VINCE BRIFFA

Studied with sculptor Edouardo Paolozzi at the Edinburgh College of Art, holds an MA in Fine Art & Digital Media from Leeds University and is currently doctoral research artist at the Electronic and Digital Art Unit of the University of Central Lancashire in the UK. He is also lecturer at the University of Malta and visiting lecturer at the Unit for Contemporary Art Practice at the University of Leeds. Vince Briffa is a founding member of START, a Maltese contemporary art group and co-founder of ArtSoundCreative.

Works shown at the 48th edition of the Venice Biennale (1999) and the Villa Manin Museum of Contemporary Art, Passariano, Italy and the Casoria Museum of Contemporary Art in Naples, Italy; the Pierides Museum of Contemporary Art in Nicosia, Cyprus; the MOYA and Only Atelier in Vienna and the ‘Johanniterkirche’ and Palais Liechtenstein in Feldkirch, Austria; the Palais des Nations, United Nations Building, Geneva, Switzerland; the grounds of the Museum of Modern Art, Vaduz, Liechtenstein; the Galerie der Schwarze Punkt, Konstanz, Germany; the Edinburgh College of Art , Edinburgh Festivals - 1996 & 2000 and Matthew Gallery, Edinburgh and the Invergordon Gallery, Inverness, Scotland; the Bretton Hall College Art Gallery, Wakefield, UK; Galerie d’Art Zero, Barcelona, Spain; Queen Street Gallery, Belfast, Northern Ireland; the Espace Claudel, Bibliothèque Universitaire, Amiens, France; MAC, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Santa Fe, Argentina; Cork Vision Centre, Cork, Ireland and the Cathedral Museum, Mdina, the Museum of Fine Art, the Museum of Archaeology and St. James Cavalier in Valletta, Malta.

Curated ‘Digital Discourse’ for St James Cavalier Centre for Creativity, an international exhibition of electronic and digital art from the Commonwealth Countries to coincide with the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Malta in November 2005.

ROBERT CAHEN

Robert Cahen’s work, like that of other video artists, springs from divisions between music, photography and film. As a graduate of The Paris Conservatoire in 1971 (Pierre Schaeffer’ s class), he brought technological and linguistic experiments of music concrete into video art. During his research at ORTF, he became a pioneer in the usage of electronic instruments.

Employing methods of colouring, slippage, modelling, and the systematic use of mixed elements reworked in editing, Cahen treats images like sounds; arranging and transforming images while providing examples of the interchangability between models, and the parameters of image and music.

Since his first video “Invitation au Voyage”(1973), he has manipulated images and rendered them malleable. In 1983 he produced a thirteen-minute long fiction video “Juste le Temps”, widely regarded as a turning point in video art of the eighties. A characteristic feature of his work is the use of slow-motion, which makes “restrained time” visible. His work “7 vision fugitives” won him first prize at ZKM Videokunstpreis and SDR in 1995. In 1989 he created a visual piece titled “Boulez/Response” about the music of Pierre Boulez. Robert Cahen was the “Villa Medici hors the Murs” Fellow in 1992. He produced a permanent video installation at Euralille in 1995 for the Ally of Liege of Lille. The first exhibition of his video installations took place in 1997 in FRAC, Alsace.  Since then his work has been shown worldwide, including Italy (Pisa, Rome, Palermo, and Milan), Germany (Berlin, Ludwigsburg, at ZKM in Karlsruhe) in the USA (Baton Rouge, Louisiana), Canada, Switzerland, Peru, Morocco, France, China, Vietnam, Azerbejdzan, Brazil. In 2004 he was invited to show at the Biennale of contemporary art in Shanghai.

Born in Valence, Robert Cahen lives and works in Mulhouse, France.

PETER DONEBAUER

Thames Reflections

The piece showing at Fieldgate Gallery is a single screen part of an intended four-screen installation showing the same urban landscape scene in four different seasons, each for an 8-hour recorded timeframe. It is a single unedited selection from dozens of recordings of the same scene throughout one year.

It is accepted that we have to “suspend disbelief” to enjoy most theatrical productions. Similarly, we “suspend our own flow of time” to enjoy most conventional films or TV programs. Even many moving image works shown in art contexts require this unacknowledged agreement by the audience to submit to the duration of time needed to view the piece.

