All posts by mem

School of Music & Fine Art Lecturer stars in new production of Jerry Springer the Opera

March 15, 2016 mem

Freelance classical singer and School of Music & Fine Art Lecturer in Music Performance, Sarah Dacey, is starring in a new production of Richard Thomas’ and Stewart Lee’s award-winning Jerry Springer the Opera at the Lost Theatre in South London from 16^th – 19th of March.

Sarah plays Irene, the strict catholic mother of a wannabe pole dancer, a dead Nurse that escorts Jerry Springer into ‘Purgatory’ and the Virgin ‘Mary’.

“Witness America’s favourite talk show host suffer the worst day of his career as high art meets low culture in the funniest, most groundbreaking and talked about musical EVER!” From website of The LOST Theatre, London SW8.

A member of the critically acclaimed Juice Vocal Ensemble, a female a cappella trio specialising in contemporary music, Sarah Dacey works in oratorio, opera, recitals, session recordings for TV/Film, electro-acoustic music, early music ensembles, physical theatre and also arranges/composes vocal music.

She performs with the BBC Singers, Philharmonia Voices, The Octandre Ensemble, Okeanos Ensemble and the Oriel Quartett. An advocate of new music, Sarah has worked with many of today’s finest composers including Anna Meredith, Paul Mealor, Gavin Bryars, Errollyn Wallen, Duncan MacLeod, Mica Levi and Dai Fujikura.

For info about the production of Jerry Springer the Opera go to: http://losttheatre.co.uk/index.php/whats-on/calendar/11-current-shows/389-jerry-sp

For more info about Sarah go to: http://www.kent.ac.uk/smfa/staff/staff-profiles/musicandaudio/Dacey.html

fine art, news, research

Uncommon Chemistry Exhibition features School of Music & Fine Art Lecturers

March 11, 2016 mem

School of Music & Fine Art Lecturers Tim Meacham and Adam Chodzko are 2 of the artists featured in Uncommon Chemistry, which runs from 20 March – 17 April at The Observer Buildings, Hastings.

Curated by Dan Howard-Birt, the exhibition explores the parallel artistic leitmotifs of material agency and arcane spirituality, and how the conscious engagement with one or other of these territories provides valuable analogies for the broader understanding of art-making and art-viewing.

There is always something which lurks beyond the artist’s control, which brings a work to life and enables it to mutate and evolve through different contexts of time and place.

Visit the Facebook event for more information: https://www.facebook.com/events/221838461501852/ or go to http://observerbuildinghastings.co.uk/whats-next/

The exhibition is FREE to attend.

fine art, news

Medway inspired films, art workshops and installations from Wetlands Project

March 11, 2016 mem

Nadia Perrotta, MA Fine Art, School of Music & Fine Art, who was awarded a grant of £5,000 from the University of Kent Student Projects Grant Scheme for her project Wetlands Hub, has organised film screenings, art workshop and installations inspired and shaped by the Medway expanse, with the first event on Tuesday 15 March.

Says Nadia, “Wetlands is an art project initiated in 2015, inspired by the powerful metaphor of a possible memory retained and preserved by the waters. The aim of the project is for students and alumni of the University of Kent to involve and interact with local communities living in proximity of waters, recreating a dialogue between them, their maritime history and the wetland landscape.

For Wetlands 2016, we are running film workshops with young people, in collaboration with Youth Centres of Hoo St Werburgh, Chattenden and Grain. Students from School of Music and Fine Art will create video and sound works from the documentation collected.”

Programme:
15th March  10.30 – 12.30   Film Screening – Grain Library
3 – 5pm      Film Screening – Hoo Library
16th March from 10am. Film Installations – Brook Theatre & Sun Pier House
17th March 10.30 – 3.30pm.   Film Installations – Sun Pier House
17th March 11 – 1pm. Film Screening – Wigmore Library
18th March 10.30 – 1pm. Film Screening – Lordswood Library
24th March 6.30 – 8.30pm. Closing Event – Royal Dockyard Church, Historic Dockyard Chatham

Wine Reception with presentation of film and sound works by the Wetlands project team, followed by an insight into the project’s development.

Contacts:
Website: http://wetlandsmedway.jimdo.com
Email: wetlandsmedway@gmail.com
Facebook: Wetlands Hoo
Twitter: @wetlands_medway

music, news, research

SMFA Research Seminar: Spatial Syntax in Binaural Composition

March 8, 2016 mem

Photos by Mike Park.

Tuesday 22nd March at 5pm
Clocktower Building – Lecture Theatre,
University of Kent, Historic Dockyard Chatham
Keynote Speaker: Dr Matt Barnard (University of Hull)

The binaural method of hearing represents our natural spatial register and employing binaural recording and/or synthesis methods in composition reveals peculiar characteristics of the method. Discussing a compositional practice that is now exploring a syntax of space as primary, the binaural method is explored in its creative manifestations. Can we compose music for human hearing?

