Matt’s Gallery News
New Assistant Director
Laura Hensser in the gallery. Exhibition: Matt Stokes, Madman in a Lifeboat, 2015.
Current Exhibition
Matt Stokes, Madman in a Lifeboat, 1 April–24 May 2015
Matt Stokes, Madman in a Lifeboat, 2015. Installation shot at Matt’s Gallery, London.
Matt Stokes’ new Matt’s Gallery commission Madman in a Lifeboat is an immersive, sculptural video installation, built around the pilot episode of a faux situational comedy series. The work is the culmination of Stokes’ year-long Bartlett Fellowship residency with the University of Newcastle’s Fine Art department and at Matt’s Gallery, London, supported by on-going mentorship by Matt’s Gallery director Robin Klassnik.
Offsite at Dilston Grove: Matt Stokes, Cantata Profana, 27 March–26 April 2015
Matt Stokes, Cantata Profana, 2010. Installation view. Photo by Nils Klinger.
Matt’s Gallery and Dilston Grove present the second in a new series of co-productions, Cantata Profana by Matt Stokes. This six screen video and sound installation focuses on the physicality of extreme metal vocalists and the ability of their voices to immerse a listener and transcend both the individual performer and group.
Black Rock Residency
David Cheeseman, work in progress. Courtesy the artist.
This spring, a new Artists Residency at Lydney Park Estate, Gloucestershire has launched in association with Matt’s Gallery. The first group of artists – Rebecca Birch, Bronwen Buckeridge, David Cheeseman and Roy Voss – are in residence during March and April 2015, utilising the various studio facilities available and the topography of the estate, including the forest and woodland, the expansive gardens and deer park. An exhibition of work made during the residency will take place later in the year.
Artists’ News
Graham Fagen, Palazzo Fontana, Venice Biennale, 9 May – 22 November 2015
Graham Fagen, Consciousness (b&w), 2014
Graham Fagen will represent Scotland at the 56th International Art Exhibition, the Venice Biennale, in a solo presentation commissioned and curated by Hospitalfield, Arbroath. Fagen will present an entirely new body of work, including sculptures, drawings and a five channel audio-visual installation. Using the Palazzo Fontana, a 16th century Venetian palace, as an historic backdrop for his presentation, Fagen will choreograph a new body of work across four rooms of the palazzo to create a path through which visitors can effectively become performers within the piece.
Nathaniel Mellors, A Modest Proposal for Radical Bourgeoisie, De Hallen Haarlem, until 25 April 2015
Nathaniel Mellors, still from The Sophisticated Neanderthal Interview, 35mm & Digital-8 HD transfer, 2013/14. Courtesy the artist and Matt’s Gallery, London; MONITOR, Rome & Galerie Diana Stigter, Amsterdam.
Nathaniel Mellors’ The Sophisticated Neanderthal Interview (2013-14), alongside photogram Venus of Truson (prehistoric photogrammic original) and sculpture Cave Box (2014), will be on show as part of international group exhibition A Modest Proposal for Radical Bourgeoisie. The exhibition title refers to A Modest Proposal, Jonathan Swift’s satirical complaint from 1729 against the ruling classes, in which the writer proposes to feed poor children to the rich to thus combat the growing poverty. The exhibition is the first showing of The Sophisticated Neanderthal Interview since its joint acquisition by the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and De Hallen Haarlem, as part of the annual Andaz Art Donation 2015.
Jordan Baseman, Sequence VII, Reykjavík, Iceland, 10 April – 19 April 2015
Jordan Baseman, Veil, 2015. Production still.
Jordan Baseman will be showing new work Veil as part of Sequences VII, the biennial real-time art festival in Reyjavik, Iceland. The ten-day programme presents a spectrum of video installations, exhibitions, screenings, performances and discussions centred on the theme of ‘Plumbing’, highlighting the often-unseen infrastructure that underlies digital communication and its complex network of pipes and wires and its metaphorical correspondence with the physical structure of the body as well as of the earth. The seventh edition looks at the developments in the areas of DIY culture, body visualisation and the dynamic possibilities offered by installation, sound and time-based media with an unbiased approach which embraces, rather than avoids, notions of amateurism, improvisation, “glitch” aesthetics and bottom-up creative initiative.
Jordan Baseman, Artist in Residence, University of Lincoln, April 2015 – March 2016
University of Lincoln, School of Law Artist in Residence, production still, 2015.
Jordan Baseman has been selected by The City of Lincoln and University of Lincoln to undertake a ten month research residency at Lincoln Law School within the College of Social Science. During his time in Lincoln, Jordan will explore how individual liberty and human rights infuse belief systems. He will work with academics, offenders, victims of crime, those who work in the legal system as well as representatives of different faiths in Lincolnshire to explore the individual, power and the law. The Artist in Residence Award is funded by the Leverhulme Trust and marks the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta.
Imogen Stidworthy, Listening, Hayward Touring, at Site Gallery and Sheffield Institute of Arts Gallery, 11 April – 31 May 2015
Imogen Stidworthy, Sacha, 2011. Video still.
