Pio Abad’s practice explores the dualities that operate within the discourse of excess: the relationship between control and collapse, and the precarious line between the ornamental and the excremental. He is drawn to how these dualities are made manifest in history, from the calculated hegemony of totalitarian aesthetics and the shambled marriage of 70’s modernism, to the increasingly dire presence brought on by our schizophrenic relationship with luxury. An anxiety towards these persistent failures of history informs his work – a nagging feeling that we are tragically bound to these patterns, fated to exist in a perpetual state of farce.
Abad’s work employs images of failed narrative and spectacle, both imagined and historical, in interrogating notions of power. His drawings and sculptures appropriate elements of baroque excess into a grotesque entanglement of forms.
Defoe’s work focuses on performative, narrative and/or sonic matter; In this case straddling the media of experimental sound composition and video.
Leo examines a common tradition in Munich, which traverses between tourist attraction and local superstition: Rubbing the noses of the lion statues outside the Residenz building on Odeonsplatz is said to bring luck. By capturing all four lions together in one image Defoe attempts to show that there is indeed a connection between the sculptures and the visitors; a subtle one-way-communication. “My second intention was to compose a deconstructed soundtrack with the help of the visitors, triggering notes on an invisible instrument.”
Evers’ work explores the artists persona recreated through historical and culturally significant iconography and imagery. Using his own image and body as well as those close to him (family and friends) he represents the culturally familiar yet makes the viewer reconsider the gravity with which we imbue them. Amidst the distinctly un-pious reality of the artist and his mother’s endeavours to recreate the formation of Michaelangelo’s sombre masterpiece, lie moments of unintentional humour, tenderness and serenity.
Darren Farquhar is a performance artist based in Edinburgh. His work focuses on setting a scene to which viewers are witness to an abstract act. Farquhar creates one-off events reliant on exhaustive physical preparation making complex sculptural constructions that inform the motion. The presence of solid sculpture is essential to altering the environment the performance inhabits and enforces his need to engage with the audience; focusing their gaze as a kind of punishment, making them uncomfortable and or laugh.
Distinctly awkward and relishing in the absurd, his material is “hugely selfish” and based on anti-intellectual primal performance and uses sculptural elements to enhance this aesthetic.
“ANALEYES is an abstracted aftermath of an argument between twa yokels and a coo.”
Allison Gibbs’ practice involves sound, object and representation in space and the negotiation of these three diverse elements. She is interested in reconfiguring and re-presenting architectural structures and cultural motifs as potential or transitory happenings as a consideration on spectacular violence and negative iconography. Drawing points of reference from 20th century roadside service architecture, anecdotal narratives and sonic deterrence. Her audio and sculptural works offer possible counter narratives of digression and assimilation, absurdity and banality.
Pylonic Vibration Therapy and Transmission Remission (Aelian Vibration & Corona Discharge) refer to ideas associated health hypochondria in relation to electricity pylons inducing depression, confusion and bogus natural therapies such as "vibrational light and colour therapy".
Amy Marletta works through a process that begins with drawing & collage and develops into large scale sculptural installations that form a set for interaction. Inspiration is predominantly drawn from biographical material she collates which undergoes a process of selection, reworking and reconstruction. Most recently Marletta has begun to work collaboratively forming bands and dance troupes who go on to perform within her installations. Marletta writes, produces and records all her own music and choreographs and performs in all her video and live works. “A hang-over from a child hood of avid disco dancing, Dance Troupe, is a group of variable willing participants. The members change, the only constant is me, gold shoes and the merchandise. This routine was learnt in an intensive 3 day period and then filmed, before being developed further into a performance. I wrote this song about an experience which occured during a trip to Memphis in 2004. I went to visit 'Elvis' biggest fan' and found myself inside a pink house-turned-shrine, a self made museum so full its contents nearly spilled out of the front door and onto the seemingly 'normal' suburbia around it.”
Christian Newby’s work combines drawing, sculpture and installation combined as assemblages in his fictitious narratives. Newby has recently begun to develop his work into film acting as a document for the combined exploration of his practice. Previously a drummer in the American band VCR his films and works often explore musicality and reference exotica and exuberance.