Thames Reflections uses digital moving image technology to present a work with perhaps more affinity to traditionally static artworks such as paintings or photographs than most other moving image experiences. With static works the viewer remains active in the time taken to experience the work rather than being dictated to by the maker. And the same is true here –but there is also movement. Time is present in the piece, but it is natural time, not edited time. There is stillness and movement. 

Following in a very long tradition of western landscape art, it extends the observation or depiction of a landscape to include the passage of time. And that reveals the actual movement of objects within the frame, and of the light, that can only be alluded to in traditional forms.

 -- Peter Donebauer – November 2007

CATHERINE ELWES 

'SCARS -Paul's Story' (2005) takes as its starting point a video of the scar above a WW2 SAS parachutist's eye. Paul Robineau, speaking in French, tells how the wound was made and healed. The translation forms a series of six panels in the shape of the Cross of Lorraine, the emblem of both the Resistance and the Free French in England.

 SCARS – ‘Paul’s Story’ and ‘The Six Lives of Erich Ackermann’

 For me, the Second World War exists as a black and white movie in which my English father starred as the good guy and my German father in law as the villain of the piece. For the nation, the War has taken on a mythical status as the focus of national pride and is nostalgically invoked every time a government wants to lead us into a new war. My father died just before the Falkland’s conflict and his obituary was used to promote the image of the ideal of military valour, now resurrected to promote Thatcher’s war. My father-in-law’s career as a bomber pilot in the Luftwaffe is unknown and forms no part of Remembrance Day, because as he once told me, he “flew for the wrong side.” In the culture, images of militarism and masculinity, both good (us) and bad (them) continue to be entwined in computer games, films, television reconstructions and endless documentaries about the SAS, the über-elite of the men who dared.

 I began my series WAR STORIES with a film about my dead father, himself an officer in the SAS during the war. This work led me to seek out witnesses who fought with him. Many of them became close friends and felt able to entrust their own memories to me. ‘Paul’s Story’ within the present exhibition is the first of the SCARS series in which Paul Robineau, himself a veteran of the French SAS describes the wounding and healing that is marked by the scars on his body. It also became important for me to tell a story from the ‘other’ side. My now deceased father-in-law provided the material for ‘The Six Lives of Erich Ackermann’ and his photographs of the plane crashes he walked away from form the visual material of the work. Extracts from his diary become the audible subtitles to the images and the soft voices from both works speaking in French, English and German fill the space and offer an alternative to the harsh Nazi tones of the movies and the go-go-go hysteria of contemporary commando-speak. Unlike television documentaries, the subjects are allowed to reminisce uninterrupted for as long as the viewer is willing to listen. There are no voice-over commentaries, no uniforms, explosions and cheap dramatic re-enactments that inhibit the work of the imagination. The presentation is minimal, the content rich.

 Both works attempt to create a listening environment, out of conflict, in which the veterans reconstruct a version of the past breaking a silence that for the WW2 generation was a matter of honour for ‘us’, and a question of survival for ex-Luftwaffe flyers like Ackermann in post war Europe. Both stories tell of broken bodies, broken machines and shattered dreams. Although it is impossible to make a work about war that is ideologically untouched or one that combats the fascination of military conflict, I have striven to present another agenda, that of a daughter, a female friend who is trying to understand what it was like to be caught up in events that men create and that she has never herself had to face. Although violence and conflict are very much a feature of the new millennium, few of us have been tested to the extent of these individuals – so far anyway. This daughter has always wondered what she would have done, what manner of man she would have made.

I am grateful to Paul Robineau for his memories and to Ingeborg Ackermann for permission to publish some of her husband’s images and extracts from his diary. Uwe Ackermann kindly provided me with translations and his father’s voice.

 -- Catherine Elwes March 2004

TERRY FLAXTON

"Terry Flaxton has been an impassioned, indefatigable presence in British Independent Video for almost two decades. During this time he has assembled an impressive body of work encompassing powerful, polemical documentary (produced as a member of ground-breaking outfits Vida and Triplevision) and highly personal, poetic video art.