Imogen Stidworthy is part of the current Hayward Touring Curatorial Open exhibition curated by artist Sam Belinfante. Listening, an international group exhibition, will interrogate the act of listening in contemporary art. After showing at Site Gallery and Sheffield Institute of Arts Gallery, Sheffield, the tour will continue to Norwich University of the Arts Gallery.
Alison Turnbull, Multiplicities, Art Seen, Nicosia, Cyprus, until 9 May 2015
Alison Turnbull, A Garden of Numbers (Green/Red), 2015. Silver gelatin print; archival pigment print with watercolour. Detail.
A Garden of Numbers, made especially for ArtSeen Editions, brings together a black and white photograph of a tiered fountain in Rome’s Orto Botanico with a digital print of Pascal’s triangle of numbers. Embedded in this digital image – crisscrossed with coloured lines and hand-tinted with watercolour – is the Fibonacci number sequence. This mathematical sequence is famously present everywhere in nature – in the seed head of a sunflower, the pods of a pinecone and the population of a beehive. Multiplicities also features new works by Angus Braithwaite, Savvas Christodoulides, Marianna Christofides, Gary Colclough, Eleni Kamma, Aldo Kroese, Eva Marathaki, Jost Münster, Vicky Pericleous, Maria Theodoraki, Lefteris Tapas and Amikam Toren.
Hayley Newman, History is Now: 7 Artists Take on Britain, Hayward Gallery, until 26 April 2015
Hayley Newman, You Blew My Mind, 1998. Photo by Casey Orr.
Hayley Newman, Book Talk: Copy Readers Union, Housman’s Radical Booksellers, London, 8 May 2015, 7pm
Hayley Newman, Common, 2013.
Lindsay Seers, Doug Fishbone’s Leisure Land Golf, EM15 Venue, Venice Biennale, 6th May – 26th July 2015
Lindsay Seers, Golf Hole for Leisure Land Golf, 2015.
Lindsay Seers’ golf hole for Leisure Land Golf, Venice Biennale features a figurehead, upside down and pregnant being attacked by two enormous snakes. The figure is Princess Salme of Zanzibar daughter of a circassian in the Sultan’s harem. She was made pregnant by a German merchant and was smuggled out of Africa by a British Sea Captain to Europe where she was used as a pawn by the British and German’s in the carving up of East Africa. The golf ball’s journey, up a steep ramp, over a painting of an elongated anamorphic British Naval Captain, runs through the snakes bodies and bounces off a rock with an image of a ‘circassian beauty’ from PT Barnum’s freak show. You should be able to score a hole in one. Participating artists also include: John Akomfrah, Ellie Harrison, Candice Jacobs, Hetain Patel, Yinka Shonibare, Eyal Weizman and Doug Fishbone.
Benedict Drew, Hands Off!, Room of Requirement at Horse and Pony Fine Arts, Berlin, until 5 April 2015
Benedict Drew, No Body, 2014. C-Type print on Kodak Metallic Paper.
Benedict Drew, 5th Birthday Party, Grand Union, Birmingham, 3 April 2015, 7pm
Benedict Drew, Dyslexia Salon, 2014. Still from performance at Chelsea Art Space, London.
Grand Union will be celebrating their 5th Birthday with a party on Friday, 3 April 2015. The evening event will include an immersive set by Benedict Drew as well as a newly commissioned performance by their current artist-in-residence Phil Hession.
Drawing Biennial 2015, Drawing Room, London, until 30 April 2015
Melanie Jackson, Giving Suck: (Marie Antoinette as Hebe), 2015. Ink, graphite, watercolour on paper.
Jennet Thomas, THE UNSPEAKABLE FREEDOM DEVICE, UK Tour, April 2015
Jennet Thomas, THE UNSPEAKABLE FREEDOM DEVICE, 2015.
Jennet Thomas’ new work THE UNSPEAKABLE FREEDOM DEVICE, an experimental narrative film haunted by the image of Margaret Thatcher as an after-burn on our cultural memory, will tour the UK this Spring. Set in a warped primitive-future world, of collapsing signs and imploding meanings, characters in the film become entangled in a Thatcher cargo-cult where the difference between technology and magic has become incomprehensible. The film has been commissioned by Grundy Gallery, Blackpool, and will open there in July as a large-scale installation work. In the run-up to the launch of the exhibition and the General Election in May, a series of evening events, with live presentations, performance and debate from writers and artists including Erica Scourti, Oreet Ashery, Esther Leslie, Melanie Jackson, Pil and Galia Kolletciv, will tour to Grand Union, Birmingham; Primary, Nottingham; Outpost, Norwich; Cube, Bristol. It will also be coming to London later in the year in conjunction with Matt’s Gallery.
Peter Liversidge, Notes on Protesting, Whitechapel Gallery, London, until 14 June 2015
Peter Liversidge, The Sign Paintings, detail, 2014. Photograph by and courtesy of the artist.
Inspired by ideas around demonstration and protest, Peter Liversidge has worked with sixty children on a performance staged at the Whitechapel Gallery, on May Day 2014. Together they created songs, choreography, banners and placards which expressed their views on everything from ‘No More Homework’ and ‘Our shoes are too tight’ to ‘I Don’t Like Cooked Tomatoes’ and ‘Less trucks and cars. More chocolate bars!’
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