“Most of my work revolves around the use of theatre or at least a limited presentation of spatial representation that allows the films, drawings and sculptures to work in chorus with one another neutralizing any kind of revolving narrative structure into various tableaux of ambience, ambiguity, form and language.”
By creating a poetic or imaginary environment existing in a liminal space, Newby wishes to remind the viewer that these characters are performing simple, yet strange tasks, but that magic lies within these acts.
An old Jewish proverb says that over time parents become letters and children become strangers.
Aiko Okamoto, originally from Kyoto, Japan, has lived in Munich now for five years. Her work in Self-made Cavalcade plays with words taken from letters to an unknown recipient and explores the nuances between understanding and wilful misunderstanding. In this case the viewer is a stranger; to both the personal content of the letters and the cultural references they describe. However, the strange letters full of longing and homesickness evoke a universal understanding which will not change.
In the format of a video-greeting, Okamoto uses layered imagery and memories of childhood tales, to tragic-comic effect. Using footage from one continuous take, looped into an almost-obsessive cycle, Okamoto employs techniques taken from her other creative persona, mo, the Video performance artist to illustrate this ‘letter home’.
Petra Pennington’s practice explores her interest in folk culture, organic matter, and cosmic heritage. Recent work explores inherited ideals of beauty and fertility from historical or tribal movements; with these tentative explorations Pennington seeks out the magic or sacred properties imbued in the physical image and re-presents them in an abstract context. Employing an inclusive range of media, and often working directly in reaction to a place or situation, Pennington exposes the possibilities of relationships between composite elements; outcomes grow into installation and performance events with often surreal and theatrical sensibilities. The results settle into a strange place of experience, between the intangible (and emotive), and the ridiculous.
The Hoop of Eels, (a prop from a future play) is “a fishy-meaty cycle spectacular, liberated from a cold grimy slab into the realm of padded coat hangers, elevated to the status of pantomime punctuation.” Whilst Shimmery Screen with its choice of three performative images is “a mini-cycle running through personal hints towards a ridiculous sense of Scottish nationality, coincidentally passing through shock, amazement, the extraordinary day-to-day, and astounding pomp.”
Johannes Sailer’s work explores through sculptural installation and film the existence of parallel realities and the feeling of 'being in-between' worlds. His focus lies in trying to find so-called 'cross paths' between parallel dimensions. He questions what it could look like if we stand on those cross paths; one foot in one reality and the other in the next.
His work questions; when switching between these worlds how would memories of the previous reality manifest when entering the next? How aware are we of the apparently familiar space in this transition period? Through such questions Sailer’s work attempts to create visual answers.
Verena Seibt and Clea Stracke have been artistic collaborators since 2004, investigating the places, spaces and institutions which surround them in a variety of media from sculptural interventions to performance and latterly, film. With a minimal interference to the underlying structures of their subject matter, the two make audible, visible and tangible new given narratives which alter the perception of said space. They hold the unique ability to highlight the things which would otherwise go unnoticed; to make the familiar strange and the strange into something altogether new.
In the course of their spatial investigations, some hidden narratives can be uncovered; some must be invented.
In And the Ship Sails On Seibt and Stracke have transformed Munich’s Academy of Art into a heavy tanker, sailing through rough seas on an uncertain course. The Academy, like a ship is a closed system, distant to the outside world. Seibt and Stracke ask us to question our free will, when it is housed in such institutions. On the command bridge, the captain has his telescope on the horizon: No land in sight. But the ship sails on.
Susanne Wagner creates her video artworks within a performative framework. The labour and the failure of the artist are recurring themes in the situations and images she creates. Using the medium of video to authentically document a non-public performance, Wagner stages investigations into the divisions between performance, object and documentation. In In the Office special equipment and a musical instrument are the tools the artist needs whilst sketching ideas. A constructed framework of spools and nylon string makes the objects interdependant. “Creating moving images is a balancing act between general understanding and mystery”
http://www.jaaliceklarr.org/
ReplyDeletehttp://okamotoaiko.wordpress.com/2009/08/09/self-made-cavalcade/
ReplyDelete:)
Pio Abad (Glasgow)
ReplyDeletePio Abad’s practice explores the dualities that operate within the discourse of excess: the relationship between control and collapse, and the precarious line between the ornamental and the excremental. He is drawn to how these dualities are made manifest in history, from the calculated hegemony of totalitarian aesthetics and the shambled marriage of 70’s modernism, to the increasingly dire presence brought on by our schizophrenic relationship with luxury. An anxiety towards these persistent failures of history informs his work – a nagging feeling that we are tragically bound to these patterns, fated to exist in a perpetual state of farce.
