Monthly Archives: November 2014

fine art, news

This Week We Welcome ‘Visiting Artist’ Jananne Al-Ani

Focusing on photography, film and video, Jananne Al-Ani’s recent work references the use of lens-based technologies in modern warfare and surveillance.

jananne al-ani2

4th December, 2014

Clock Tower Building (formerly BridgeWardens College), Lecture Theatre
17.30-18.30
Free, everyone welcome!

jananne al-ani

Jananne Al-Ani’s solo exhibitions include Excavations, Hayward Gallery Project Space, London (2014); Groundwork, Beirut Art Center (2013) and Shadow Sites, Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington DC (2012).  She participated in the 13th Istanbul Biennial (2013); Sharjah Biennial 11 (2013); 18th Biennale of Sydney (2012) and the 54th Venice Biennale (2011).  Her work is in the collections of the Tate, London, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo and Darat al Funun, Amman. She is currently Senior Research Fellow at the University of the Arts, London.

fine art, news

This week we welcome ‘Visiting Artist’ Kirsten Glass

Kirsten Glass work has been exhibited regularly in group and solo shows, mainly in London’s commercial, public and project spaces such as the ICA, Barbican, V22 Projects and Hales gallery.

kirsten photo

27th November, 2014

Clock Tower Building (formerly BridgeWardens College), Lecture Theatre
17.30-18.30
Free, everyone welcome!

 

kirsten glass poster

 

Kirsten Glass was born in Belfast in 1975. She attended Chelsea College of Art then Goldsmiths College, graduating in 2000.

Kirsten will talk about developments in her painting practice over the last 15 years, focusing on the most recent body of work which is currently showing in London: Persephone, Queen of the Underworld, 14.11.14- 11.12.14. The Cock ‘n’ Bull Gallery, a project space below Tramshed Restaurant, 32, Rivington St, EC2A 3LX.
Kirsten writes of this recent body of work:

I don’t want to be entirely in control. I want to feed the paintings this ritual geometry until they begin to transform into something I didn’t design. I watch out for when the painting becomes present, when it seems to hold something within itself. It’s important not to reduce this to an explanation. I’m interested in feeling the pulse or vibration and atmosphere of a painting, and knowing it holds its story precisely but silently. I guess the desire to get closer to something beyond the language you’re using – to know something unknowable – is the same for every artist and it really is the nature of painting. It’s the seduction of ‘almost’ and why once is never enough. But yes, they are libidinal and female and made between something sexual and something metaphysical. In this way they are love paintings.

For more information about Glass, please see: http://www.kirstenglass.com/

news

This week we welcome ‘Visiting Artist’ Trish Scott

Trish Scott works performatively to examine social practices and conventions, investigating the relationship between everyday lived experience and institutional paradigms (and how these become naturalised).

Trish scott copy

20th November, 2014

Clock Tower Building (formerly BridgeWardens College), Lecture Theatre
17.30-18.30
Free, everyone welcome!

 

Trish scott

 
Scott often works experimentally with others and recent collaborators include employees in a City bank, householders in Kent and a Catholic priest. Working across media, Scott precipitates encounters, which she then documents and transforms into further works to trouble the relationship between events and their representation, participants and spectators.

Recent projects and exhibitions include Ethnographic Terminalia, Washington DC (2014) We know what we like and we like what we know (Individual Households in Kent, 2014), CRG @The Hub (Whitstable Biennale, 2014), Divina Sonus Ruras (Binaural, Portugal, 2013), Tangency (Osnabruck, Germany, 2012) and Stone Shoes (Space Station Sixty Five, London, 2011).

Trish is currently completing a practice based PhD at Chelsea College of Art supported by a Rootstein Hopkins studentship. She has an MA in Fine Art from Camberwell College of Art and a BSc in Social Anthropology from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

news

SMFA Fine Art graduate wins the 2014 Platform Award

The School of Music and Fine Art  is delighted to announce that Fine Art graduate Sophie Dixon has been awarded the 2014 Platform Award.

Platform_Winner_2014  

Platform Graduate Award winner Sophie Dixon, pictured with Peter Heslip, Director of Visual Art, Arts Council England, and the Lord Mayor of Portsmouth. 

The Platform award is the most prestigious available to a graduating student across the entire south east stretching from Portsmouth to Milton Keynes to Margate.

