Working with Commercial Galleries

  A talk by gallerist Ceri Hand

11th December 2013

 

Opening up some of the mechanics of the art world gallerist Ceri Hand discussed the relationships between artists and commercial galleries. Ceri was refreshingly honest in discussing possibilities for regulation in commercial galleries and some of the more covert practices within the industry, such as discounting.

Initially trained as an artist, Ceri Hand draws on over twenty years in the art world. She has previously acted as Director of Metal (Liverpool), Director of Exhibitions, FACT (Liverpool, where she was a contributing curator to Liverpool Biennial in 2004 and 2006), Deputy Director of Grized...ale Arts, Cumbria and Director of Make, London. Ceri Hand Gallery was founded in Liverpool in 2008 and relocated to London in 2012. The gallery has a special focus on conceptual and performance art, producing and exhibiting major new works on and offsite, including publications, editions and multiples. Fostering relationships between gallery artists and their work provides a strong peer support for artist's development and engages curators and collectors. The gallery has actively contributed to developing a regional market in the UK through local, national and international activity and a challenging programme of exhibitions and education events.

Follow Ceri's blog: http://www.cerihandprojects.co.uk/


Ceri Hand Gallery
6 Copperfied Street
London, SE1 0EP
www.cerihand.co.uk

Series 2; Talk No.1

Show Me Something Different: Kubrick, The Shining, and Repetition

A talk by Chris Fite-Wassilak

27th November 2013

Was it 58 times that Stanley reshot Jack Nicholson crossing a street in The Shining in the hope that, as he told me, ”something interesting would happen”?

- Ian Watson, New York Review of Science Fiction, 2000

Writer and curator Chris Fite-Wassilak and artist and filmmaker Tom Flanagan began a multipart documentary film project exploring the myths and methods that hover around the making of Kubrick's version of The Shining (1980). Carrying out in-depth interviews with Kubrick’s colleagues and collaborators, as well as with experimental re-stagings of particular scenes, the project seeks to examine a methodology entirely separate from Kubrick himself and the usual 'troubled genius' portraits. Taking his constant re-shooting of scenes as a focus on a way of working, this talk will provide a glimpse in to their research and process in asking, how do you know when you’ve found what you’re looking for?

The talk included an exclusive ten minute preview from the documentary aspect of the project.

For more information on Chris Fite-Wassilak and Tom Flanagan:

http://www.growgnome.com 

http://cfitewassilak.wordpress.com

http://vimeo.com/tomflanagan

http://www.artspacegalway.com/artistdetail.asp?id=118

Eight

8. 19/06/13

Painting Experience

- a strange place in one's practice

 A talk by the artist 

Rebecca Meanley

 Rebecca Meanley Dissembling #2 2012

Rebecca Meanley Hybrid Painting 2013

A strange place in one’s practice – an odd in-between place – a transition - an impossible to ignore experience - the impact on one’s practice

Working from one’s own experience - is this self-indulgence or self-analysis, reality or authentic life experience?

Painting as a place which absorbs all of these domains, forms hybrids, finds a voice

From a place slightly dumbfounded by the inability to articulate an experience too great – to seek to manifest such experience in painting – through painting

To try to describe, to try to solve

Work becomes a vehicle with which to communicate or attempt to – 

Isn’t that what it’s supposed to do?

Not abstraction versus representation BUT how can the two polar opposites fold into one another to form another kind of entity?

And how can the artist navigate this space – to seek to find – to interpret, to fathom, to understand, to try to solve

A very honest consideration of how a life-threatening experience can affect ones’ practice.

Rebecca Meanley will discuss the impact serious illness has had on her practice, with a close analytical look at the last year in painting.  

Dissembling#2 is currently on show at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 

More works can be viewed at: http://www.rebeccameanley.com/

Seven

7. 5/06/13

'The Flowering of Art Nouveau'

A talk by the artist Susan Finlay

Métropolitain  

Susan Finlay always paints in acrylic on shop-bought, pre-stretched canvases, while her more recent ceramic works were built by hand using cheap school clay. Both are intended to highlight the use of ‘poorer’ and hence ‘stagier’ materials, as well as the repetition of certain art nouveau motifs which reoccur across both the two and three-dimensional elements of her practice. Her work is very much concerned with the feminine (what Adolf Loos would term erotic) aspects of certain early modernisms, and in particular those which may have previously been dismissed as minor due to their engagement with graphic and/or sculptural elaboration, capriciousness and play. Simultaneously, the work acknowledges the construction of this, so-called, decadence, and in so doing consciously prevent the viewer from fully indulging in the worlds that it alludes to . . .