What unites these separate strands of Flaxton's video making is a strongly held belief in the medium's ability to change our image of the world - or at least that resrtricted view of it obtained through the television screen. In Flaxton's eyes, a faith in video's transforming potential burns undiminished. More to the point, in Flaxton's hands, much of the medium's radical promise goes some way towards being fulfilled.

A gifted lighting cameraman, whose skills are extensively sought both inside and outside the industry, Flaxton brings a consumate polish to everything he shoots, exemplified equally by the verite Prisoners (1984) and the visionary The World Within Us (1988). A similar finely-honed sensibility distinguishes later pieces, like The Colour Myths (1990 - 1995), which draws heavily from an up-to-minute-palette of digital effects. Attempting the kind of rhapsodic fusion of image and language that few of his contemporaries could contemplate, let alone execute, Flaxton's later works have tended to divide opinion; but there is no doubting their vigour, integrity and sheer visual panache."

 -- Steven Bode, A Directory of British Video Artists, Editor david Curtiss, Arts Council of England, John Libby Media/University of Luton Press

DENISE HAWRYSIO & JOHN WYNNE

Push comes to Shove

Video/sound installation (1986/2005/2007)

Push comes to Shove is an installation which superimposes ‘found’ soundtracks onto 2 Super-8 films shot by Hawrysio in the 80s. The films were part of a series made by attaching the camera to various machines or devices; in each case an invitation was made to the operator(s) of the devices to participate in the making of a film. There is no editing or manipulation of the footage outside of the camera. The soundtracks are unmanipulated clips from a suspicious telephone conversation found on a cassette tape bought for 25 cents from a street vendor in New York City and a police radio recording made in the South London squat in which the artists lived using an old hi-fi receiver found on the street. The speakers used in the installation were found on the streets of London. It’s up to the viewer to decide which soundtrack goes with which film.

Denise Hawrysio obtained her MFA in film installation from the San Francisco Art Institute. She is currently artist-in-residence at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where she is working on a new series of large-scale etchings. Her recent solo show at Simon Fraser University, Situational Prints, was a retrospective of her conceptual printmaking projects: “Hawrysio’s decision to continue with imagery saturated in ‘imprint’ and ‘touch’ is strengthened by her entanglement with critical conceptualism, both as an aesthetic attitude and as politics.” (Ian Wallace) She has taught at the Architectural Association and at the University of the Arts London and was course leader in print and digital arts at Wimbledon School of Art. Last year she received the Putnam Fellowship from the prestigious MacDowell Art Colony in the US and recently curated and participated in 15/1(3) at Overgaden, Institute of Contemporary Art in Copenhagen.

Denise Hawrysio: www.hawrysio.com

KATHARINE MEYNELL

Katharine Meynell is Reader in Fine Art at Middlesex University. Her works engage with the inscribed & recorded as the other side of the coin to the live & performed. 

“Since November 2006 I have been working with a broken camera that only records in ‘nightshot’, making a serendipitous connection between dysfunction and surveillance. This exhibition at Fieldgate Gallery completes a full year, where the sound breaks up intermittently and the record button needs to be constantly depressed. These short works are intended to produce complex meanings and layering of conventions implied by the physical support and its appearance… and I am looking forward to buying a new, fully functional camera, with my Christmas money”

CHRIS MEIGH-ANDREWS

Born in Essex, England, Chris Meigh-Andrews lived in Montreal, Canada from 1957-75. He studied photography, film & TV at the London College of Printing (1976-79), has an MA in Fine Art, from Goldsmiths (1981-83) , and a PhD from the Royal College of Art. (1996-2001) 

Working with video in a fine art context since 1977, his single channel video tapes have been screened in the UK, Europe, North & South America, Australia and Japan. Establishing an artist's post-production facility and independent video production company in 1980, he worked as a freelance director and cameraman, video editor, and animator to fund his own experimental video work throughout the 1980's. An active member of London Video Arts from 1980, he was chairman of the Council of Management 1987-89. 

