PARALLAX

PAUL CARTER - JOHN CLAYMAN - SHONA DAVIES - PHILIP HAUSMEIER - SHARON KIVLAND - ROSIE LEVENTON


CHARLES MASON - IAN MONROE - CALLUM MORTON - MARGARET O'BRIEN - LUCY REYNOLDS


KATE TERRY - ZOE WALKER &  NEIL BROMWICH - JOHN WYNNE - CATHERINE YASS


curated by Richard Ducker


Exhibition runs from: 29 March - 20 April 2008


It is a matter of distance and it is a matter of position.
 
Parallax involves positions and relations and the movement that aligns or displaces an object or objects. Something is set against a background; one might say it occupies a place. It is seen by a viewer, who changesposition and in so doing, it is as though what is seen has shifted; there is a new line of sight and something, hithertounseen, appears (as though it has been revealed), changing what one has seen before. Parallax is geometrical,mathematical, and useful in astronomy if not always in the viewing of works of art. It is epistemological andontological. It is a lovely metaphor, and may be observed as a literary style, as when a story is told through morethan one narrator’s voice, giving rise to different accounts of the same event, as much as it may be taken as a figurefor an exhibition that undertakes a collection of works, to which are invited a number of viewers, who will clearlyhave more than one point of view. Yet it is perhaps a matter of the shift that occurs in viewing – on the part of theviewer, that is - rather than merely a matter of the multiplicity of places from which viewing may take place, againstvarious backgrounds (including the site of the unconscious, about which one may know very little, simply positing itsexistence from time to time or suspecting it when falling into a gap in knowledge). If it were only a matter of ashifting occupancy, then meaning would flow endlessly, and sometimes, it does not. 
 
However, what is seen, from whatever position, can be determined. It can be tracked down, of course, triangulated– but only indirectly for the observations are incommensurable. The object (and I do not use the term lightly)remains somewhat uncertain, even blurry, for in the act of triangulation (a topological space, which suggestsconnection, contiguity, and continuity), it does tend to be mutable or unclear. This may be no more than an effect ofoptics, as Jacques Lacan demonstrates in his reflection on the experiment of the inverted bouquet, where one maysee an imaginary phenomenon: a real bouquet of flowers in a real vase brought together in a spherical mirrorthrough a fusion of real and imaginary space by a viewer in an illusion that risks falling apart at any moment if theviewer is in the wrong place.  The setup is simple enough – a bouquet of flowers is suspended under a hollow box,placed on a stand, more or less lined up with the centre of a half-sphere, nicely polished, at a distance. Without thereflective sphere, the viewer cannot see the flowers, but can see the vase placed on top of the stand. In thereflective sphere, the viewer can see both flowers and vase; indeed, the flowers are in the vase in the mirror but theimage is strange, despite the appearance of reality, unless the viewer is quite far away, and distance allowsparallax to do its work in producing a complete and satisfying illusion. Lacan turns this experiment into a metaphorfor the human subject, who has to be in the field of the sphere.
 
It is a matter of position and it is a matter of distance. And it is where position and distance have an associatederror, which - happily or sadly - includes the viewer.
 
-- Sharon Kivland 2007 



PAUL CARTER


The Hotel As opposed to the studio


Could it be the studio hotel, replacing new constructions with existing ones a place to stay sleep. Window, work, seat, bed, window, work, seat, bed, Window, work, seat, bed, window, work, seat, bed, Window, work, seat, bed, window, work, seat, bed, Window, work, seat, bed, window, work, seat, bed, Window, work, seat, bed, window, work, seat, bed. Daily


After crossing the threshold of the hotel entrance, checking in taking the stairs in place of the lift, you have the room. Not just a room a reading room, eating room, sleeping room. Any room for constructions? fluids, toilet piss and shit, dirt and sink.


