Upcoming
The series of 10-day shows continues from September onwards, plus other events at Matt’s Gallery, London
Bronwen Buckeridge, Widowhood, Matt’s Gallery, London, 2 September 2018, 2-6pm
Widowhood is a live audio performance with racing pigeons and the pigeon men who train them. The work is driven by an interest in the complex relationship racing pigeons hold with domestication and wildness, and the mystery that surrounds their ability to find their way home. It explores the rituals of race preparation, the ingenuity of strategies employed in the training and husbandry of the birds, and the related ideas of love, loss and longing.
Working with Pigeon Racers from clubs across Kent, Buckeridge will release a number of birds to fly home from the Matt’s Gallery garden. She draws our attention to the anticipation that builds around their return – focussing on their keepers and the lovelorn widow bird who is left behind and who waits, hoping for their lover’s safe return.
The event starts promptly at 2pm.
Juan Cruz, I don’t know what I’m doing but I’m trying very hard., Matt’s Gallery, London, private view 7 September 6-9pm, exhibition open daily 12-6pm, 8 – 16 September 2018
Juan Cruz’s I don’t know what I’m doing but I’m trying very hard. is the artist’s fourth show with Matt’s Gallery.
For this exhibition Cruz seeks to develop themes of his 2001 show at the gallery. In Portrait of a Sculptor the artist shifted the organisation of the gallery’s space, moving the gallery into the bookshop and vice versa. In 2018, Cruz again fiddles with the architecture of the space, the former commercial unit that is Ron Henocq’s studio at 92 Webster Road, by sidestepping the gallery created by architect Tomas Klassnik’s 3x3x3m cube, in a gesture that speaks to an interest and awareness of remaining somehow on the margins of art making.
The video shown has grown out of a series of photographs made by the artist after taking a weekly run; photographs that were not originally intended as art works but which were subsequently noticed as images that might betray some insight. A rucksack containing a series of print outs of these selfies was stolen from the artist while he attended the funeral of a former teacher, and this experience affected a shift in the artist’s thinking about the work, leading him to consider them as a form of auto-obituary.
Cruz’s gestures strive to be slight and self-effacing while battling the essential ego required to do anything at all and think that others might want to see it. In this regard, the work speaks to Cruz’s ongoing interest in the poetry of his namesake, the mystic poet San Juan de la Cruz and his famous assertion I live without living in me.
I don’t know what I’m doing but I’m trying very hard. is characterised by a rather desperate, sentimental and hubristic desire to avoid aging, irrelevance and death. Cruz grapples with the shame and embarrassment of being an artist and the bizarre irony of wanting publicly to deal with that shame through the form of the exhibition.
Also coming soon at Matt’s Gallery, London, 92 Webster Road…
Benedict Drew, The Anti Ecstatic Machines, Matt’s Gallery, London, private view 21 September 6-9pm, exhibition open daily 12-6pm, 22 – 30 September 2018
Matt’s Gallery thanks Ron Henocq Fine Art for their generous support.
Richard Grayson, Possessions_inc.
Possessions_inc is a video and web project by Matt’s Gallery and Richard Grayson. Episode 27 is currently available to watch.
Over 2016-2018 Matt’s Gallery will be posting monthly instalments of the video project Possessions_inc. Part series, part blog, part essay, part talking head, Possessions_inc. is an expanding exploration of: ideas of value, ways we invest in objects, the Bilderberg owl, animatronics, the mystery of Rennes Le Chateau, codes, fakes, oligarchs, the missing head of Philip K Dick, treasure hunting, M.R. James, the V.I.P. Lounge, drug smuggling, computer animation, animism, Pygmalion and the insurance industry.
A specially commissioned essay by Lars Bang Larsen titled To Be Spoken Like A Thing Possessed is also available on the website.
To subscribe please sign up to the Matt’s Gallery mailing list
To watch the episodes click here
Artists’ News
Lindsay Seers, Every Thought There Ever Was, Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea, PV 8 September, until 23 December 2018
Incorporating industrial robotics in conjunction with a three-screen video projection, the work is shaped by philosophical ideas and scientific research concerned with the phenomenon of consciousness. Through digital animation, special effects, drawing and sound design, Every Thought There Ever Was explores the extraordinary brain functioning that occurs in the condition of schizophrenia. Two screens, supported by robot arms, move with the images, bringing agency to them as an active element in the work.