Since 1990, Meigh-Andrews has specialised in sculptural and projection video installations, including commissioned and site-specific works which have been shown in the UK, Europe and Canada. He has been Resident Artist in Electronic Imaging at Oxford Brookes University (1994), Artist in Residence at the Saw Contemporary Arts Centre in Ottawa, Canada (1994), Video Artist in Residence at Middlesbrough Gallery, Cleveland (1995), Video Artist in Residence at the Prema Arts Centre in Gloucestershire (1995) and Arts Council of England International Artist Fellow, at Bunkier Sztuki, in Krakow, Poland (2003-04). 

Currently Professor of Electronic & Digital Art at the University of Central Lancashire, he is director of The Electronic & Digital Art Unit (www.uclan.ac.uk/edau), a centre for post- graduate research. He is co-curator (with Catherine Elwes) of “Analogue: Pioneering Artists’ Video from the UK, Canada and Poland; 1968-88”, an international touring exhibition (2006- 07) funded by Arts Council, England. His book, “A History of Video Art: the Development of Form and Function” was published by Berg in October 2006.

STEPHEN PARTRIDGE AND ELAINE SHEMILT

Stephen Partridge is an artist and academic researcher. He is the principal investigator on the four-year AHRC funded research project REWIND, which runs until June 2008. 

He was in the "landmark" video shows of the 1970s including the Video Show at the Serpentine in 1975, the Installation Show at the Tate gallery in 1976, The Paris Biennalle in 1977 and The Kitchen in New York in 1979. During the eighties he exhibited widely and also became interested in works for broadcast television and was commissioned by Channel 4 television to produce Dialogue for Two Players in 1984. 

With Jane Rigby, he formed Fields and Frames Ltd - an arts projects and television Production Company - which produced the innovative Television Interventions project for Channel 4 in 1990, with nineteen works by artists for television (including his own piece in the series - The Sounds of These Words. He also co-produced a short series of student and artists work, Not Necessarily, with BBC Scotland for BBC2 network television in 1991. He has also curated a number of influential video shows: Video Art 78 in Coventry; UK TV New York; National Review of Live Art 1988-90; 19:4:90 Television Interventions; and the touring tape packages Made in Scotland I, II, Semblances, Passages.   He has worked with the artist and composer David Cunningham, whose soundworks and structural approach has enriched many of his works since 1974. Other major collaborations include the artist Elaine Shemilt on a series of works including the installation Chimera and the digital prints and etchings series Intangible Bodies. 

He has lectured since 1975 in a number of art colleges, and established the School of Television & Imaging at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design (University of Dundee). He is presently Professor of Media Art and Dean of Research responsible for the research leadership of the College and the Visual Research Centre and the Exhibitions Department. He has experience of evaluation for the Arts Council, Channel 4, the Scottish Arts Council, Scottish Screen, SAC Lottery, Creative Scotland Awards and the AHRC and from September 2004-2007, was a member of the AHRC Research Committee and Convener of AHRC Panel 2 Visual Arts & Media. Currently a member of the AHRC’s Nominations Committee.

ELAINE SHEMILT

The work I make ranges across a wide variety of media - from sculpture and installation, to photography, digital imaging and video. Ultimately, however, I regard myself as a printmaker who is concerned with developing and extending the discipline to suit my needs as a practicing, contemporary artist. For example, research for the series of works featured in the exhibition “Behind Appearance” was conducted in the library of the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh where I concentrated on 18th and 19th Century anatomical drawings. Considerable experimentation and adaptation of printmaking techniques, using both water based and oil based inks, were required in order to produce imagery which could be layered on to a variety of surfaces. I developed a method of printmaking using carborundum grit, which enabled the layering of photographic and drawn images. In this work the much larger than life sized, anatomical, drawings of the flayed figure became a new source of body imagery as well as marking the reversal of the layers of materials and the bindings of the body in earlier work. 

In ‘Chimera’, a video and sound installation comprising of eight different films projected onto four latex screens, each of which is split down the centre and angled in space. The location of these screens is such that the viewer is partially surrounded by the work and is invited to make their own connections between its various components. The sound of the spoken word is itself a montage of poetry, fragments of which are derived from a variety of different sources - sociology, psychoanalysis and feminist theory. The research involved experimentation into the combination of traditional printmaking techniques with computer generated imagery, creating a new way to output the digital imagery and to develop digital layering techniques with an element of historical time by studying and incorporating imagery from earlier work of the 1970’s to introduce a ‘recycling’ of ideas and themes into the new collaborative output. In the series of prints for ‘Intangible Bodies’ my research expanded upon digital retouching techniques to create a series of manicured silicon photographic images, contrasted with monochromatic, traditional etchings, using an adaptation of the photogravure process. 