Making the hotel with windows extracted, open fenestration pulling the walls apart. Not self catering, served elsewhere  


The location of the hotel, somewhere full of cultural creative goings on. Not self catering food and drink is served elsewhere


Other objects in the rooms Looking around nothing to be desired The bust, the heads sitting on boxes Legs coming out of walls a plastered foot as a door stop another foot as a lamp shade, shit and rubbish, shit is this the psychos room?


The cushions, lovely ones that make up sofas. Loving colours, patterns, smells, perfume, feet, hair, stains from all places, all shapes and sizes.


Out of the window. Literally through the window that is no longer there, onto the street, seat. The hotel architecture is small everywhere has to be bigger, full of things, useful, ugly, useless, desired, left, beautiful there is no and.


Expanding and contracting, the air in a lift shaft breathing buildings. Fold down sofa beds the exhale of cushions, the inhale of cushions, gone. No self catering today.

JOHN CLAYMAN


John Clayman has been digitally manipulating black and white photographs from art textbooks over the past few years. Empty Frames is a selection of iconic images of site-specific artworks made between 1955 and 1997 with the artwork painstakingly removed.

SHONA DAVIES


Shona Davies’ work offers fleeting glimpses into peoples’ lives. The viewer is encouraged to construct meaning from ambiguous scenes, where an infinite number of interpretations are possible. The work weaves functions, events and narrative together into a diminutive museum of the imagination. 


‘Miniature, yet intricately crafted abandoned rooms are painted to give a coating of what appears to be the dust of years of neglect. We peer in, intruding on these deserted spaces. Simultaneously inviting and repellent, the rooms are pervaded by melancholy, charged with the extreme loneliness of those who once inhabited them. It’ s almost a relief to find them gone’. 

-- Jessica Hall, Curator 2007 


Davies is currently based in London, England. She recently graduated with First Class Honours from Sir John Cass College of Art, and won joint first prize in the Owen Rowley Award, as well as being a recipient of the Sir John Cass Purchase prize. Davies has shown internationally and forthcoming group exhibitions include Pure_ Mixed Media Group Show, Ferreira Projects, Shoreditch, London and SaLon Gallery at FORM.

PHILIP HAUSMEIER


"The Black Series is a body of work that has moved almost beyond perception into more haptic visceral areas of non-visual bodily experience. The dense forest of hand cut strips of black plastic suspended ceiling to floor is decep­tively simple in form and execution but presents complex phenomenological and philosophical issues concerning our experience of an art work in the tangible world. From the outside we see the material properties within the room. Once we penetrate inside its sliced outer skin our experience of it radically changes. We have moved into a space without light, a non-visible space in which our sensory perceptions are reduced to those within our own body. We can easily move out through the slatted volume which yields no physical resistance even though we experience it as a compact mass of dark matter within the light of the room."  -- (c) Tim Head 2006

SHARON KIVLAND


Flair 2005, CD 


A sound work for speakers, scenting the air with its narcissistic words, as French women recite the foolish strap-lines for perfumes, claiming the phrases for themselves. Their French accents distort the English words, stress falls incorrectly, and breaths are misplaced. The work’s title has two meaning: in English, it means the possession of a certain style or aplomb, while in French, it more usually means the faculty of discerning an odour or an aptitude for intuition or perspicacity. (This is also a book work: Flair, and a text work for walls, first commissioned in 2004 for the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College, London.)  


Mes fils 2000 to present, continuing project. C-type photographs mounted on aluminium. A continuing series of photographs; each a medallion, like the French beauty in the museum in Lyons, always at the back of the artist’s mind; each a portrait of an embrace, the same woman, but a different man. There is something disquieting, for on closer view, it is clear that woman, who is gradually aging over the years of the project, is old enough to be the mother of each young man, She is constant, however, while each of the men is disposable, discarded in favour of the next, one might say. And worse, these young men are her former students.  


