Simon Ling launches new season of Visiting Artist Talks on the 11th October 2016

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Simon Ling, ‘Untitled’ 2012, oil on canvas. Photo by Marcus Leith. Courtesy of Greengrassi, London

 

The School of Music and Fine Art is delighted to announce the first event in the Autumn term Visiting Artist Talk series, welcoming painter Simon Ling on Tuesday 11 October at 6.15pm in the Royal Dockyard Church.

Born in 1968, British artist Simon Ling studied at Chelsea College of Art & Design and then at the Slade School of Art in London. His practice in involved in a deep engagement with painting and his subjects can often appear banal street scenes, still lifes, rocks, stones or patches of scrubland – but through a process of sustained and rigorous looking, his works transcend the ordinariness of their initial appearance, taking on a strange and at times unsettling quality.

Looking and seeing are of profound importance in Ling’s work. This might seem an obvious statement with regard to an artist, particularly a painter, but for Ling the operations and effects of perception are of particular centrality. Looking is always an extraordinary act rather than simply a process of passive observation – an active and deliberate thing that not only produces the world, but alters and disrupts it.

Many of Ling’s works are made ‘en-plein air’: painted in the streets around his London studio, in more rural locations in the British countryside, as well as in parks and wasteland. However, he also works in the studio, sometimes from models (which he constructs himself); sometimes from sketches or memory. In this way, his paintings take on a composite quality, accumulating and collapsing together different kinds of experience, perception and time.

Across all of Ling’s paintings we see an intense engagement with objects (in their broadest sense) – their relations, realities, and our mutable experience of them. Each canvas might be read as a kind of ‘event’: between the artist and the world, as it appears in that moment, as well as through the vagueries and distortion of recollection and reverie. Ling’s paintings might be seen to exemplify this unstable, contingent quality of the visible, the withdrawn and flickering thingly-ness of things, the way objects seep and pulse with the mute but exuberant fact of their own materiality.

In 2015, Ling had a solo exhibition at Kunsthalle, Bergen, and London art gallery, greengrassi, as well as taking part in numerous group exhibitions including Tate Britain, Camden Art Centre, and CAPC Bordeaux, France. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/nov/08/why-painting-still-matters-tate-britain

The talk is from 6.15pm-7.45pm and FREE to attend.  Future visiting artists include Martin Clark, Erica Scourti, Maria Fusco and Heather Phillipson. 

 

Venue: Royal Dockyard Church
University of Kent
Historic Dockyard Chatham

Adam Chodzko’s Deep Above at Manchester Science Festival 2016

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Adam Chodzko, film still from Deep Above 2015. 

 

After a screening at Shambala Festival in August, acclaimed award-wining contemporary visual artist and School of Music and Fine Art Lecturer Adam Chodzko’s Deep Above will continue its tour at Manchester Science Festival on October 22nd at Texture in Manchester’s Northern Quarter.

The work uses moving image and sound to explore, short-circuit and abstract our slippery self-deceptions regarding climate change. Exploring the zones between the rational and irrational, and mind and body, whilst adopting the languages of meditation, hypnosis and ‘self help’ he addresses the behavioural psychology analysed in George Marshall’s book Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change.

Deep Above is commissioned by Invisible Dust, advised by Adam Harris, experimental psychologist University College London and Paul Wilkinson, Environmental Epidemiology, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. It has been part of Bristol European Green Capital and is produced in association with Watershed and Shambala Festival and is funded by an Arts Award from the Wellcome Trust.

Exhibiting internationally since 1991, Adam Chozko works across media, from video installation to subtle interventions, with a practice that is situated both within the gallery and the wider public realm. http://www.adamchodzko.com

Manchester Science Festival is running from Thursday 20th October to Sunday 30th October. For more info go to http://invisibledust.com/

Artist Hannah Lees joins School of Music and Fine Art

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Hannah Lees “Tablets” (2016) part of “Overlay” curated by Jeremy Millar at White Rainbow, London. Photo Credit: Noah de Costa

 

Widely exhibited artist, Hannah Lees, is now teaching on the Fine Art programme in the School of Music and Fine Art.

Turner Contemporary and the British Museum (National Programmes) commissioned Lees to create a new mural in response to the British Museum’s collection of Roman Samian Ware pottery found along the coast near Whitstable. Inspired by ritual and religion and influenced by her interest in history and heritage connected to her home-town of Canterbury, Hannah Lees explores cycles of decay and regeneration often using natural materials and is particularly interested in rituals surrounding consumption.