This talk centres on Susan Finlay's work from the previous three year years and its relationship to art nouveau.

Six

6. 23/05/13

London Seizure

A two-part screening series
curated by Carmen Billows

Part One: Urban DISease

Mike Stubbs Cultural Quarter

London, as with many other urban centres, functions as an 'island of desire' in commonplace perception, advertising freedoms in lifestyle and self-fulfilment. But, the urban dweller must compensate for these luxuries with certain sacrifices. On the one hand seduced by the allure of the urban multitude, he has to on the other hand accept the city's pace and, often passively, a role in its systems of mediation, surveillance and control. 

The origins of a certain ‘urban DISease’ very often lie beyond grasp but are instead sensed as underlying and immaterial threats to the status quo. Adaptation, or a healthy sense of disregard is needed in order to adjust to an environment of constant shifts in social politics; here is it easy to unknowingly submit to the powers at play.

London Seizure, a two-part screening programme of artists’ moving image works suggests to take a step back from this hypnotic swirl. 

The artists featured in part 1, Urban DISease, use processes of close observation and contemplation to engage with their immediate surroundings. They share an interest in capturing instances of disruption in everyday social or political life and give a voice to a general sense of discomfort.  

The artists featured in part 2, Extension of the Zone of Operation, take an extra interest in current housing politics and regeneration processes that endanger interpersonal links and nurture isolation and individualism.

Contextualised within institutions in two London boroughs currently strongly affected by regeneration processes, this two-part project aims to trigger an exchange of voices from a Southwark to a Hackney Wick context. 

Urban DISease

John Smith, The Black Tower, 24 min., 1985-87.

Piotr Krzymowski, The shape of things to come, 6,20 min., 2012.

Alexander Costello, All you need to know right now (1), 8,27 min., 2001.

Claire Hope, Boy Nature, 1,30 min, 2009.

Emily Richardson, Block, 13 min, 2009.

Mike Stubbs, Cultural Quarter, 10 min, 2003.

Steven Ball, No-Way Street, 1 min, 2007.

Hector Castells, Film, (2012), 7.13 min, 2012.

Matthias Kispert, The Funeral of Baroness Thatcher, 4,09, 2013.

Followed by a Q&A with the artists and curator

Location:

Bermondsey Project

46 Willow Walk

London SE1 5SF

http://bermondseyproject.com/

http://arttalksandtea.blogspot.co.uk/

Part 2: dates and location tbc; a detailed programme will be announced shortly.

Five

5.08/05/13

Thijs groot Wassink

'On collaboration, supposedly dumb questions and how these have been applied in the production of artist books'.

www.wassinklundgren.com

"Why collaborate at all?... One big reason is to restrict one’s own freedom... There’s a joy and relief in being limited, restrained. For starters, to let someone else make half the decisions, or some big part of them, absolves one of the need to explore endless possibilities. The result is fewer agonizing decisions ... and sometimes, faster results.(David Byrne: Journal 03.15.10) WassinkLundgren is a meeting of two creatively mischievous minds: Thijs groot Wassink and Ruben Lundgren. As their conjoined name suggests, the pair work as a single, two-headed creative entity, looking at the world around them through the medium of photography, while simultaneously playing around with ideas of creativity and collaboration through that same medium. Each of their projects, to differing degrees, takes them on a tightrope walk of discovery where chance, accident and uncertainty often seem as important as the pursuit of a single governing idea". Sean O'Hagan 2013

The talk centred around 3 books produced by WassinkLundren (Thijs groot Wassink and Ruben Lundgren) over the last few years. Tokyo Tokyo (2010), Empty Bottles (2007) and their latest book HITS (2013). 

Image from Tokyo Tokyo © WassinkLundgren

With the 2 artists living so far apart (Ruben lives in China) Thijs there are obvious questions regarding authorship but these problems are quickly dismissed as uninteresting and  do not appear to concern this artist collaboration, who operate as a kind of two headed beast.

