August 2015

Forthcoming Exhibition

Gerard Hemsworth, Nothing to Declare, 16 September–1 November 2015

Nothing to Declare will be Gerard Hemsworth’s third solo exhibition at Matt’s Gallery, presenting recent works from 2012 to 2015. Nothing to Declare brings together signs and representations of modernist art, alongside and integrated with signs and representations from what seem like cartoon narratives, offering pictorial and ideological oppositions.

Current Exhibition

David Osbaldeston, The Top & Bottom of It. Mechanism for a Future Reference, Matt’s Gallery (Office), July 2015 – Ongoing

A new site-specific installation of moving objects and unstable items embedded within the architecture of Matt’s Gallery’s Office, available to view every first Thursday per month, between working hours of 10.30am–1pm & 2–5.30pm (closed for lunch between 1–2pm). Viewing by prior arrangement only, one person per half-hour viewing slot. Further details and pre-booking information here.

Offsite Exhibition

Blackrock Artists Residency Programme, Saturday 19 & Sunday 20 September 2015, 11–5pm, Lydney Park Estate

The Blackrock Artist Residency Programme is a partnership between Matt’s Gallery, London and Lydney Park Estate on the edge of the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire. Blackrock will see work by artists Rebecca Birch, Bronwen Buckeridge, David Cheeseman and Roy Voss sited throughout the estate including the woods, the Mansion, the caves, the Roman temple, the rhododendron gardens and the village hall. Whilst in residence in April to May 2015, the artists stayed in a farmhouse on the estate and shared in a community of interaction, conceptual development and production of work with the support of Robin Klassnik and Rupert Bathurst.

To launch Blackrock, new works by all four artists will be shown on the 19 & 20 September 2015. At the same time Matt’s Gallery will show Susan Hiller’s Channels (2013), a major 104 screen audio-sculptural installation in which disembodied voices report on ‘near-death’ experiences.

Artists’ News

Benedict Drew, KAPUT, QUAD, Derby, until 6 September 2015

Oscillating between space tourism and the mystical power of sacred objects, between the scientific and the esoteric, this exhibition of new work by Benedict Drew will question different modes of learning and the power and privilege of the acquisition of knowledge. Presented at QUAD Gallery as part of The Grand Tour fringe programme, an exciting new cultural event taking place in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire in 2015 and 2016, thanks to funding from Arts Council England.

Benedict Drew, Disappearing Acts, Lofoten International Art Festival, Norway, 28 August – 27 September 2015

Benedict Drew will be showing video work Mainland Rock as part of this year’s Lofoten International Art Festival, which takes place across a cluster of islands located on the North West Coast of Norway, just above the Arctic Circle.

Imogen Stidworthy, IWM Contemporary, Imperial War Museum London, until 6 September 2015

Imogen Stidworthy’s sound installation The Work v5, currently on show at the Imperial War Museum London, was developed through conversations with two former British soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and the wife of one of the soldiers, who lives with the effects of war at home. Stidworthy transmits their voices through objects associated with conflict, exploring the nature of memory and the difficulty of communicating traumatic experience.

Graham Fagen, Palazzo Fontana, Venice Biennale, until 22 November 2015

Graham Fagen is currently representing Scotland at the 56th International Art Exhibition, the Venice Biennale, with a solo presentation commissioned and curated by Hospitalfield, Arbroath. Fagen presents 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 has choreographed 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.

Alison Turnbull, Compression, Ormston House, Limerick, Ireland, until 7 August 2015

This exhibition curated by Ed Krcma brings together contemporary artworks that achieve density and compactness of meaning through the use of spare and concentrated means. While much recent art has depended upon high production values and spectacular effects, Compression explores strategies for the generation of aesthetic and conceptual magnitude via the articulation of more modest artistic materials. Recent paintings by Alison Turnbull feature alongside works by Stephen Brandes, Maud Cotter, Angela Fulcher, Tom Hackney, Harty Catherine, Caoimhe Kilfeather, Susan Morris and Trevor Shearer.

