It’s been close to a year now since I had the Night Shift show at Simon Oldfield Gallery. Yesterday, I was surprised in a very very nice way by Rebecca Helen Page, who has filmed bits of the performance I’ve done there and uploaded them to Vimeo.
It was quite a noisy performance with very weird sound and I had very short hair at that time.
The desk I had my instruments on was absolutely gorgeous. It felt like my own private TARDIS.
Forman’s Smokehouse Gallery presents Of this Event, I cannot foresee the end. – video art / video performance / installation
Private view: Thursday 1st March 6-9pm Exhibition runs 2nd-30th March 2012, Thu-Fri 5-9pm, Sat-Sun 12-5pm
Stour Road, Hackney Wick, E3 2NT London, United Kingdom
The featured artists appropriate approaches from scientists in order to gain insights, accumulate data or choose their observational vantage point. By defining a framework wherein a staged experiment or action can take place, the artists test the boundaries of our earthly existence, everyday life, patterns of social behaviour and virtual reality. A distanced camera perspective witnesses and frames the performance – events with unknown outcome – wherein chance and failure play part. The video works go beyond documentation demanding independence from the prior event and share the element of suspense, surprise and humour.
Artists: Memo Akten ● Sophie Clements ● Callum Cooper ● George Eksts ● Kris Emmerson ● Samuel Levack and Jennifer Lewandowski ● Santiago Ortega ● Clifford Sage ● David Sherry ● James Stringer ● Anais Tondeur ● Helen Turner ● Pablo Wendel ● der Warst (Simon Schäfer)
Audio-visual performances at the opening night: der Warst (Simon Schäfer) Brood Ma (Quantum Natives) DJ Tesco (Quantum Natives).
Curated by Carmen Billows
The exhibition also marks the second anniversary of Forman’s Smokehouse Gallery. All welcome.
Night Shift explores the relationship between painting, sculpture and performance with new work by Simon Schäfer and Katy Kirbach.
The exhibition examines the tension between the handmade and ready-made; multiplicity and uniqueness; live event and still object; the diurnal and nocturnal. Night Shift is visually and aurally layered with texture, sound, digital feeds, colour and analogue electronics.
I had to wear some very silly clothes to get this quite large piece of paper. Later, I drank very much wine and had to spend the night in Rob Bellman’s shed/bar/art because I got stuck in Battersea.
Dazed online mentioned me briefly in an Article about the degree show. You can try to read it here, but the text has been edited down to near uselessness.
Somewhat unrelated: I would really like to crouch into a hole and not come out for about two weeks.
To acquire knowhow is to gain the practical skills or intelligence necessary to get something specific done. This is tacit knowledge in the sense that it can be withheld and kept confidential. It may also be difficult to transfer without practical instruction and the required cognitive faculty in the beholder. In the artist this skill has traditionally revealed itself as craft.
Since the dawn of the Readymade, craft in Art has continually been brought into question, and as a result any preconception of a definitive Artistic Knowhow has been blurred or expanded to involve a myriad of scenarios or conditions.
Knowhow aims not necessarily to pin down a definition of the word but to ask the artists to delve into their own practice or maybe push themselves beyond their normal bounds of proficiency. This might manifest itself in a cathartic exploration of an unknown craft, an engagement with a ‚knowing‘ failure or even through the use of prosthetic labour which utilises the employment of non-artistic intervention.
KNOWHOW is a curatorial project by Ben Newton in collaboration with Campbell Works