Five galleries – Aspex, Portsmouth; De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill; Modern Art Oxford; MK Gallery, Milton Keynes and Turner Contemporary, Margate – each showcased selected work of recent graduates. Through a rigorous process of presentation and interview, Sophie was chosen from a final shortlist of 5 graduates and was presented with the Platform award on Saturday at Aspex Gallery by Peter Heslip, director of Visual Art, Arts Council England, and the Lord Mayor of Portsmouth. Sophie will receive a bursary of £2500 as part of the award together with 12 months of support and mentoring from an experienced art professional.

Sophie’s work was selected by the Turner Contemporary Gallery. And Only Fine Threads Hold Us To Each Moment, consists of a 50 page book, prints and written text about Srbská, formerly Wünschendorf, a small village on the Czech Republic’s modern-day border with Poland. The artist’s video installation Wünschendorf, explores the irreversible changes that the Second World War wrought on the lives of millions, a period of loss and displacement which continues to influence the world in which we live today.

The Platform project is part of School of Music and Fine Art’s ongoing working partnership with the Turner Contemporary. The award supports graduate professional development and nurtures emerging artists from universities from across the South East region.

School of Music and Fine Art would like to congratulate Sophie on her achievement and thank staff at the Turner Contemporary for their continuing support for our students through Platform and other activities. Our relationship with the Turner has grown in strength over the last few years and the Platform project forms a key component of the fine art 3rd year.

“Congratulations to Sophie Dixon on this fantastic achievement. Supporting artistic ambition and talent is an important aspect of the work we do at Turner Contemporary. We are delighted that a Kent graduate has been selected as the winner of this year’s Platform Award.”  – Victoria Pomery, Director of Turner Contemporary

 “Sophie is a deserved winner of this award, Scholtz’s House is a poetic and poignant study of a historical trauma from the Second World War that remains unconcealed and unresolved even to this day and told with remarkable insight and maturity. The whole School is very proud of this outstanding achievement.he refugee, the displaced person, the migrant is the emblematic figure representing ‘the quintessential experience of our time.” – Andy Conio, Director of Fine Art, University of Kent

 

 

Alumni, creative events, fine art, music, news

50th Anniversary Medway RECREATE Bursary

We are happy to announce the awards of the first ever Recreate 50th Anniversary Bursary, to two School of Music and Fine Art graduates

The two awards, of £4,250 each, have gone to Claire Orme (Fine Art) and Drew York (Music) to fund the creation of new work for an eight week exhibition to be held at the Rochester Art Gallery from the17th January – 14th March 2015

The awards are part of our evolving partnership work with the local authority arts development through the Recreate project

As part of the bursary Rochester Art Gallery provides the following:

  • The gallery space for an 8 week show
  • Support and advice to develop your show and supporting activities/partnerships
  • A technician to install/take down
  • Preview evening event with free wine
  • All design and print for exhibition info/invite cards, posters
  • A gallery info wall panel
  • Insurance for the work
  • Transport by art courier to and from the gallery if required
  • A modest exhibitors fee (TBC)
  • Media/press liaison
  • Basic online web/facebook presence

We are delighted that our graduates are winners of this award.

For more information on RECREATE Medway, please see the website.

 

news

This week we welcome ‘Visiting Artist’ Hayley Newman

Hayley Newman is a performance artist with a passion for humour, fiction, ecology and activism.

LiberateTate

06th November, 2014

  • Clock Tower Building (formerly BridgeWardens College), Lecture Theatre
  • 17.30-18.30
  • Free, everyone welcome

Hayley Newman

Her commitment to working collectively around the current ecological crisis forged The Gluts (Gina Birch, Hayley Newman and Kaffe Matthews) who took their musical, Café Carbon, to the Copenhagen Climate Summit in 2009. Her novella, Common, was written as self-appointed artist-in-residence in the City of London over the summer of 2011. Common takes its readers through crashes in global markets, turbulence in the Euro-zone, riots on hot summer nights and the most extraordinary imaginings.

She recently completed the work Histoire Economique, a series of rubbings of the fronts of banks in the City of London, made on used envelopes; the very things banks send us information about our finances in. A member of the art/activist collective Liberate Tate, she lives and works in London and is represented by Matt’s Gallery.

She is a tutor on the doctorial programme at the Slade  School of Fine Art and Reader at Chelsea College of Art and Design.