Abad’s work employs images of failed narrative and spectacle, both imagined and historical, in interrogating notions of power. His drawings and sculptures appropriate elements of baroque excess into a grotesque entanglement of forms.
Flow Defoe (Munich)
ReplyDeleteDefoe’s work focuses on performative, narrative and/or sonic matter; In this case straddling the media of experimental sound composition and video.
Leo examines a common tradition in Munich, which traverses between tourist attraction and local superstition: Rubbing the noses of the lion statues outside the Residenz building on Odeonsplatz is said to bring luck. By capturing all four lions together in one image Defoe attempts to show that there is indeed a connection between the sculptures and the visitors; a subtle one-way-communication. “My second intention was to compose a deconstructed soundtrack with the help of the visitors, triggering notes on an invisible instrument.”
Johannes Evers (Munich)
ReplyDeleteEvers’ work explores the artists persona recreated through historical and culturally significant iconography and imagery. Using his own image and body as well as those close to him (family and friends) he represents the culturally familiar yet makes the viewer reconsider the gravity with which we imbue them.
Amidst the distinctly un-pious reality of the artist and his mother’s endeavours to recreate the formation of Michaelangelo’s sombre masterpiece, lie moments of unintentional humour, tenderness and serenity.
Darren Farquhar (Edinburgh)
ReplyDeleteDarren Farquhar is a performance artist based in Edinburgh. His work focuses on setting a scene to which viewers are witness to an abstract act. Farquhar creates one-off events reliant on exhaustive physical preparation making complex sculptural constructions that inform the motion. The presence of solid sculpture is essential to altering the environment the performance inhabits and enforces his need to engage with the audience; focusing their gaze as a kind of punishment, making them uncomfortable and or laugh.
Distinctly awkward and relishing in the absurd, his material is “hugely selfish” and based on anti-intellectual primal performance and uses sculptural elements to enhance this aesthetic.
“ANALEYES is an abstracted aftermath of an argument between twa yokels and a coo.”
Allison Gibbs (Glasgow)
ReplyDeleteAllison Gibbs’ practice involves sound, object and representation in space and the negotiation of these three diverse elements. She is interested in reconfiguring and re-presenting architectural structures and cultural motifs as potential or transitory happenings as a consideration on spectacular violence and negative iconography. Drawing points of reference from 20th century roadside service architecture, anecdotal narratives and sonic deterrence. Her audio and sculptural works offer possible counter narratives of digression and assimilation, absurdity and banality.
Pylonic Vibration Therapy and Transmission Remission (Aelian Vibration & Corona Discharge) refer to ideas associated health hypochondria in relation to electricity pylons inducing depression, confusion and bogus natural therapies such as "vibrational light and colour therapy".
Amy Marletta (Glasgow)
ReplyDeleteAmy Marletta works through a process that begins with drawing & collage and develops into large scale sculptural installations that form a set for interaction. Inspiration is predominantly drawn from biographical material she collates which undergoes a process of selection, reworking and reconstruction. Most recently Marletta has begun to work collaboratively forming bands and dance troupes who go on to perform within her installations. Marletta writes, produces and records all her own music and choreographs and performs in all her video and live works.
“A hang-over from a child hood of avid disco dancing, Dance Troupe, is a group of variable willing participants. The members change, the only constant is me, gold shoes and the merchandise. This routine was learnt in an intensive 3 day period and then filmed, before being developed further into a performance. I wrote this song about an experience which occured during a trip to Memphis in 2004. I went to visit 'Elvis' biggest fan' and found myself inside a pink house-turned-shrine, a self made museum so full its contents nearly spilled out of the front door and onto the seemingly 'normal' suburbia around it.”
Christian Newby (Glasgow)
ReplyDeleteChristian Newby’s work combines drawing, sculpture and installation combined as assemblages in his fictitious narratives. Newby has recently begun to develop his work into film acting as a document for the combined exploration of his practice. Previously a drummer in the American band VCR his films and works often explore musicality and reference exotica and exuberance.