Sharon Kivland is an artist and writer, who divides her life further between France and England. Reader in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University, Research Associate of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research, London, she occupies herself with fine leathers, elegant embossing, improper attributes and borrowed vices. Attracted by Karl Marx, devoted to Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, she frequently withdraws from theory to the solace of Parisian department stores. 

Her work is represented by Galerie Bugdahn & Kaimer, Düsseldorf (Germany). She is currently working on a series of three books, Freud on Holiday, of which the first, Freud Dreams of Rome, is published by INFORMATION AS MATERIAL, 2006. The second, A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis is published by INFORMATION AS MATERIAL and Cube Editions (Athens), 2008. A third volume is planned for 2009, as she reconstructs Freud’s last visit to Rome in 1923. A series of etchings, derived from the first volume, has been exhibited recently at the Freud Museum, London, where they appeared strangely at home. A second series takes up a number of themes: Freud and stairs, the gift of flowers, Freud and real estate, and the reason Freud changed hotels in Paris in 1885. She is co- editor of the series The Rules of Engagement (London: Artwords 2004-2008). Projects in 2008 include solo exhibitions at Bastart, Bratislava, where she addressed Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ideas on natural education; Sleeper, Edinburgh, for which she worked hard on her cross stitch, stem stitch, and her worst traits; and Chelsea Art Space, in November, for which she is continuing her exploration of revolutionary moments in the history of France, with particular attention to la mode. She is Visiting Fellow in the Institute for Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London, where she is working on the impossible translation of Freud’s work, getting rather stuck in three essays on sexuality.

 ROSIE LEVENTON

 

Rosie Leventon makes sculptural installations, for both indoors and outdoors, using a broad variety of materials from recycled mobile phones and human hair to recycled central heating pipes. Some of Leventon’s Installations comprise radical interventions into the interior architecture of a building. She has constructed false floors that float on water and which shift underfoot. Her outdoor installations sometimes highly ambitious in scale, often have a functional regional element, providing water for animals, for example. or promoting biodiversity and regeneration. 


All of Leventon’s work is grounded in sensitive concern for the natural environment, and how we use it. She sees her work as ‘interweaving a kind of personal archaeology with the archaeology of contemporary society and the physical archaeology of places. Much of Leventon’s sculpture incorporates elements of surprise or wryly mordant humour, but there is also a muscular quality to some of her installations, which carries its own freight of symbolism. ‘Forensic Evidence’ a piece first shown at London’s Serpentine Gallery, comprises a series of stacked scaffolding boards, from which an elegant wound-like indentation has been hacked, while ‘False Floor’ is constructed from old scaffolding boards punctured with ragged holes from which water spurts, splashing the surrounding boards. Such pieces possess vaguely menacing connotations, as if one has inadvertently strayed into a place where some catastrophic event has taken place. 


Leventon’s drawings combine expressive energy with a sculptor’s instinct for ground and depth. Surfaces are tactile, often evoking organic sculptural materials, or referencing the elemental aspects of landscape. 

-- Tom Flynn. 2007


CHARLES MASON


Charles Mason deploys a deceptively minimal approach using, among other materials, ceramic tiles, pieces of furniture, electrical tape and concrete, familiar things that fabricate and furnish our daily life, which he combines to create seductive sculptures. 


Objects that should be defined by a proper form and a proper use, here, Mason misuses, the resulting sculptures; formal, subtle and anti-authoritative perform a re-employment of recovered elements evoking unexpected emotions. 


The finished works hint at their former lives as well as proposing new ones, replete with psychological implications and open to narrative, they probe the world in which they find themselves, like interventions in the urban fabric of the overlooked and undervalued.