The work draws on an experimental treatment known as Avatar Therapy, in which those living with schizophrenia can speak to their persecutors in a digital world. Guided by first person accounts and a collaborative drawing exchange, Seers’ work has been shaped by conversations with scientific partners including Anil Seth at The Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science and Chris Frith, Emeritus and Professor of Neuropsychology, UCL to explore the current studies and thinking on the condition.
Pursuing her on-going fascination with how an individual’s biography embodies history, Seers takes Victorian surgeon James Miranda Barry as her narrator. Barry transcends time through a connection with the offspring she gave life to by performing a groundbreaking emergency Caesarian section operation. Barry’s future life sees her manifest as an Avatar with an ability to cure.
Every Thought There Ever Was is funded by Wellcome and is co-commissioned by Matt’s Gallery, London; The MAC, Belfast; Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea; Hospitalfield, Arbroath; and John Hansard Gallery, Southampton.
The exhibition will open at Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea, from September 8th to December 23rd 2018. In 2019 it will tour to Hospitalfield and in 2020 to John Hansard Gallery, following its premiere at The MAC, Belfast earlier this year.
Leah Capaldi, Alter Heroes Coalition, Mimosa House, London, 22 September – 15 December 2018, PV 21 September 6.30-8.30pm
The group exhibition Alter Heroes Coalition presents a selection of artworks, artefacts, texts and images, which explore the concept of an alter ego. The artists included in the show reinvent themselves as unconventional and empowering heroes reflecting on cultural displacement, belonging and unbecoming. Collectively, they suggest ways of inhabiting and negotiating different personas and healing split identities.
The exhibition title marks the first step in Super Taus’s intent to form a Super Heroes Coalition – a community of every day super heroes who support each other and unite to achieve a common goal.
Featuring: Tomaso Binga, Leah Capaldi, Cibelle Cavalli Bastos, Gery Georgieva, Yolanda López,
Kent Monkman, Tabita Rezaire, Super Sohrab and Super Taus
Melanie Jackson, The Mothership residency, Dorset, Summer 2018
Melanie Jackson is undertaking a residency at The Mothership, Dorset, where she will be storyboarding a new animation entitled Hellmouth, based on a text made for Arts Catalyst.
Alison Turnbull, Japanese Paintings, Rodic Davidson Architects, London, until September 2018
Throughout the summer, from July to September, Alison Turnbull will be exhibiting works from the series Japanese Paintings at Rodic Davidson Architects, London. The small-scale, geometric paintings are based on arrangements of the tatami mats used in traditional Japanese interiors. Twice as long as they are wide, and laid out in interlocking grids, the tatami were originally conceived to accommodate one person lying down or two seated. They act as units of measure, both for Japanese architecture and for these intensely coloured abstract paintings. Japanese Paintings will be exhibited in bespoke wooden display boxes in the windows of the architectural studio and can be seen in Bury Place, London WC1 (opposite the British Museum) during daytime and at night.
Michael Curran, The Public Image (Scottish Lady Tiger), Generator Projects, Dundee, PV 15 September 7-9pm, continues until 30 September 2018
The Public Image takes its title from Muriel Spark’s ninth novel (1968) which showed a shift in style, more overtly experimental, than her earlier works. Spark had recently moved from London to Rome and was exposed to the excesses of the film industry there. It is a highly prescient examination of celebrity, and the power of an image saturated culture, where spectacle reigns, and the world of the media has transformed the subject’s real life into a replica without an original image. Video and performance artist Michael Curran will create an environment in which a series of actions and performances inspired by the life and work of Muriel Spark can take place.
Generator Projects will act as a laboratory, a press office, a casting room and a film set for Curran and local hand-picked collaborators to dissect the author’s fascination with appearances and what lies beneath. The exhibition will explore some of the ambiguities concerning Spark, the muse, the enigma and the émigré. Through the artist’s actions, photographic and drawn images and video works, Spark will appear as a figure under investigation. Curran will re-negotiate Spark’s public image while simultaneously referencing and interpreting her fiction.
Curran, also an errant Scot, lives and works in Camberwell, London, a stone’s throw from where Spark resided while writing her early novels. Curran is passionately interested in Spark as an innovator and in the centrality of mystery and inexplicability of her imagination. She understood that our sense of reality and our human attempts at exploration are laughable and that all ‘truths’ all ‘images’ are malleable.
