December 2015

Off-Site Exhibition

Jonny Williamson, Inaugural David Troostwyk Studio Award, StudioRCA, Royal College of Art, London, until 18 December

Jonny Williamson, 2015.

Jonny Williamson, the recipient of the inaugural David Troostwyk Studio Award, presents a new installation developed through a year-long residency at the Matt’s Gallery Martello Street Studio. The selection committee for the award comprised Robin Klassnik, Director Matt’s Gallery, artist Susan Hiller and RCA Head of Sculpture Jordan Baseman. Williamson’s ambitious installation The Aleph and Other Stories depicts moments of our supremely layered lives through multiple slide projections, computer generated visuals that never repeat yet appear to continually replicate, ethnographically based visuals and formal minimalist obelisks that merge into an elliptical system of knowledge. The work embraces themes of the infinite and the mystic sublime. Open to the public Saturdays and Sundays, 2–4pm until 18 December.

Ongoing Exhibition

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

David Osbaldeston, The Top & Bottom of It. Mechanism for a Future Reference, 2015. Installation view at Matt’s Gallery, London.

A 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, including Thursday 3 December and Thursday 7 January, 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.

Artists’ News

Benedict Drew and Imogen Stidworthy, British Art Show 8, Leeds Art Gallery, until 16 January 2016

Imogen Stidworthy, A Crack in the Light, 2013. Video still.

Benedict Drew and Imogen Stidworthy have been selected for the British Art Show 8, widely recognised as the most ambitious and influential exhibition of contemporary British art, with artists chosen for their significant contribution over the past five years. Imogen presents installation A Crack in the Light, 2013, which was first shown as part of the Bergen Triennale 2013, while Benedict has created new work Sequencer, 2015 specifically for the exhibition. After opening in Leeds, BAS8 will then tour to Edinburgh, Norwich and Southampton during 2016/17.

Benedict Drew, de re touch, Art on the Underground, London, until 28 February 2016 

Benedict Drew, de re touch, 2015. Video still.

Benedict Drew’s new commission for Art on the Underground, titled de-re-touch, will be on display on digital screens across the London Underground network from November 2015. Playing with the language of advertising, the work has been created in direct response to London Underground’s unique public environment and will be embedded amongst the cycle of real adverts displayed on the Underground’s digital screens. It will be accompanied by an electronic and experimental audio piece piece comprised of ten tracks, available to download for free from the Art on the Underground website.

Imogen Stidworthy, An Introduction to Bliss for Two Voices with Chorus, Concreta Magazine, December 2015 

Imogen Stidworthy, An Introduction to Bliss for Two Voices with Chorus, 2015. Teaser image.

An Introduction to Bliss for Two Voices with Chorus is a new work by Imogen Stidworthy rendered as a binaural sound composition for headphones. Commissioned by Spanish bilingual magazine Concreta the work will be presented online, with a teaser included in the print edition of the magazine.

Nathaniel Mellors, Neanderthal Container (Animatronic Prelapse), 2014. Installation view at Taipei Biennial 2014, Taiwan.

Nathaniel Mellors, The Object (Ourhouse), 2010. Photo Simon Keitch. Courtesy Hayward Touring.

Nathaniel Mellors’ video works Giant Bum – Stage 1 (Rehearsal) and Giant Bum – Stage 2 (Theatre) (2008) and animatronic sculpture, The Object (Ourhouse) (2010) are currently on show as part of group exhibition Alfred Jarry Archipelago, which also features Mike Kelly, Tala Madani and Marvin Gaye Chetwynd amongst others.

Jordan Baseman, Essex Road II, Tintype Gallery, London, 1 December — 20 December 2015

Jordan Baseman, E, 2015. Video still.

Jordan Baseman will be showing new work, E (2015), as part of exhibition Essex Road II, comprised of eight specially commissioned short films by critically acclaimed artist-filmmakers, each inspired by the north London street from which the project takes its name, and where the gallery is also located. Each five minutes or less in length, the films are back-projected onto the gallery’s large window, and can be viewed from the street seven days a week between 4 and 11pm. E is a psychedelic, experimental road movie that has been shot using super 16mm with multiple exposures on location on Essex Road.

Jordan Baseman, Flat Death, Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool, 15 January — 3 April 2016

Jordan Baseman, Deadness, 2013. Still courtesy the artist and Matt’s Gallery, London.