IAN MONROE

courtesy Haunch of Venison


Ian Monroe renders the promise and disappointment of modernity in its own language. Deploying perspective and the viewer's expectation of volumetric space, the artist's depictions of cavernous but illusionary places propose that the project of utopian desire, however internally erroneous and eternally alienating, continues, wherein man is not only absent, but turned away. For most of us Architecture is handed down to us from above, needs are assumed, demographics consulted, and made manifest in concrete and fibre-optics, the result being tantalizingly limitless and malleable, but this is a potential energy only. We are all nomads of the lobby, the computer game, the banking system; locations through which both ourselves and our production pass, but systems whose ultimate success depends on us leaving no mark, no disturbance. On his own work Monroe comments, “Like the invisible yet immense forces in a sub- basement column of a skyscraper, there is a liminal inertia that surrounds us. Physics tells us that in any system, for every amount of order there has to be an equal disordering, and thus the future is inevitably tinged with melancholy, no matter how crisp and fluorescent.”

You’ve chosen a terrific way of integrating images and text into your website. Move the image anywhere you want in this container and the text will automatically wrap around it. You can display events team members new products and more easily and creatively. To start add an image from the Image Picker and edit it as you would edit any image in the system. For example you can link the image to existing pages in your site a website URL a popup or an anchor. After you’ve chosen the image add your text. You can add text that describes the image you’ve selected or simply use the image for decorative purposes. \nYou’ve chosen a terrific way of integrating images and text into your website. Move the image anywhere you want in this container and the text will automatically wrap around it. You can display events team members new products more easily and creatively. To start add an image from the Image Picker and edit it as you would edit any image in the system. For example you can link the image to existing pages in your site a website URL a popup or an anchor. After you’ve chosen the image add your text. You can add text that describes the image you’ve selected or simply use the image for decorative purposes.

MARGARET O'BRIEN


Margaret O’Brien’s practice refers to a psychological in-between space, one that exists between the private and public personas, and the self and others. This is an intangible, insecure space, fragile and changeable in the extreme. It alludes to psychological conditions such as obsessive behavioural patterns, paranoia, a compulsion to control, isolation, alienation, agoraphobia, claustrophobia etc. 


O’Brien draws her inspiration from the everyday, the familiar and the domestic environment. In recreating objects or spaces that we encounter on a daily basis, she replaces their normally functional or benign fundamentals with an element of malfunction or mishap. 


O’Brien’s practice is multidisciplinary and location is fundamental to her concerns. She uses installation as a material through which the emotive experience of a space is manipulated to create a disorientating psychological environment. The spaces she interferes with become highly sensory experiences. Using devices such as sporadic sound, live malfunction, scale, and the multiple, the psyche of the viewer is affected through an involuntary, sensory response to the work.

LUCY REYNOLDS


Lake (nocturne) 

12mins, silent, B & W 


Lake (nocturne) is a study of the interplay of artificial light with the changing patterns and movements in nature, exploring the illuminations and obfuscations that occur in landscape after dark. The shadowy forms of landscaped lake and parkland also resonate with past narratives of the pleasure garden, recalling the original meaning of nocturne as a term for music composed to be performed at night-time, as accompaniment to the illuminated tableaux, spectacles and fétes of grand gardens, evoking a lost domain.  


Lucy Reynolds is a writer, artist and independent film programmer and Content Manager for Luxonline, whose doctorate research explores British expanded cinema. She has curated numerous screenings of artists film and video and her recent film programme, Describing Form, exploring the relationship between film and sculpture, has toured museums and galleries across Britain, from Tate Britain to Spacex, Exeter and the Henry Moore Institute. Recent publications include 'Margaret Tait: The Marks of Time' in Subjects and Sequences: A Margaret Tait Reader, 'Found Footage Film: The World in Fragments' in Ghostings: The Role of the Archive in Contemporary Artists Film and Video and 'Filmaktion: New Directions in Film Art' for Centre of the Creative Universe: Liverpool and the Avant-Garde, Tate Liverpool. She teaches the history and theory of film, specialising in artists moving image, at the University of Westminster and Birkbeck College.