Matthew Tickle, Unsensed, Hatton Gallery, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, 19 September – 12 December 2015

Matthew Tickle’s What the eye can’t see the heart can’t grieve for (2004) will feature in a group exhibition at The Hatton Gallery, which attempts to reveal the unseen and unnoticed facets of our everyday environment. First presented at Queen Mary University in 2004, What the eye… is an artwork developed by Tickle in collaboration with theoretical physicist, Dr Fay Dowker, which lit up the interior spaces of buildings, in time to the firing of Geiger counters triggered by background radiation.

Richard Grayson, Speech Acts, UTS Gallery, University of Technology, Sydney, 8 September – 9 October 2015

Exhibition Speech Acts showcases work by the American artist Matt Mullican and the British-Australian artist Richard Grayson, whose practices explore systems of knowledge and the performative aspects of language. Curator Wes Hill has conceived of the two person show as a forum for considering the artists’ performative approach to text and language-based art. For the exhibition Grayson will present new video projection Cosmic Jokes.

Richard Grayson, His Master’s Voice: On Voice and Language, La Panacee, Centre de Culture Contempraine, Montpelier, France, until 20 September 2015

Richard Grayson’s video work The Golden Space City of God, 2009, will be presented as part of His Master’s Voice, an exhibition on the voice and language curated by Dr Inke Arnes. Featuring more than thirty video, digital and performance works, which experiment with technologies that record, reproduce or obscure the voice. The exhibition explores and recovers historical or contemporary discourse, probing the emotional or spiritual effect of the power of the voice, playing with the transformations of identity and meaning.

Melanie Jackson, Take Me To The River: currents of the contemporary, Dojima River Biennale, Osaka, Japan, until 30 August 2015

Melanie Jackson will present new work The Land of the Eternal Infant as part of the Dojima River Biennale 2015 in Osaka, Japan. Titled Take Me To The River: currents of the contemporary the exhibition will also feature works by Aki Sasamoto, Angus Fairhurst, Hito Steyerl, Melanie Gilligan, Michael Stevenson, Peter Fend, Ryoji Ikeda, Shimabuku, Shitamichi Motoyuki, Simon Fujiwara, Superflex, The Play, Vermeir & Heiremans, Yuken Teruya.

Roy Voss, The London Open, Whitechapel Gallery, London, until 6 September 2015

Roy Voss has been selected for The London Open 2015, the Whitechapel Gallery’s triennial exhibition. A showcase of some of the most dynamic sculpture, painting, performance, moving image, photography, printmaking and many other media being made across the capital in 2015. Manual labour and the ways we work is a theme investigated throughout the exhibition.

Hayley Newman, Liberties, Collyer Bristow Gallery, London, until 21 October 2015

Works from Hayley Newman’s series Domestique feature in an exhibition alongside more than 20 women artists, which reflects on the changes in art practice within the context of sexual and gender equality since the introduction of the Sex Discrimination Act (1975) in the UK. The exhibition presents a snapshot of the evolving conversations that continue to contribute to the mapping of a woman’s place in British society: body, femininity, sex, motherhood, economic and political status are explored through contemporary film, sculpture, performance and painting.

Mike Nelson, David Osbaldeston, Lindsay Seers and Benedict Drew, Graphics Interchange Format: 25 Years of Focal Point Gallery, Focal Point Gallery, until 12 September 2015

Mike Nelson, David Osbaldeston, Lindsay Seers and Benedict Drew have each produced new animated GIF works for the multi-screen exhibition Graphics Interchange Format: 25 Years of Focal Point Gallery. As part of Focal Point Gallery’s 25th Anniversary, every artist who has exhibited at the gallery has been invited to contribute one or more animated GIF for the project, opening to the public on Saturday 18 July 2015. Produced as a collaboration between Focal Point Gallery and Fraser Muggeridge studio, the GIF collection will form a key part of the gallery’s new website, which will launch in 2016.