Lindsay Seers, A Woman’s Place at Knole, Knole House, Kent, until 14 November 2018
Lindsay Seers is presenting a new work as one of six commissions highlighting the progression towards equality through the stories of the women who have contributed to the spirit and history of Knole. Curated by Lucy Day and Eliza Gluckman, the project shines a light on historical women’s voices, marking 100 years since the Representation of the People Act that gave women the vote in the UK for the first time. The history of women’s rights is well illustrated at Knole, where Vita Sackville-West, the only child of the 3rd Baron Sackville, was prevented from inheriting the house because of her gender. The loss of Knole deeply affected Sackville-West, leading her to write that ‘Knole is denied to me forever, through a technical fault over which we have no control’. Seers’ work focuses on ‘the love letter’, the famous description of Virginia Woolf’s book Orlando dedicated to Vita Sackville West. Drawing in particular on the correspondence between Vita and Virginia it takes the form of a digital book with text, spoken word, music and film. Other commissioned artists are Lubaina Himid, CJ Mahony, Emily Speed, Alice May Williams and Melanie Wilson.
Willie Doherty, REMAINS, Earagail Arts Festival, Letterkenny Regional Cultural Centre, Ireland, until 22 September 2018
Willie Doherty’s video installation REMAINS (2013) is being exhibited in the context of the Earagail Arts Festival in Letterkenny, Ireland. The work is filmed in a number of locations in Derry, Northern Ireland, used since the early 1970’s to carry out kneecappings, a form of punishment shooting used to control drug use and other forms of so-called ‘anti-social behaviour’. Despite the relative calm achieved since the signing of the Belfast Peace Agreement in 1998, paramilitaries still seek to exert control over the lives of those who live in some of the most economically deprived areas. In 2012, a number of parents were forced to present their children for punishment shootings. REMAINS builds on Doherty’s interest in the relationship between landscape and memory and in working in locations that are contaminated with untold stories; some forgotten, some half remembered or unacknowledged. Doherty uses the camera to examine these locations in almost forensic detail. His telling of these events is punctuated by the image of a burning car, a motif that first appeared in his body of work in the early 1990’s. On loan from the collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Earagail Arts Festival is a bilingual (Irish and English language), multidisciplinary arts festival which takes place each July throughout County Donegal along the Wild Atlantic Way on the North West coast of Ireland.
Willie Doherty, No Return, FRONT International, Cleveland, Ohio, until 30 September 2018
Doherty’s recent video No Return, 2017 and related photographic works, made in Braddock, Pennsylvania, are shown as part of the Front Film Program at Transformer Station, Cleveland and The Akron Art Museum, Akron, Ohio.
Hayley Newman, In My Shoes, Attenborough Arts Centre, University of Leicester, until 2 September 2018
Hayley Newman’s work You Blew My Mind is featured in the Arts Council Collection touring exhibition In My Shoes, which explores the ways in which artists based in the UK have represented themselves in their work since the 1990s. Encompassing a range of media including film, photography and sculpture, In My Shoes draws primarily from the Arts Council Collection, with key loans from other UK collections, to investigate these dynamic approaches.
Lindsay Seers, Entangled² (Theatre II), Sursock Museum, Beirut, until 8 October 2018
Fleeting Exits is a group exhibition that brings together works that draw on notions of gender, escape, and liberation. Spanning from theatrical installation to robotic sculptures, these works transform into a microcosm of poetic biographies pushing the spectator to expand their understanding of identity.
Jo Bruton, John Moores Painting Prize 2018, The Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, until 18 November 2018
Jo Bruton is one of 60 artists whose paintings will feature in the John Moores Painting Prize 2018 exhibition, marking 60 years of the UK’s longest-established painting prize. Paintings were selected from more than 2,700 entries by an esteemed panel of jurors. This year’s jurors include artists Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, Lubaina Himid MBE, Bruce McLean and Liu Xiaodong, and curator Jenni Lomax. In celebration of the Prize’s anniversary year, an additional award will be offered to the first prize winner – a three month fellowship at Liverpool John Moores University together with an in-focus solo display at the Walker Art Gallery in 2019.
Graham Fagen, Longing and Consolidation, Watou Arts Festival, Belgium, until 2 September 2018
Graham Fagen’s Guerre/Jardin, a neon work from 2014, is featured in Longing and Consolidation, the Watou Arts Festival. The festival takes place every summer in the Watou village in the Belgian province of West Flanders, near the French border.
