February 2016

Ongoing Exhibition

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

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 on Thursday 4 February, 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, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburgh, and Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, until 8 May 2016

Benedict Drew, Sequencer, 2015 © Benedict Drew 2015. Installation view: British Art Show 8, Leeds Art Gallery, 2015-17. Photo © Leeds Museums and Galleries 2015

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 the 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 comprised of ten tracks, available to download for free from the Art on the Underground website.

Graham Fagen, Hospitalfield, Scotland + Venice, opening 19 March 2016

Graham Fagen, The Slave’s Lament, 2015

In March, Hospitalfield will open a major exhibition of the work of Graham Fagen.

Fagen will reinterpret the body of work he made for his exhibition for Scotland + Venice 2015, during the 56th International Venice Biennale. The original exhibition was made for the four noble rooms of Palazzo Fontana, on the Grand Canal. Here in Arbroath the exhibition of sculpture, drawing and moving image will be installed, with some changes and additions, into the lovely and various historic Arts & Crafts rooms of Hospitalfield House.

Imogen Stidworthy, States of Mind: Tracing the edges of consciousness, Wellcome Collection, London, 4 February 2016 – 28 April 2016

Imogen Stidworthy, The Whisper Heard, 2003. Production still.

Imogen Stidworthy’s The Whisper Heard (2003), first shown at Matt’s Gallery in 2003, will be presented as part of a series of installations at the Wellcome Collection. Contrasting the language acquisition of a young child with that of a stroke patient with aphasia, The Whisper Heard explores language, meaning and identity.

Imogen Stidworthy, Listening, Hayward Touring, Art Exchange and Firstsite, Colchester, 12 December 2015 – 14 February 2016

Scan of an article in The Independent, 23rd Nov 2007, about Wiretap analyst Sacha van Loo. Photograph Josh Fistock, scanned by Imogen Stidworthy during the making of Sacha, 2011-12

Imogen Stidworthy is part of Hayward Touring Curatorial Open exhibition curated by artist Sam Belinfante. Listening is an international group exhibition, which interrogates the act of listening in contemporary art.

Nathaniel Mellors, Nothing Happens, Twice, Harris Museum & Art Gallery, Preston, 6 February – 4 June 2016

Nathaniel Mellors, Ourhouse Ep. -1 – Time, 2016. Video still. Presented by the Contemporary Art Society, 2015, through the Annual Award funded by the Sfumato Foundation with the support of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne and the Mondriaan Foundation. Commissioned by the Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston. Produced by Nathaniel Mellors & NOMAD

In 2014, Nathaniel Mellors, in partnership with the Harris Museum & Art Gallery was the recipient of the Contemporary Art Society Award enabling him to create his most ambitious film to date, Ourhouse, Ep.-1: Time. The absurdist drama, which is shot in various locations around Preston, features a family who inhabit Preston’s iconic, Brutalist bus station — and find themselves inhabited by Neanderthals after Charles ‘Daddy’ Maddox-Wilson (Richard Bremmer) announces his imminent celebrity. Charles has invented a revolutionary new theory of time — but the family’s subsequent attempts at time-travel see them duped, cannibalised and trapped inside a permanent present.

Ourhouse, Ep.-1: Time will be shown as part of a group exhibition, Nothing Happens, Twice of national and international artists that includes film works, sculpture and painting and 6 commissions.

Nathaniel Mellors, Anatomie de l’Automate, La Panacée Centre de Culture Contemporaine, Montpelier, until 28 February 2016

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 the group exhibition Alfred Jarry Archipelago, which also features Mike Kelly, Tala Madani and Marvin Gaye Chetwynd amongst others.

Mike Nelson, Sensory Spaces 8 – Mike Nelson, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 13 February–5 June 2016

Mike Nelson, from the series Amnesiac Shrine, 2007

Mike Nelson has created an installation that questions the distinction between real and fictional time for the eighth edition of ‘Sensory Spaces’. Nelson creates immersive environments that evade linear temporality and impact as physically and emotionally disruptive. The preoccupation with scale and the participatory engagement of the visitors overcome categorizations, defining an experience located in an area of tension between what can and what cannot be defined as art. For Sensory Spaces 8, Mike Nelson revisits Amnesiac Shrine, a set of successive artworks conceived as a category in its own right, more than simply a series. Ordinary time and fictional time are aligned, testing the former’s regularity against the viewer’s experience. A recurrence of multiple visual reflections, illusions and flashbacks creates fundamental elements that demand to be completed with the baggage of personal experience. 

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

Jordan Baseman, Deadness (still), 2013. 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, Veil, TAP, Southend, 6 February – 3 April 2016

Jordan Baseman, Veil, 2015. Video still.

Jordan Baseman will be featuring two new works, Veil and Blackout; both made in 2015 and produced in part as a result of a research residency in early 2014 at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, Nebraska.

Jennet Thomas, The Unspeakable Freedom Device, Chelsea College of Art, March 2016

Jennet Thomas, The Unspeakable Freedom Device (still), 2015. Courtesy the artist

A screening of Jennet Thomas’ The Unspeakable Freedom Device will be shown at Chelsea College of Art on Wednesday 2nd March at 6pm. The screening will be followed by illustrated talks from Esther Leslie, writer, theorist and Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck and Sally O’Reilly, writer and critic.

The Unspeakable Freedom Device is an experimental narrative film haunted by the image of Margaret Thatcher as an after-burn on our cultural memory. Set in a 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. A kind of warped Folk-tale, the film follows two women on their pilgrimage to the Winter Gardens, Blackpool to cure their green baby.

Willie Doherty, Home, Villa Merkel, Galerien Der Stadt Esslingen, Germany, 14 February–24 April 2016

Willie Doherty, Home, 2016. Two screen video installation, colour, sound.

Anne Bean, new exhibition Moments of Consciousness and…… MoCa Trowbridge, Trowbridge, Wiltshire, ongoing 2016 

Anne Bean, Leaden Man with Swan Thoughts, MoCa, 2015. Installation view.