Monthly Archives: April 2018

creative events, fine art, news

SMFA Degree Shows in May 2018 opened by Liz Moran, University of Kent’s Director of Arts & Culture

Liz Moran, Director of Arts & Culture, University of Kent

 

The School of Music and Fine Art presents the 2018 Graduation Shows for Fine Art and Event and Experience Design at the University of Kent, Medway, Historic Dockyard Chatham which celebrate the creative work and achievements of our talented students.  The Fine Art show is We Are Here: 51°23’44.3″N 0°31’42.5″E… with the Event and Experience Design Showcase titled Fusion.

This year, we are delighted that the guest speaker for the opening preview on Saturday May 19th, 1pm – 6pm, will be Liz Moran, the University of Kent’s Director of Arts & Culture.

Comments Liz: “Kent is very fortunate to have such inspirational and creative students supported by an incredibly talented and respected staff team. I look forward to the exhibition which I have no doubt will challenge, provoke, excite, surprise and demonstrate that despite challenging times young artists prove the arts are very much alive, vibrant and thriving.”

Liz began her career working with young people in Scotland and witnessed the transformative effect that engaging with the arts has when and if young people have the opportunity.  Following this, she became the first Director of the new Paisley Arts Centre which opened with artist and playwright John Byrne’s trilogy The Slab Boys. In 1991 she became Director of the MacRobert Arts Centre in Stirling and embarked on a major capital development to extend and develop the building all designed by young people working in partnership with the Architect. This included a new state of the art cinema and children and young people’s gallery space called Arthouse. Liz became Director of Gulbenkian in 2011 initiating the ART31 project designed to empower children and young people to have a voice and greater access to creative opportunities and bOing! International Family Festival. In 2014 Gulbenkian became a National Portfolio Organisation with Arts Council England. In 2017 she became the University’s first Director of Arts and Culture and her plans include an International Festival of Dangerous Ideas in 2019.

 

The Degree Show exhibitions are open to all and free to attend. To get your ticket for the special opening Private View, please go to https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/school-of-music-fine-art-2018-graduation-shows-private-view-tickets-44642318376

The shows are open to the public: Sunday 20th – Saturday 26th May: 10am – 5pm (Closed: Tuesday 22nd May).  Click https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/school-of-music-and-fine-art-2018-graduation-shows-tickets-44643012452  to get your special Visitor Pass for the Degree Show and access to the Historic Dockyard, Chatham.

fine art, news, research

SMFA’s Adam Chodzko features in international Cornish summer art festival Groundwork

Ghost

 

SMFA Fine Art Senior Lecturer and acclaimed artist, Adam Chodzko, is featured in Groundwork – a festival season of exceptional international contemporary art in Cornwall from 5th May through to September. With an emphasis on moving image, sound and performance, the programme of exhibitions and events in 2018 includes presentations of important new commissions and acclaimed works by internationally celebrated artists in venues and outdoor sites across West Cornwall. You can experience Adam’s work 5-7th May at St Anthony-in-Meneage, Helston and the waters of the Helford River. http://groundwork.art/programme/adam-chodzko/

Adam Chodzko’s iconic vessel Ghost will be taking passengers on voyages on Gillan Creek, near Manaccan on the Lizard peninsula, during Groundwork’s launch weekend. Ghost is a hand-made wooden kayak fabricated from hundreds of strips of different woods and is both a vessel and a sculptural object. First exhibited in the Whitstable Biennale in 2010, it has since travelled along the River Medway and the River Tamar, through The Olympic Park, London, along the Tyne and in creeks through Essex. In each location members of the public are carried in a reclining position, in a state between waking and sleeping, their passage recorded by a camera mounted on the boat’s prow.

Using a wide range of media, including video, installation, photography, drawing and performance, Adam Chodzko’s work focuses on our relationships to life’s edges, endings, displacements, transitions, disappearances and in-between states and often involves looking in the ‘wrong’ place or in the ‘wrong’ way to discover productive mis-readings and to propose alternative realities.

 

More info about the festival here http://groundwork.art/artists/

fine art, news, research

SMFA Fine Art Lecturer Adam Chodzko featured in exhibition of films as part of Film London Jarman Award at the Whitechapel Gallery

Adam Chodzko, 2018.

 

Fine Art Lecturer and acclaimed artist Adam Chodzko is featured in the exhibition of films commissioned from shortlisted artists by Channel 4 as part of Film London Jarman Award: A Journey Through the First Decade at London’s Whitechapel Gallery 2 from 15th May  – 10th June.

The Film London Jarman Award was named in honour of visionary artist/filmmaker Derek Jarman, and since 2008, has celebrated the creative spirit of artists working today, rewarding challenging and innovative work and helping to establish the place of the moving image within the art world.