Hayley Newman / The Gluts, OilY, Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 23 September 2018
The Gluts (Hayley Newman, Gina Birch and Kaffe Matthews) are showing the video OilY from their song-cycle Cafe Carbon in the exhibition Free The Pussy! in the Summerhall visual arts programme at the Edinburgh Festival this summer. Free The Pussy! aims to be an archive of the global protest in support of the Pussy Riot’s call. The show will include artist responses that can be seen in the book, alongside many others who stood in condemnation at the women’s imprisonment. This is the first time many of these pieces made in protest have been brought together for display. Artists include: Gina Birch, Tamsyn Challenger, Judy Chicago, Billy Chyldish, Gaggle, John Keane, No Bra, Hayley Newman, The Gluts, Kaffe Matthews, Yoko Ono, Miss Pokeno, Pussy Riot, Jamie Reid, Layla Sailor, Wendy Saunders and more.
Mike Nelson, General Rehearsal, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow, Russia, until 16 September 2018
Mike Nelson is exhibiting as part of the group project General Rehearsal. Organised over three floors at MMOMA’s historic Petrovka Street gallery, visitors will be met with Nelson’s work Again, More Things (a table ruin) (2014). Best known for creating powerful, immersive, large-scale installations, Nelson selected historic and contemporary figurative works from the V-A-C collection for his presentation, by artists including Pawel Althamer, Louise Bourgeois, Constantine Brâncusi, Alberto Giacometti, Sherrie Levine, Henry Moore and Willem de Kooning. Displayed on a reclaimed wooden floor as a mass of modelled figures, the sculptural installation, inspired by a Dieter Roth work, The Floor (Studio-floor from Mosfellsbaer, Iceland), (1973-1992), is what Nelson describes as a “levelling of sorts, questioning how we look at objects.” The piece also serves as an introductory model for how works are activated in the rest of the show. General Rehearsal is a content-rich, innovative presentation that combines works from three international art collections: V-A-C Foundation, KADIST and MMOMA. Designed to evolve and change like a living organism that adapts and responds to its environment, General Rehearsal adopts the structure of a theatrical play developing over three acts staged over a five-month period. In this framework, the project proposes considering artworks as actors in the play, having a potential agency similar to human beings. With the project V-A-C also introduces a more fluid, transparent method of working collectively and engaging all disciplines equally.
Mike Nelson, Indicators: Artists on Climate Change, Storm King Art Center, Cornwall, New York, until 11 November 2018
Mike Nelson’s Eighty Circles Through Canada (The Last Possessions Of An Orcadian Mountain Man) (2013) is being shown in the exhibition Indicators: Artists on Climate Change exploring the impacts of the changing climate. Both indoor and outdoor installations, including pieces newly created for the exhibition at Storm King, will illuminate the threats of a changing climate to our biological world and to humanity.
Informed by his friend and collaborator, the artist and mountaineer Erlend Williamson, the piece comprises a large set of driftwood shelves laden with Williamson’s last possessions before falling to his death in the Scottish Highlands. The reverse of the structure acts as a screen on which to project 80 transparencies of discarded stone fire circles, found and documented between Banff and Vancouver in 2012-13. The exhibition at Storm King marks the first time this work will be shown in the United States. The organizers of the exhibition are Nora Lawrence, Curator; David Collens, Director and Chief Curator; and Sarah Diver, Curatorial Assistant, who collaborated closely with artists to develop their ideas and proposed projects for the exhibition. Participating artists include: David Brooks, Dear Climate, Mark Dion, Ellie Ga, Justin Brice Guariglia, Allison Janae Hamilton, Jenny Kendler, Maya Lin, Mary Mattingly, Mike Nelson, Steve Rowell, Gabriela Salazar, Tavares Strachan, Meg Webster, and Hara Woltz.
Nathaniel Mellors and Erkka Nissinen, The Aalto Natives, KIASMA, Helsinki, Finland, until 9 September 2018
The Aalto Natives showcases artist duo Erkka Nissinen and Nathaniel Mellors who represented Finland at the 2017 Venice Biennale. The work is a humorous yet critical examination of Finnish identity that involves creativity, nerdy humour and a cast of national celebrities from prehistoric times to the age of robotics. This exhibition features the installation from Venice & Cobra Museum as well as 4 rooms of new animatronic installation by Mellors-Nissinen.
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