In the work for the Falkland Islands projects, research into materials and techniques of collage and montage were developed to withstand extreme temperature changes.

MAGDA STAWARSKA-BEAVAN

My practice is based around the subject of cultural identity and the aspect of the connection between thought, language and communication. The main questions in my recent investigation were; “How does language affect our identity?” “How does language shape the way we think?” and “Do we feel different depending on which language we use?” I was also curious as to ways in which we perceive others when we hear different voices and accents, especially when we remove the image of body and the other attributes of identity. Recently my work has slowly moved from the direct subject of language to the tradition of story telling and the legends and oral traditions that build our identity. 

In Chameleophonia (2005) I use my own body as a uniform to go with different voices that I have recorded. I removed my voice and replace it with that of others. I asked several women with different accents to tell a story. The viewer watching the first performance would accept the person telling the story as a real character; he/she would start finding out more about the background of the performer from their accent, but then a look-alike continued the story with a completely different accent and voice.  I thought that my own national identity (Polish) in the piece could be exposed in a story like an old legend. Myths as part of our national culture give us a sense of being part of society from an early age. My own national identity unfolds and is exposed as a thin narrative in the manner of an old legend.

MARTY ST. JAMES

Marty St. James, considered the inventor of the video portrait, has worked primarily across performance art, video art and drawing. Exploring the physical, the electric and the pencil, as he describes it. A time based media artist straddling modernist and post-modernist times. His work locates itself between the narrative of meaning and the meaninglessness of re-assemblage. A type of visual Beckett. St. James has exhibited in leading museums in the US, Europe, Russia and Japan. His video portraits including The Swimmer are in the National Portrait Collection, London. He is a Professor of Fine Art at the University of Hertfordshire, UK  

Homage, 2007 

6:50 Performance / video installation continuous re-cycle. 

Homage is an homage to all fedora hats, including my own; my hat maker in the East End of London whom I have been visiting for twenty four years; my step-grandfather, who stepped out of his First World War helmet into his Fedora; Rembrandt and his hat in his self portrait, which I visit as often, in North London; Beuys, whose hat met mine on a number of occasions; and to none of these things. My artistic life is about existing, ‘somewhere between the moving and the static’. The journey has taken me from the ‘rawness’ of discovering ‘open ground’ to a period of using and locating popular forms, to more recently trying to locate and inhabit the spaces between points. It has taken me many years to understand and appreciate for myself that the intelligence of ‘meaning’ is only important and useful when ‘meaningless’ is explored with intelligence. In my mind it is the role of the artist to explore this as fervently as possible.

JOHN WYNNE & DENISE HAWRYSIO

Push comes to Shove

Video/sound installation (1986/2005/2007)

Push comes to Shove is an installation which superimposes ‘found’ soundtracks onto 2 Super-8 films shot by Hawrysio in the 80s. The films were part of a series made by attaching the camera to various machines or devices; in each case an invitation was made to the operator(s) of the devices to participate in the making of a film. There is no editing or manipulation of the footage outside of the camera. The soundtracks are unmanipulated clips from a suspicious telephone conversation found on a cassette tape bought for 25 cents from a street vendor in New York City and a police radio recording made in the South London squat in which the artists lived using an old hi-fi receiver found on the street. The speakers used in the installation were found on the streets of London. It’s up to the viewer to decide which soundtrack goes with which film.

John Wynne has a PhD in sound art from Goldsmiths College. He was artist-in-residence for one year at Harefield Hospital, one of the world’s leading heart and lung transplant centres, which has given rise to pieces for the BBC and for CBC in Canada, a surround-sound video shown at TATE Britain, an installation for the Old Operating Theatre Museum (December 2007) and a photographic sound installation with photographer Tim Wainwright (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 from hundreds of discarded but working hi-fi speakers: Fallender ton für 207 lautsprecher boxen in Berlin sounded “like Heaven …and Hell”.

John Wynne: www.sensitivebrigade.com