“Most of my work revolves around the use of theatre or at least a limited presentation of spatial representation that allows the films, drawings and sculptures to work in chorus with one another neutralizing any kind of revolving narrative structure into various tableaux of ambience, ambiguity, form and language.”
By creating a poetic or imaginary environment existing in a liminal space, Newby wishes to remind the viewer that these characters are performing simple, yet strange tasks, but that magic lies within these acts.
Aiko Okamoto (Munich)
ReplyDeleteAn old Jewish proverb says that over time parents become letters and children become strangers.
Aiko Okamoto, originally from Kyoto, Japan, has lived in Munich now for five years. Her work in Self-made Cavalcade plays with words taken from letters to an unknown recipient and explores the nuances between understanding and wilful misunderstanding. In this case the viewer is a stranger; to both the personal content of the letters and the cultural references they describe. However, the strange letters full of longing and homesickness evoke a universal understanding which will not change.
In the format of a video-greeting, Okamoto uses layered imagery and memories of childhood tales, to tragic-comic effect. Using footage from one continuous take, looped into an almost-obsessive cycle, Okamoto employs techniques taken from her other creative persona, mo, the Video performance artist to illustrate this ‘letter home’.
Petra Pennington (Edinburgh)
ReplyDeletePetra Pennington’s practice explores her interest in folk culture, organic matter, and cosmic heritage. Recent work explores inherited ideals of beauty and fertility from historical or tribal movements; with these tentative explorations Pennington seeks out the magic or sacred properties imbued in the physical image and re-presents them in an abstract context. Employing an inclusive range of media, and often working directly in reaction to a place or situation, Pennington exposes the possibilities of relationships between composite elements; outcomes grow into installation and performance events with often surreal and theatrical sensibilities. The results settle into a strange place of experience, between the intangible (and emotive), and the ridiculous.
The Hoop of Eels, (a prop from a future play) is “a fishy-meaty cycle spectacular, liberated from a cold grimy slab into the realm of padded coat hangers, elevated to the status of pantomime punctuation.” Whilst Shimmery Screen with its choice of three performative images is “a mini-cycle running through personal hints towards a ridiculous sense of Scottish nationality, coincidentally passing through shock, amazement, the extraordinary day-to-day, and astounding pomp.”
Johannes Sailer (Edinburgh)
ReplyDeleteJohannes Sailer’s work explores through sculptural installation and film the existence of parallel realities and the feeling of 'being in-between' worlds. His focus lies in trying to find so-called 'cross paths' between parallel dimensions. He questions what it could look like if we stand on those cross paths; one foot in one reality and the other in the next.
His work questions; when switching between these worlds how would memories of the previous reality manifest when entering the next? How aware are we of the apparently familiar space in this transition period? Through such questions Sailer’s work attempts to create visual answers.
Clea Stracke & Verena Seibt (Munich)
ReplyDeleteVerena Seibt and Clea Stracke have been artistic collaborators since 2004, investigating the places, spaces and institutions which surround them in a variety of media from sculptural interventions to performance and latterly, film.
With a minimal interference to the underlying structures of their subject matter, the two make audible, visible and tangible new given narratives which alter the perception of said space. They hold the unique ability to highlight the things which would otherwise go unnoticed; to make the familiar strange and the strange into something altogether new.
In the course of their spatial investigations, some hidden narratives can be uncovered; some must be invented.
In And the Ship Sails On Seibt and Stracke have transformed Munich’s Academy of Art into a heavy tanker, sailing through rough seas on an uncertain course. The Academy, like a ship is a closed system, distant to the outside world. Seibt and Stracke ask us to question our free will, when it is housed in such institutions.
On the command bridge, the captain has his telescope on the horizon: No land in sight. But the ship sails on.
Susanne Wagner (Munich)
ReplyDeleteSusanne Wagner creates her video artworks within a performative framework. The labour and the failure of the artist are recurring themes in the situations and images she creates. Using the medium of video to authentically document a non-public performance, Wagner stages investigations into the divisions between performance, object and documentation.
In In the Office special equipment and a musical instrument are the tools the artist needs whilst sketching ideas. A constructed framework of spools and nylon string makes the objects interdependant.
“Creating moving images is a balancing act between general understanding and mystery”
JaAliceKlarr
projects
2009