ArtSlant Review: Urs Fischer at Sadie Coles

Adjacent to the festive consumerist glitz of Regent Street, the Sadie Coles gallery is inaugurating a brand new space with an exhibition of Urs Fischer mirror sculptures as dazzling as any designer shop window.

Fischer has littered the space with a variety of giant mirrored boxes with views (front, back, sides and top) of everyday objects screen printed onto each side in hyper-real digital detail. Giant cigarette packets, high heeled shoes and oversized chairs dwarf viewers like a Pop Art hall of mirrors throwing around its imagery while incorporating the reflection of the viewer in a labyrinthine mash-up of hard fake veneers and reflected real-world depths... (read more)

Sketchbook page

This nude combines my interest in drawing the figure with the fact I like to grid things up and break them down. That it's divided into different units also makes the act of reading the drawing more like a graphic novel or a storyboard, more sequential. I like the idea that deconstructing or destroying an image, especially that of a person, can actually force the viewer to spend more time looking at it, one step back to get two steps forward...

Little White Lies Review: The Arbor

Before I post my review on here, I just want to urge you to go to see The Arbor, it's an incredible piece of filmmaking. The director, artist Clio Barnard, really utilises the properties of film to create something with real visual flair and emotional resonance as well as social pertinence. I don't think a piece like this could be produced in any other medium.

It's also really gratifying to see an artist getting their work released in cinemas whilst still retaining the creative freedom of producing work for a gallery setting. It feels like the extension of an art practice rather than a leap into being a commercial filmmaker, which is kind of how I felt about Steve McQueen and Sam Taylor-Wood making feature films. Sure, as artists they're probably given more scope (and expectation) to be 'original', but there's still rules of narrative commercial filmmaking that have to be adhered to, gotta have an arc after all.

Maybe because The Arbor is a mash up of fiction, faction and documentary it can get away with more. Gillian Wearing's feature film Self Made looks like a similar crossbreed of documentary and fiction - looking forward to that one very much. Anyway, this comment is longer than my actual review, short and sweet, here you go...

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Clio Barnard’s dissection of the life and legacy of playwright Andrea Dunbar is a fascinating look at working-class Britain and the effects of growing up on a gritty Bradford estate. But more than that, it’s a stunning meditation on the subjectivity of memory.

Dunbar’s children – now in their twenties – recall their past in voiceover as actors lip sync their lines, with her two daughters taking centre stage with mutually sympathetic yet drastically different accounts of their upbringing... (read more)

ArtSlant Review: Flat Time House

John Latham (1921 to 2006) occupied a distinct position in contemporary British art placing his practice at the intersection between artistic, philosophical and scientific theories. Flat Time House in Peckham is his former residence and studio, open to the public since 2008 as a permanent gallery of his work, a changing exhibition space, and a centre for research into Latham’s theories about life and the universe.

Walking down Bellenden Road, the space is not hard to spot: there’s a giant book embedded in the front window. Beyond this, the first room hosts permanent exhibits that demonstrate Latham’s central Time Base theory – Flat Time – a theory that prioritizes time and event over space and object as the building blocks for the universe. (read more)

ArtSlant Review: Floor Ten Gallery

East London is a hub of up and coming art spaces, more densely populated with creatives than anywhere else. But since arty coolness attracts gentrification, so the artists themselves go in search of cheaper rents, making Bow the 00s equivalent of Hoxton in the 90s.

Slightly less accessible than Hoxton, it’s a bit out of the way even for those of us used to seeking out art in Bethnal Green’s Vyner Street, but worth a visit to see art coming straight from the next generation, unmediated.

Bow’s Floor Ten Gallery is an artist run space in a tower block that also serves as artists’ live/work space for your garden variety East Londoner. It's about as close to the Bow scene as one is going to get, and currently hosts Goldsmiths student Tom Crawford... (read more)

More tricks with mirrors

Taken in Toulouse last year.

China Gorilla Intergalactic viral

Pic in the Guardian Magazine!

My pic of St Martin in the Fields made it into today's Guardian mag Your Pictures page, marvelous! Also online here: http://gu.com/p/2jt6e

Video interview: David Blandy on Lux

I interviewed artist David Blandy about his new exhibition Child of the Atom, a combination of video and installation exploring his family's historical ties to Hiroshima. See the results on the Lux website here:

http://www.lux.org.uk/blog/artist-david-blandy-his-new-film-child-atom

Child of the Atom
Seventeen Gallery, Kingsland Road, 2 September - 2 October 2010

Dazed Digital Interview: Hussein Chalayan at Lisson Gallery

(Originally published on Dazed Digital)

Constantly defying compartmentalisation, Hussein Chalayan is a true cross-disciplinary artist whose work is never hampered by fixed expectations of genre or discipline. Far from it, if the medium fits the philosophy then he runs with it, sparking an endlessly innovative convergence of fashion, performance, installation, technology, anthropology, and more into the trademarlk Chalayan cultural experience. From 8 September, London’s Lisson Gallery hosts one such experience with 'I Am Sad Leyla (Üzgünüm Leyla)', a multi-room installation deploying audio, video, sculpture and fashion in its deconstruction of Chalayan’s native Turkish musical tradition. Dazed Digital spoke to him about how this all came about.

Dazed Digital: What is the inspiration behind I Am Sad Leyla (Üzgünüm Leyla)?
Hussein Chalayan: The idea was to create a new context for this genre of Turkish music which, in itself an art form, has constantly shifted musical structure due to the amorphous nature of Turkish culture and history .The idea was to further extend this shift by putting it into an alien environment in London at the Lisson Gallery, and also to reframe it to reiterate its power.

DD: What attracted you to such a strong musical element?
Hussein Chalayan: Music and sound have always featured in my work. Visual people are ‘poorman’s musicians’, we all strive to achieve the same affect as music but are not sure that we ever get there.

DD: How did you begin?
Hussein Chalayan: We recorded the piece from scratch. Sertab Erener, a super well-known pop star in Turkey, is not known for this genre of music. Part of the thrill of approaching her, and I think for her accepting, was to create a momentary shift from her longstanding oeuvre. Her performance has the might of early chanteuses in the beginning of the 20 the century in Turkey. We are both more than delighted with it.

Little White Lies review: Perestroika

Watching Perestroika is like being privy to someone else’s lucid dream. Blending footage of two trips on the trans-Siberian express, one alongside her friend Sian Thomas, the other 20 years later after Thomas’s death, Sarah Turner negotiates the gulf between past and present, truth and construction, memory and experience as she tries to piece everything together in a state of retrograde amnesia... (read more)

From the vaults: Tell Us More

A one minute film from back in 2006 called Tell Us More. Made as footage of the plane crashing into the Penatgon in 2001 was released to the media, this is where my longstanding pixel fixation began.

Tell Us More was selected to screen as part of no.w.here's Archetypes Screening at Transit Space, E1, in May 2006. Although back then I didn't give things titles.

Installation: Murder Disco!

I made this pixel piece as an installation covering one wall of a dark room, the rest is self-explanatory...

Astriloquy video for China Gorilla Intergalactic

Some wall candy I made for China Gorilla Intergalactic: a 5 min silent video derived from clips of the film Alien (don't sue me 20th Century Fox), dealing with extra-terrestrial contact. Not for the epileptic amongst us.

Video showing at China Gorilla Intergalactic

I'm going to be exhibiting a video and making some virals for China Gorilla Intergalactic this Friday (see Facebook), more to follow...