Matthew Barnard is a composer and researcher primarily focused upon electronic music, including electronica, acousmatic and soundscape idioms. The field of spatial representation in sound, particularly ambisonics and the binaural method, are of interest.

fine art, news

Night in the Museum for Fine Art students on Friday 4th March

March 3, 2016 mem

On Friday 4 March, as part of an ongoing collaborative project, a group of students from the School of Music & Fine Art will be spending the night in Rochester Guildhall museum. The stay forms part of 2nd year fine art modules Place and Site and Practice and its Publics. Students are working in response to the museum and the collection. The project has included working closely with curators and museum staff who have given students virtually unlimited access to objects in storage areas, as well as public displays. The project culminates in an exhibition of student responses and proposals in the museum entitled Show don’t Tell. The exhibition will open on Friday the 1^st of April, with a Private View from 5.30pm-8pm, and the exhibition will be open until Thursday 7th April.

As part of the modules students will present their proposals to a panel of museum staff and professionals from the local creative and cultural community. University of Kent School of Journalism students will be also be writing an article, interviewing students and making a film about this exciting venture.

music, news, research

Acclaimed composer Denis Smalley’s 70th Birthday Celebration with new commission from the School of Music & Fine Art

February 26, 2016 mem

The world premiere of Denis Smalley’s newly commissioned work by the School of Music and Fine Art, University of Kent, celebrating his 70th birthday, will take place in The Colyer-Fergusson in Canterbury on Saturday 21 May 2016 at 6pm. Professor Denis Smalley is one of the world’s leading acousmatic composers and a scholar and pioneer of electroacoustic music. His works have been widely acclaimed, winning a number of international awards. He has made original contributions to thinking about sound, in particular with his investigations into listener’s perception and the notion of spectromorphology. In 2013 he became Honorary Professor at the University of Kent.

Professor Simon Emmerson, who worked closely with Denis Smalley, will give a pre-concert talk on the continuing influence of music and theories developed by Smalley; the session will include a QA with both composers and will be broadcast on Resonance FM. The talk and discussion is for anyone who is interested in listening strategies, perception, reception and the sound world in general – not only music. Simon Emmerson is one of the leading figures in the broad area of electroacoustic music and has published and edited seminal books and articles on live electronics. The event is kindly funded by the Sound-Image-Space Research Centre.

There will be a pre-concert talk at 4:30pm, and the concert starts at 6pm.

creative events, news

The Elective Collective Community Project by Event & Experience Design student

February 23, 2016 mem

CharlotteCR522Dec15 2 — Charlotte Harding , Photo by Chien-Yi Yang

Charlotte Harding, a 3^rd Year student on the BA Event & Experience Design in the School of Music & Fine Art, sees the culmination of her innovative project for the Medway Student Scholarship in an exhibition at the Nucleus Arts Gallery in Chatham. The project The Elective Collective included workshops with a number of clients of Caring Hands in the Community to create personalised artwork that intends to inspire people and promote the use of art in the community.

Caring Hands in the Community, located at the heart of Chatham town centre is a resource for housing, job searches, counselling and rehabilitation help for those in the chains of addiction.

Says EED Lecturer Peter Hatton: “Charlotte devised an inspirational participatory project to work with homeless adults at the Caring Hands Centre. She had a small team of her peers on the course to support her alongside staff at the centre in running a series of activities including mask making and photography. Her intention was raise awareness of homelessness and to increase the visibility of the homeless through their artwork. The mask making was a form of self-portraiture, an expression of individual identity. Participants in the workshop were then given a disposable camera to document their environment outside of the centre. Nucleus Arts have contributed to the project by giving the participants the exciting opportunity to exhibit this accumulative personal narrative in the gallery. This public facing exhibition will be both a celebration of the participants and their stories and the awareness-raising element of the project. The skills Charlotte has developed while studying Event & Experience Design have certainly played an important part in Charlotte delivering this ambitious and successful project but an equally important part has been the cooperation and support of all the individuals and organisations that have worked together and have wanted this project to happen. So a big thank you to the participants, Ricky at Caring Hands, Natasha at Nucleus Arts and Jack MacDonell, the Scholarship Officer.”

The exhibition will run from 10-16 March, with the preview on Fri 11 March from 2-4pm.

For more info go to: http://www.caringhandsuk.org.uk/ and https://issuu.com/nucleusarts/docs/gallery_guide_spring_2016_22869d7aeb613e

fine art, news, research

Whitstable Biennale Artist Walks 2016

February 23, 2016 mem

A collaborative project with the School of Music and Fine Art and the 2016 Whitstable Biennale has produced an innovative series of Four Artist Walks, which aim to test the proposition that a walking journey with an artist could be as valuable as hearing them address a lecture theatre, and that sharing a range of sights and sounds could reveal something that slides and video clips do not.