Mike Nelson, David Osbaldeston and Benedict Drew, Plague of Diagrams, ICA, London, 20–23 August 2015

Works by Mike Nelson and Benedict Drew will feature in Plague of Diagrams, an exhibition and a programme of performances, talks and discussions concerning the relationships between diagrammatic practices and thought in different disciplines. Organised by David Burrows and Dean Kenning in collaboration with Ami Clarke, Andrew Conio, John Cussans and David Osbaldeston, the event explores the function and use of diagrams in art as expanded diagrammatic practice beyond the graphic presentation of information.

Mike Nelson, Modern Life, La Biennale de Lyon Art, 10 September 2015 – 3 January 2016

Mike Nelson will be participating in Modern Life, the 13th edition of La Biennale de Lyon Art, curated by Ralph Rugoff.

Jordan Baseman, Teton Artlab, Wyoming, USA, August 2015

Jordan Baseman will be in residence throughout August at Teton ArtLab, Wyoming. While there he will be making a film about the Smith Family Mansion, a local architectural landmark created by a single man over two decades.

Jordan Baseman, FUSO International Video Art Festival, Lisbon, 25 – 30 August 2015

Jordan Baseman’s video work July the Twelfth 1984, 2003/2014 will be shown as part of FUSO International Video Art Festival. July the Twelfth formed part of Baseman’s first show don’t stop ’til you get enough at Matt’s Gallery in 2005, and has since been entirely re-made for solo show Nobody Likes Us But We Don’t Care at Kunstverein Freiburg, 2014.

Anne Bean, Decade, CGP London, Dilston Grove, London, 18 – 27 September 2015

REAP was an expansive, year-long investigation into the nature of time, memory and ephemerality created by Anne Bean, who invited a host of other artists to produce works in and around Dilston Grove from September 2004 to October 2005. Exactly a decade later, CGP London has commissioned Bean to re-examine REAP, particularly in regard to two of the works which continue to resonate through her practice, through three new installations where the decayed and the present meet head on.

Jennet Thomas, THE UNSPEAKABLE FREEDOM DEVICE, Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool, until 22 August 2015

Jennet Thomas’ new solo exhibition THE UNSPEAKABLE FREEDOM DEVICE, commissioned by Grundy Gallery, Blackpool, centres around an experimental narrative film, of the same name, which will be presented alongside four galleries of thematic installation work and animations. A kind of time-warped folktale, the film follows two women through a bizarre, broken landscape of collapsing signs and imploding meanings on a pilgrimage to the Winter Gardens, Blackpool to cure their green baby. In this fantastic, primitive-future world the characters become entangled in a cargo-cult of Margaret Thatcher and buy a Maggie Doll which spouts  quotations when they pull its string. This project explores the idea of the image of  Thatcher as an after-burn on the collective memory of our culture. Watch the film trailer here.

Paul Rooney, Still at Large, Berwick Film and Media Festival, Custom House, Berwick, 23 — 27 September 2015

Still at Large is a solo exhibition of new work made during Paul Rooney’s Berwick Visual Arts Artist Residency. The video work at first seems to be a televisual essay programme about Holy Island, written and presented by architecture writer Nicholas Still.  But there is another voice in the screening space as well as that of Still, a female voice at the rear of the space which describes a figure up to his neck in the sea (in the manner of one of St. Cuthbert’s prayer methods), on the run from an unspoken crime. The fugitive the voice describes seems to be a self-righteous violent murderer given to sentimental ‘hyperthermal’ reveries about his childhood, a Robin Hood TV series and sainthood. Still seems to become more aware of the voice as his performance for the camera continues. Is the figure the voice describes lurking somewhere around Holy Island? Or is he in another realm entirely?

Supernormal Festival, Braziers Park, Oxfordshire, 7 – 9 August 2015

Benedict Drew, Jennet Thomas, X Marks the Bokship and Angus Braithwaite will all be participating in this year’s Supernormal Festival as part of the arts programme.