After our Director’s Talk at the Chisenhale Gallery Members will be taken to Matt’s Gallery for the Contemporary Art Society Summer Party! Kindly hosted by Matt’s Gallery, this event provides an excellent opportunity to explore the important work of the gallery’s Director Robin Klassnik.
Matt’s Gallery is one of the oldest institutions of its kind in the UK. Located in East London for the past 32 years, it is not only an essential part of the London art scene since its founding in 1979, but, way beyond the city’s limits, it is also internationally recognised as an innovative and discursive platform for contemporary art and its discourses.
During our event Members will be given short tours of the forthcoming exhibitions at the gallery.
We also look forward to offering a light summer lunch and drinks. This event will be open to every Member of the Contemporary Art Society including National Network, North East, North West, London, Collector and Artist Members, thereby providing a unique opportunity meet our many supporters and stakeholders.
Click here to go to the Matt’s Gallery website.
Fiona Crisp, Negative Capability: The Stourhead Cycle
The Stourhead Cycle is a series of eight large-scale photographic works that will be shown for the first time in the installation Negative Capability: The Stourhead Cycle at Matt’s Gallery, London June/July 2012.
Implicit are questions concerning the democratising of cultural ‘assets’ or the space between the public and private sphere but ideas are also articulated through a formal visual language where tensions are set up between proximity and distance, between the flat plane of the photograph and the perspectival depth of landscape or between revealing and obscuring a ‘view’.
Generated at the National Trust site of Stourhead (Wiltshire, UK) in 2006, the images eschew any desire to document a specific location; instead, the historic house at Stourhead, along with it’s world-famous 18th century landscape gardens, are employed by Crisp as a formal device to reflect upon the colliding imperatives of heritage, leisure and history at a site of national cultural significance.
Negative Capability: The Stourhead Cycle will be Crisp’s third exhibition for Matt’s Gallery and continues her exploration of what, in phenomenological terms, a photograph is – What is it capable of? Here the equivocal identity of Crisp’s work persists as glazed and framed photographic works are removed from the plane of the gallery wall and sited on single scaffolding poles to create a new, provisional architecture of the gallery interior.
Jennet Thomas: SCHOOL OF CHANGE
Click here to watch the trailer
SCHOOL OF CHANGE, is an experimental, musical science fiction film based in a distorted reality that satirically reflects on our own; where changes, social, technological – even mutations in the workings of reason itself – are threatening the viability of humanity. The film has been shot in Thomas’ old secondary school with a cast of 14 professional and ‘real life’ performers including current pupils and staff. The work is in collaboration between the artist and composer Simon Bookish (www.simonbookish.com).
Drawing upon motifs and characters from the work, the exhibition will expand upon the experience of film and sound art, by creating immersive experimental states, stage sets which we, the audience are not excluded from, moreover we are encouraged to enter the scene as if we are players ourselves.
To view the video the audience will enter a subversive projection room that the audience will access via a sculptural walkway, interacting with a performance by a character from the piece itself. The film’s distinctive aesthetic and choreography will heavily inform the installation within the gallery environment; colliding an everyday location with an extraordinary skewed logic. A playful strangeness is manifest throughout the film via disruptive editing rhythms, original songs, dance routines, a modular narrative structure, bold design and special effects, all deployed to knit together a ‘hive like mind’; a school of worker bees striving towards a stronger kind of logic. This obscure, futuristic logic will be further developed in the installation format with sculptures and performances using adapted school furniture, hybrid, bogus technologies, sound design, all akin to an aesthetic Thomas refers to as “crystal ball meets I-Pad”.