Thijs addressed some of the practicalities of a long-distant collaboration as well as discussing the use of play as a means of entering a new work.Often this initial sense of fun remains central to their work but there are projects, for example Empty Bottles, that flip this initial playfulness and take on more sober subjects. Empty Bottles is a book of "photographs of full-time scavengers, cleaners and other citizens of Beijing and Shanghai picking up plastic bottles that were placed in front of the camera". 

Image from Empty Bottles © WassinkLundgren

And the cake was chocolate....

Four

4. 25/04/13 

Andrew Bick

'Against cultural amnesia'

Andrew Bick, Savage School Window Gallery, Vyner St, London 2010

A war against cultural amnesia…

At a recent CAS conference on curating and commissioning Ingrid Swenson, director of Peer projects in London expressed frustration, towards the end of the day in that she was ‘bored with hearing about young and emerging artists. Young and emerging is all very well, but I’m more interested in old and submerged artists these days”. The report on the conference goes on to describe “a palpable surge of approval” for this statement. I was not an attendee, [I picked up the report later on twitter], but am very much there with Swenson’s argument. In particular, I have been engaged with the work of British Construction and Systems artists over the past few years…

Such an influence, submerged, like Swenson's analogy, and therefore less easy to identify, is nevertheless, in my opinion, a vital component of any analytical debate concerning what drives abstraction now as much as what drives my own experimentation.  Exploring the implications of Construction and Systems in relation to my own practice as well as that of artists in my own and younger generations, whose connection to them is sometimes even less direct, has become a war against cultural amnesia. Naming it this way indicates a level of discomfort for any of the protagonists, older or younger. This short talk is a partial account of some of the resulting experiments…

Andrew Bick, April 2013.

The talk brought to light a much neglected period in British Art and introduced us all to a number of exciting artworks, interesting texts and exhibitions.

Here's a sample of some of the things that came up.

The exhibition Construction and Its Shadow, curated by Andrew Bick, 2011 at Leeds Art Gallery.
http://www.henry-moore.org/hmi/collections/collections-displays1/previous-displays1/construction-and-its-shadow

Pier + Ocean: Construction in European and American Art of the Seventies, the Hayward Gallery's 1980 exhibition.

The 2012 exhibition Concrete Parallels/ Concretos Paralelos at Laurent Delaye Gallery. Here's Abstract Critical's article on it:

http://abstractcritical.com/note/concrete-parallels-concretos-paralelos/

Artworks by Achill Redo (Anthony Hill's pseudonym) 

Kenneth Martin's Chance and Order series.
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/martin-chance-and-order-group-vii-drawing-6-t01847

Mary Martin's beautiful relief constructions.
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/mary-martin-1586

Of course there was cake, a honey loaf.

And a full moon.

Three

3.  20/03/13

Imagining a re-synchronising: 

(The Phantom Twin)

In the form of a video conversation The Modern Language Experiment screened a collection of short films and videos by artists Robert Crosse, Erica Scourti and Maria Marshall and two clips from the documentaries Kony 2012 and We Live in Public. Matthew Stock and Keh Ng took slightly adverse positions to consider when and what would constitute a collaboration in video and film based art practices. 

'The process of formulating the collective possibilities that presents themselves when we no longer focus on the individual as the basic atom of creative production.

Beyond the experience of being a creative self we are becoming more and more attuned to multifaceted and dynamic creative generation that issues from collective entities. This creative matrix seems to be a promising ground from which to start thinking about social and political life and to imagine ways in which we might take up the challenges of the future.'

For me the axis of the discussion was, are we as viewers of screens, collaborators? 

Here are some links to the texts and films discussed:

The Loneliness of the Project by Boris Groys, 2002

http://www.ny-magazine.org/PDF/Issue%201.1.%20Boris%20Groys.pdf

Kony 2012

http://vimeo.com/invisible/kony2012

We Live in Public

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XSTwfdFwIYY

www.modernlanguageexperiment.org

 

This video conversation was a collaboration between The Modern Language Experiment and madamewang.com and it will generate an Event Article as part of a forthcoming series of Event Articles on madamewang.com 

  

 And the cake was peanut butter and white chocolate blondies...