames; slouched body with paper bag head; log fire with face shield, fur, gas cans, wood planks and concreted blocks; space constellations of hubcaps, wire, and balls; latters; antlers; Mickey Mouse with devil antlers; chicken wire; humming radio; fabric mountains; the list goes on.

Each new work I encounter of Nelson’s is a new adventure. I have a long road of discovery ahead when it comes to his work and I’m looking forward to the journey.

Mike Nelson will be representing Britain at the 54th Venice Biennale this summer. Image is from Camden Arts Centre, courtesy of the artist.