Whitstable Biennale Satellite Programme 2010
TWILIGHT SPACE
3rd July 2010
Harbour Street Christian Fellowship Church, Whitstable
Twilight Space is a one day only show of six emerging artist’s most recent work. The exhibition focuses on artists that make use of dark spaces.
Limen
Projection with mirrors
Millie Findlay
'My aim is for the viewer to feel part of a no-man’s land – enhanced by the fragmented images they see around the space and the voids created by the mirrors. My practice currently seems to be a state of questioning, linked to the nebulous nature of memory and the fleeting moment. However, there is a sense for me that liminality is key to my practice, as the moment when the memories I am exploring can never be recreated, so I remain suspended between the past and its future impact. In fact, it seems that video installation itself could be described as a liminal state, placing the “viewers’ consciousness and body in the middle of the artwork” (Heartney, 2002).'
www.milliefindlay.wordpress.com/
Welby Street
Monitor installation
Katie Hare
'Welby Street, two monitors are placed in the space on plinths. One video slowly pans through deserted rooms in a messy, student-style house. The video is clear and shot in daylight. The other plays grainy, yellow-tinged footage of two young women sitting in bedrooms and a living room that we recognize from the other monitor. Both videos are silent. The flickering, inhabited shots suggest that they are older whereas the empty shots show the aftermath of an unseen event. The lack of people from the intensely personalised domestic spaces creates a sense of unease despite no indications of anything ‘bad’ having occurred. The mess and clutter becomes more threatening when the inhabitants are removed.'
http://katiehare.wordpress.com/
SURPLUS: eau de toilette / The Sun is but One Anus
sculpture/perfume
Jammie Nicholas
'Forming a part of the project The Sun is but One Anus (2010), which is located within the notion of the balance between production and consumption, Surplus : eau de toilette (2010) is a limited edition perfume that has been made from the excess of the body using the traditional processes of essential oil extraction, perfume mixing and perfume branding: conventionally discarded materials are re-consumed to produce a luxury commodity.'
www.surplusperfume.com
www.jammienicholas.com
www.supralimen.wordpress.com/
Electricity in the stones
Video projection with sound
Elizabeth Rose
'This is the story of a couple travelling around the ruins of Midley, Hope All Saints, Eastbridge and the former church sites of Broomhill and Orgarswick in Romney Marsh, Kent. All through the film there is a feeling of uncertainty. The matter of fact business of travel, maps, lunch, is juxtaposed with the cold historical facts of the churches turbulent past. This landscape that now seems picturesque but was once brutal on its inhabitants; disease and bad weather causing these churches to become deserted. The menace in the film is conveyed through a low hum that prevails throughout the film which is associated with the electricity pylons which are also prominent in the landscape. The work addresses both the idea of the community and the local that has been made at once familiar and strange. The film uses 16mm film to capture the Kent landscape. Super8 is used to document the travelling of the couple exploiting the emotive qualities of the medium.'
Sponsored by The Romney Marsh Research Trust
www.lizzyroseart.wordpress.com
Grandiose Mechanical Ballet
3 monitor loop installation with sound
Thinking outside the box series
Collage (image on the poster)
Ute Schleicher
'"I suddenly saw the whole beauty of this grandiose mechanical ballet, flooded with the light of the lovely blue-eyed sun. But why – my thoughts continued – why beautiful? Why is the dance beautiful? Answer: because it is nonfree movement, because all the fundamental significance of the dance lies precisely in its aesthetic subjection, it is the ideal non-freedom.” (Yevgeny Zamyatin)
The work focuses on the movement of the machine, the fascination with the movement, and the returning sound of somewhere over the rainbow. The notion of Utopia turns into dystopia. Kaleidoscope like images of machines, we focus on the movement, we focus on the mechanical ballet the machine performs for us; the repeating rhythm, the machine taking over the repeating melody. The work has been inspired by the novel ‘We’ by Yevgeny Zamyatin-as part of my research on man and machine. The body of work focuses on the idea of utopia and how fast it turns into something tragic – utopia gone wrong. Juxtaposing the imagery with the sound played on a Stylophone creates a certain feeling of uneasiness.'
www.ute-schleicher.blogspot.com/
Nature – Technology project
Suspended digital print collage
Tom Clark
'Our view of nature is irrevocably bound to a romantic idea of Landscape: something to be looked upon, and increasingly through and mediated by digital technology.
Today, we are more likely to experience the digital or cultural sublime rather than any original and vital experience of the natural world. As technology (particularly visually mediating) becomes further integrated into contemporary experience, the divide between actual and representational becomes increasingly blurred.
What then is an origin? Can there be a truly (Kantian) sublime experience, particularly given the popularity of adventure-leisure: especially as these activities are commercialized, spectactularized and competitive, whilst claiming to offer an ever realer experience.
As the ‘experience’ of nature becomes increasingly mediated, digital technology is used to create ever more ‘real’/believable virtual versions of nature in computer games, big-budget CGI in Hollywood movies and increasingly exciting representations in documentaries.
This engenders a double looping of abstraction and confusion as potentially nostalgic and already ideologically predetermined ideas of nature are re-mediated through exponentially effective and invasive technological mimesis.
The question of origin also applies to the understanding of digital technology itself: the belief in the truth and reproducibility of a digital file which, with no tangible existence, has no apparent origin (in an analogue sense) making it mutable, corruptible and available for appropriation.
Where, when the visual experience is only a visualization of data that has no physical providence, does the origin, or ‘real experience’ of digital visual forms exist? The works in this project seek to make clear these concerns in the forms they exist in culturally through appropriation and re-positioning; using the means by which they were created in the first place."'
www.supralimen.wordpress.com/