KATE TERRY


With coloured thread, tautly pulled across the expanse of the gallery, Kate Terry creates a subtle yet large presence: a whole form articulated through the most minimal means. This is her challenge. In her studio she makes a model; she draws; she imagines. In the gallery, Terry starts by hammering pins into the gallery walls. Here, her search for perfection begins. She is adamant that the pins are absolutely evenly spaced and treated identically. She ties a thread to each pin on one wall and stretches it towards its designated pin on the other side. She ties the end. The threads travel individually across, above and beneath each other… Meticulously, delicately and with great restraint she skillfully alters gallery spaces and the way viewers experience them. Yet the completed work is, at first, almost invisible. She works hard to create an installation that reveals itself slowly – transforming imperceptibility into spectacle. 

- Georgiana Uhlyarik, ‘From the invisible to the spectacular’  Mercer Union catalogue essay, Toronto, 2007

ZOË WALKER & NEIL BROMWICH   


Zoë Walker and Neil Bromwich protest and dream, via public art, sculpture and performance working between the gallery space and the public realm. Their work explores the space between the real landscape and an imagined location. Within this luminal space the duo create objects and situations that invite there audience to join them in enacting transformative experiences they invite us to consider an ‘other’ way of being. There practice brings together a humorous and surreal aesthetic while often engaging with social political issues. Limbo-Land, an inflatable, handcrafted, fabric moon and video work, was made and filmed in Northumberland on the Scottish English border. The work echoes the melancholic atmosphere of this expansive east coast landscape and conjures up a state of ‘in between-ness’ both physical and physiological. The film, presents Walker as an amateur astronaut caught between the land and the sky in a tragic comic attempt to harness the moon’s energies and reach the ultimate frontier. Limbo-Land invites us to re-consider our relationship to the world and its physical limits. Last year Limbo-Land was exhibited as a solo show at Baltic featured and features on IMAGINE, BBC1 arts program with Alan Yentob  Zoë Walker and Neil Bromwich have exhibited widely in the UK and abroad showing at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead; The Fruitmarket, Edinburgh; the Cornerhouse, Manchester; ACCA Melbourne; and Künstlerhaus, Vienna. Their partnership has resulted in a number of residencies and commissions, including My Island Home for the Victoria and Albert Museum; Sci-Fi Hot Tub, a Kielder Art and Architecture Commission, funded by Wellcome Trust, and have been featured recently on BBC1’s Imagine with Alan Yentob     Recent Live Projects include Love Cannon Parade at Whitechapel Gallery, Camden Arts Centre, and the Big Chill Festival.     Walker and Bromwich are represented by Houldsworth Gallery  

JOHN WYNNE


John Wynne has a PhD in sound art from Goldsmiths College and is a Senior Lecturer at the University of the Arts London and member of CRISAP (Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice). He was artist-in-residence for one year at Harefield Hospital, one of the world’s leading centres for heart and lung transplants, which has given rise to radio pieces for the BBC and for CBC in Canada and, in conjunction with photographer Tim Wainwright, a surround-sound video shown at TATE Britain, an installation for the Old Operating Theatre Museum and a 24-channel photographic sound installation (September 2008). His work with endangered click-languages resulted in an award-winning ‘composed documentary’ for Radio 3 and an installation shown in Botswana, Namibia and London. He has created large-scale sound installations in public squares using alarm sounds of his own design: one was banned by the City of Copenhagen for allegedly “frightening and confusing the public” and another in Toronto described as “an ambient, ghost-like presence”. He has created installations using hundreds of discarded but working hi-fi speakers: Fallender ton für 207 lautsprecher boxen in Berlin sounded “like Heaven …and Hell”.

CATHERINE YASS

courtesy Alison Jacques Gallery


Corridor Walk


Corridor Walk is a single take looking down at my feet pacing the length of a corridor in Manhattan Psychiatric Centre. My voice counts the steps in an attempt to measure it¹s length. Perhaps I¹m trying to measure myself in relation to the building; trying to comprehend its scale, which seems in a different register to mine. It feels out of scale both physically and emotionally, too big to establish any sense of myself.


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