The Private View is Friday 7 October and the work will be on show from 8 October 2016 – 8 January 2017 at Turner Contemporary, Margate.  More information can be found here:
https://www.turnercontemporary.org/exhibitions/turner-contemporary-and-the-british-museum-commission-hannah-lees
The artist will also be in conversation with British Museum curators Richard Hobbs and Sam Moorhead and archaeologist Michael Walsh, discussing her work, on Saturday December 10 at 2.30pm. Booking via https://www.turnercontemporary.org/whats-on/00000002238/hannah-lees-in-conversation

She is exhibiting in Harvest, curated by Peter Foolen at Kunstraumlangenlois, Langenlois (Private View: 10 – 7pm, Sunday 2 October 2016). Info at http://www.norbertfleischmann.at/

You can also see her work Floated On Foam [] Flew With Birds at Galerie Tatjana Pieters, Ghent, http://tatjanapieters.com/exhibitions_current.html until 16 October 2016
More details here: http://www.daily-lazy.com/2016/09/hannah-lees-at-tatjana-pieters-ghent.html

For her first Milan show, The Oldest Thing You Can Hold In Your Hand, Lees uses two of the city’s most important historical artworks as a starting point to explore ideas around display, feasting, ritual and participation, core topics in her practice. Curated by Pietro Di Lecce, with text by Attilia Fattori Franchini, the show runs until 23 October 2016. For more details go to http://www.theworkbench.it/ and http://atpdiary.com/artist-run-spaces-workbench-lees-skiba/

Her book, To Open What Is Shut () To Shut What Is Open, is available from Tenderbooks http://tenderbooks.co.uk/products/to-open-what-is-shut-to-shut-what-is-open-part-i-to-bring-about-positive-change-hannah-lees

 

For more about the artist go to www.hannahlees.com and www.thisisthepath.com

Artist Adam Chodzko’s work Ghost in Estuary Festival 2016

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Adam Chodzko, 2016.

 

Acclaimed award-wining contemporary visual artist and School of Music and Fine Art Lecturer, Adam Chodzko, is one of the exhibiting artists in Points of Departure (part of Estuary 2016) with a new commission as part of an ongoing project which will result in a video and sculpture installation in Tilbury Cruise Terminal.  Estuary is a biennial arts festival celebrating the Thames Estuary from 17th September – 2nd October 2016. The artworks presented reflect themes of arrival, departure, migration, trade, connection and nationhood via the estuary out to the wider world.

His work Ghost is described thus: A kayak; a sculpture as vessel, coffin, bed, costume and camera rig. It is designed to ferry people to the ‘island of the dead’, with a rower at the back, and the passenger lying down low and flat in the front, like a body in a coffin with their head slightly raised, travelling along the interface between water and sky. A camera, mounted on Ghost’s deck, records each unique voyage, the passengers’ point of view, from across its bows.

The video archives from multiple journeys along four previous Ghost passages (The rivers Swale, Tamar, Tyne and Thames) here joins new video footage made this summer from the Essex Ghost voyages made by a group of estuarine insomniacs, to be shown alongside Ghost itself, held suspended in the Tilbury Cruise Terminal. Read the interview with Adam here.

Chodzko’s art explores the interactions and possibilities of human behaviour. Exhibiting internationally since 1991, he works across media, from video installation to subtle interventions, with a practice that is situated both within the gallery and the wider public realm. http://www.adamchodzko.com

Points of Departure runs from 17 – 30 September – 11am – 4pm daily (closed Sat 24 September) at the following venues:

Tilbury Cruise Terminal, Ferry Road, Tilbury RM18 7NG
LV21, Town Pier Pontoon, Gravesend DA11 0BJ
Gravesend High Street DA11 0BJ
Coalhouse Fort, Princess Margaret Road, Tilbury RM18 8PB

 

For more information go to: http://www.estuaryfestival.com/artist/detail/adamchodzko.html

And also @estuaryfestival/#estuary16 for Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

Sarah Turner’s film One and the Other Time screened at Tate Modern

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One and the Other Time, 1990, Sarah Turner.

 

The opening night of the Tate Film series From Reel to Real: Women, Feminism and the London Film-makers’ Co-operative includes a screening of One and the Other Time, (1990), directed by award-winning artist Sarah Turner, Reader in Fine Art and Director of Research at the School of Music and Fine Art.

The work is being shown at Tate Modern on 23 September from 18.30-21.00 as part of Collapsing the Frame.

The filmmakers in this programme, which is supported by LUMA Foundation, FLUXUS and LUX, experiment with film structure in an attempt to collapse the frame within which women are confined, both cinematic and cultural. The screening is followed by an artist discussion moderated by the series curator Maud Jacquin.

Event Venue: Starr Cinema, Tate Modern, Bankside, London, SE1 9TG

For more details go to http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/film/reel-real-women-feminism-and-london-film-makers-co-operative/collapsing