Information about the artists and the politics, history and imaginative potential of the landscape being walked through will be disseminated before/after in a document in order to keep the walk itself as ‘present’ as possible. Walkers will be invited to mix and mingle during the walks, with an emphasis on informal conversation. Midway through the walks, students will present a set of questions to the artists which later will be collated, with the artists’ responses, in the Whitstable Biennale’s online journal.

Each route will culminate at a point along the Medway estuary or river Swale, forming a string of reference points between which the connections between the walks can be contemplated.

Walk 2, on Saturday 27th February, 10:15am—1pm approx, with Ruth Ewan, will take in Kingsferry Bridge, Iwade, Ridham Dock and the strange “elephants’ graveyard” of decaying Thames barges in the mouth of the Medway. The walk will start and end at Swale Station. An artist’s pamphlet will be provided to each walker.

Booking:

Places on the walks (priced at £5 per person: All participants will receive an artist’s pamphlet from Ruth Ewan) are limited and can be booked, on a first come, first served basis, here via https://www.eventbrite.com/e/artist-walks-ruth-ewan-tickets-21223515105?ref=elink

Notes for walkers:

The walks will be largely off-road. Participants are recommended to wear waterproof walking boots and warm outdoor clothing. Please also note that access to drinking water and toilet facilities will be limited.

For further information: http://www.whitstablebiennale.com/project/ruth-ewan/

Facebook event – https://www.facebook.com/events/159388467775540/

The next walk will be on 21st March with Mike Nelson, and the final walk on 9^th April with Brian Dillon. For further details go to http://www.whitstablebiennale.com/artists/artist-walks/

Artist Walks is a collaborative project organised by the School of Music and Fine Art in the University of Kent in partnership with Whitstable Biennale and supported by Kent County Council, taking place between Chatham and Faversham.

Alumni, fine art, news

Artist John Russell visits The School of Music & Fine Art

February 15, 2016 mem

On Tuesday 23rd February at 6.15pm in the stunning setting of the recently refurbished Royal Dockyard Church in the atmospheric Historic Dockyard Chatham, acclaimed artist John Russell will give a free talk about his work.

Formerly a member (and founder) of the subversive London art collective BANK (whose antics included faxing galleries “corrected” versions of their own press releases back to them), artist Russell has continued to make art on his own which likewise casts a gimlet eye on the doings of the art world and culture at large. The centrepiece of his recent NY exhibition consists of a video made up of animated gif files that tell the story of a near future, where humans have learned to extend life by downloading consciousness into the brains of small animals. A tale of technological transformation, SQRRL is also a chilling allegory for our own time.

Recent solo shows include “SQRRL” Bridget Donahue Gallery, New York, 2016, Jexus, MOTINTERNATIONAL Brussels 2012; Angel of History: I can see for miles, Focal Point Gallery Southend 2011; and Ocean Pose, Matts Gallery London.

Editor of Frozen Tears, Russell is Professor in Fine Art at the University of Reading and is Director of Research for Art. His research interests are: “Affect. Affirmation. Figurality. Event. Art/politics. Art/philosophy. Art/language. Class. Performativity. Fiction/fictioning. Visualisation. Digital media. Philosophy. Bad philosophy. Printed matter. Staging”

Although the talk is free and everyone is welcome, please book via: https://alumni.kent.ac.uk/events/john-russell-feb-2016

Links for more info:

http://www.bridgetdonahue.nyc/exhibitions/john-russell/

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/25/arts/design/john-russells-sqrrl-embodies-a-science-fiction-journey.html?_r=0

http://www.art-agenda.com/reviews/john-russell%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%9Csqrrl%E2%80%9D/

http://www.john-russell.org/Reviews/FuscoAM08.pdf

http://www.frozentears.co.uk/

http://media.rhizome.org/custom-produced-imbeciles-some-sort-interview-john/aaa/index.html

Alumni, music, news

University of Kent Students perform Beatles’ Abbey Road as a concert work

February 12, 2016 mem

Students studying in the University of Kent’s School of Music and Fine Art will give a concert that explores some of the most prominent works of the twentieth century, all of which might be taken to straddle a pop/classic divide. The first half of the concert will feature two very different minimalist works: Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint for guitar ensemble and Gavin Bryars’ ‘Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet’ for mixed ensemble and tape. The concert will close with the Beatles’ extraordinary B-Side of the album Abbey Road, a remarkable series of songs that develop, build and interrelate in a manner that appears symphonic in scope and intent.

To purchase tickets please use the links below:

The Royal Dockyard Church, Chatham on Wednesday 9th March at 7.30pm http://store.kent.ac.u

Colyer-Fergusson Concert Hall, Canterbury on Friday 11th March at 7.30pm https://uk.patronbase.com