More info  here: http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions/film-london-jarman-award-journey-first-decade/

Adam Chodzko lives and works in Whitstable and has exhibited extensively in international solo and group exhibitions and projects including: Tate St Ives; Museo d’Arte Moderna, Bologna; Athens Biennale; Istanbul Biennale; Venice Biennale; Deste Foundation, Athens; PS1, New York; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham; Kunstmuseum Lucerne; Creative Time, New York; Hayward Gallery, London and Tate Britain.

 

Related post: https://www.kent.ac.uk/smfa/news.html?view=2662

Alumni, fine art, news, research

SMFA Fine Art PhD student Stephen Connolly wins prestigious 2018 BAFTSS Award

Stephen Connolly, an artist filmmaker, Lecturer in Film Production, University for the Creative Arts, Farnham and Fine Art PhD student and Graduate Teaching Assistant in the School of Music and Fine Art (also a Kent 50 Scholar), has won a British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS) Award for 2018, in the Moving Image category under Best Practice Research Portfolio for Machine Space.

BAFTSS encourage best teaching and research practice, promoting the training of postgraduate students in research and giving researchers and practitioners the opportunity to attend and present a paper at the annual BAFTSS conference.

Says Stephen: “The PhD has been such an amazing experience and deeply helpful for my practice, encouraging me to push forward towards publication. The process of academic research has allowed me to place the work in context and in conversation with other disciplines and artists. I aim to contribute to the further development of practice as research as a process of making moving image work in the arts.”

Connolly’s Machine Space is an essay film exploring a city as a machine; a place of movement and circulation. Using a kinetic approach, issues of space, race and finance frame the city of Machine Space. Residents in voiceover testify how the city as a spatial and financial machine shapes their experience. The city is Detroit, a place that has changed from producing the means of movement to producing space itself.  The film uses formal representational devices to explore this content, and addresses issues of complicity of audiences in the state of affairs in the city. It is a visualization of the ideas of Henri Lefebvre, philosopher of space and urban life.

The film was shown at London Film Festival and Wexner Center for the Arts at the Ohio State University.  https://wexarts.org/film-video/stephen-connolly-machine-space

You can read the LFF Review (in which it is described as “brilliant”) on MUBI https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/spatial-stories

Stephen Connolly’s work investigates cinema and representation through place, politics and history. His award winning single screen work which explores the interface between spectatorship, material culture and subjectivity, has been widely shown internationally since 2002. A FLAMIN award recipient, he has had solo screenings at the ICA and BFI Southbank in London, and was a juror at the Ann Arbor Film Festival (Michigan, USA) in 2011.

 

More info about the BAFTSS Awards here  http://baftss.org/awards-2018/   and  http://baftss.org/special-interest-groups/practice-research/

Machine Space newsprint giveaway http://bubblefilm.net/texts/pdf_texts/Machine_Space_Newsprint.pdf

Alumni, music, news

SMFA Music student compositions performed by leading ensemble Octandre

On Monday 21 May at 1pm, the School of Music and Fine Art, University of Kent, Medway is excited to present a special lunchtime recital to celebrate the work of our BMus, year 2 composition students. Having spent the term working alongside one of the UK’s leading contemporary music ensembles, we are delighted to have three musicians from Octandre – Audrey Milheres (Flute), Sam Cave (Guitar) and Corentin Chassard (Cello) – to showcase selected submissions. Octandre are developing an international reputation for their work with a recent commission receiving a BASCA composition award, multiple broadcast recordings for BBC Radio 3 and several high profile performances at venues including LSO St Lukes and St John Smith’s Square. With Sir Harrison Birtwistle as their patron and a consistently thriving programme they are well and truly at the forefront of our nation’s music scene.

Audio link –  https://www.octandre.com/audio

The concert takes place in the Galvanising Shop Performance Space on the Historic Dockyard Chatham and is free to attend but please book via Eventbrite https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/school-of-music-and-fine-art-lunchtime-concert-with-octandre-tickets-45584024043

Alumni, fine art, news

Ropery Songs now on You Tube

In May 2017, SMFA Lecturer in Fine Art, and Partner College Liaison Officer, Tim Meacham, facilitated an innovative public event in the Historic Dockyard Chatham Rope Walk with LTHT, a University of the Arts London community of practice group engaged in low-tech and high-tech action, traversing sound, space, interaction and textiles. The result – Ropery Songs – is now available on You Tube.

The event, which took place on Monday 29th May 2017, was a collaboration between staff and students from SMFA Fine Art and UAL Textiles, Interior Spatial Design and Sound Studies. The project sought to activate the ropery by transforming the whole structure into a musical instrument through improvised “playing” of the space. Ropery Songs offered a valuable opportunity for staff and students from different universities and disciplines to come together for one day to create a new shared space of sound and performance through the re-reading of this historic building.

Ropery Songs film documentation can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0MWP1yIlus