Jordan Baseman’s installation Deadness, a multiple 35mm projection slide show–part lecture, part narrative soundtrack, was first shown at Matt’s Gallery in 2013, as part of a solo show derived from Baseman’s creative non-fiction and interview-based practice, exploring the historical, cultural and sociological relationship between photographic portraiture and embalming. These orphaned images collected through online auctions: casual snap shots and more formal portraits of individuals in their coffins from the early Victorian era to the present day, and will be presented at Open Eye alongside a new body of work by artist Edgar Martin surveying photography, records and suicide.

Jordan Baseman, Freedom Lies, The Collection, Lincoln, until 24 January 2016

Jordan Baseman, July the Twelfth 1984, 2014. Video still.

Jordan Baseman’s video work July the Twelfth 1984, 2003/2014 will be shown as part of Freedom Lies, a series of exhibitions and events which aim to create a contemporary discussion around themes raised by Magna Carta, inspired by its 800th anniversary. 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.

Mike Nelson, Modern Life, La Biennale de Lyon Art, until 3 January 2016

Mike Nelson, A7 (Route du Soleil), 2015. Installation view, Biennale de Lyon, 2015.
Photograph: Blaise Adilon.

Mike Nelson presents new work A7 (Route du Soleil), 2015 as part of Modern Life, the 13th edition of La Biennale de Lyon Art, curated by Ralph Rugoff. This is the second in a series of sculptural works that utilise blown out tyres gathered from the major arteries of primary cities across the world. The first, entitled M6 after the British motorway that passes through the industrial city of Birmingham, was realised at Eastside Projects in 2013; the remnants of tyres scattered across a 40 ton slab of concrete were viewed only from the walkway that ran around its periphery. Here in Lyon, rudimentary cages have been constructed to incorporate cast concrete slabs upon which the tyres are elevated, and displayed to create a landscape that allows the viewer to move amongst the debris.

David Osbaldeston, Inflection Sandwich, Artist’s Book published by Onamotopee, November 2015

David Osbaldeston, Inflection Sandwich, 2015.

Arranged as a palindrome where text and image relentlessly interweave, Inflection Sandwich is a looping sequence of co-ordinated drawings, sculpture, typography and animation. With subtle humour, the artist grapples with familiar artistic legacies of conceptualism, word games, and repetition that are toyed with in a bid to highlight ways in which forms of communication are re-imagined as image recognition. This publication follows the exhibition by David Osbaldeston initiated at Onomatopee project space in Eindhoven, NL and subsequently at Piper Keys, London, Wysing Arts, Cambridge, and Collective Gallery, Edinburgh. Designed by Will Holder with Chromolux self-embossed cover by David Osbaldeston.

Alison Turnbull, Another Green World, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, until 31 January 2016

Alison Turnbull, Fibonacci 14, 2015. Ink and pencil on paper.

New publication, Another Green World: Linn Botanic Gardens – Encounters with a  Scottish Arcadia, is artist Alison Turnbull and writer Philip Hoare’s lyrical portrait of the unique Linn Botanic Gardens. Conceived and compiled by Turnbull, this artist’s book captures the beauty and spirit of Linn. Hoare’s text and Turnbull’s photographs, drawings, and charts, complemented by photography by Ruth Clark, lead us through the garden and the Victorian house. Completing the publication are texts by ecologist Ian Edwards and Jamie Taggart’s list of every species in the garden. The publication has been launched at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, where it is accompanied by an exhibition of drawings, prints and photographs by Alison Turnbull, on display until January 2016.

Matthew Tickle, Unsensed, Hatton Gallery, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, until 12 December 2015

Matthew Tickle, What the eye…, 2004. Exterior view of public artwork at Queen Mary University of London.

Matthew Tickle’s What the eye can’t see the heart can’t grieve for (2004) features 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.

Anne Bean and Richard Wilson. Documentation of performance.

Since their 1980s collaboration as Bow Gamelan Ensemble (with Paul Burwell), Anne Bean and Richard Wilson have explored, in many contexts – from Iraq to the Maunsell Forts — further other-worldly encounters. Now, as W0B, they reach backwards and forwards to access cracks in time, capturing fragments of these works to create Nalemag, a performance commissioned by the London Collective Music Festival, which will have its world premiere at this special event.

Anne Bean, Moments of Consciousness and……, MoCa Trowbridge, Trowbridge, Wiltshire, 6 December 2015 — 6 January 2016

Anne Bean, MoCa, 2015. Installation view.

Anne Bean will present an installation viewable during the hours of darkness from 6 December 2015 to 6 January 2016. Part of MoCa, a space where ‘meeting-points’ with strangers occur and start to manifest in long-term collaborations, presented in association with Matt’s Gallery.