Category Archives: research

fine art, news, research

SMFA Fine Art Lecturer and acclaimed artist Adam Chodzko hosting the Ash Walk on Saturday 25th August

Adam Chodzko

 

As part of Whitstable Biennale’s partnership with The Ash Project, SMFA Fine Art Lecturer and acclaimed artist Adam Chodzko is hosting the Ash Walk on Saturday 25th August from 2-4pm.  He will lead a walk into the near future as part of a funeral procession for some of the UK’s last remaining ash trees.

https://www.theashproject.org.uk/ is a cultural response to ash dieback in the Kent Downs, celebrating the cultural, natural and social history of the ash tree, to present a series of artists’ walks in 2018 through ash landscapes in Kent, encouraging study and providing an intimate, conversational way to explore the landscapes.

An award winning artist, Adam Chodzko uses a wide range of media including video, installation and performance. His work is characterised by a keen curiosity, exploring the interactions and possibilities of human behaviour – the gap between how we are and how we could be. With a few surprises in store for walkers, along the way, this walk promises to be stimulating, interactive and surprising.  The walk is FREE but needs to be booked in advance. To book go to https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-ash-walks-adam-chodzko-tickets-44858540101

 

More info here: https://www.whitstablebiennale.com/artists/ash-walks/  and https://www.whitstablebiennale.com/project/the-ash-walks-3-adam-chodzko/

fine art, news, research

SMFA’s Fine Art Lecturer artist Adam Chodzko commissioned for Art on the Tideway

SMFA Fine Art Lecturer and acclaimed artist Adam Chodzko is one of 13 artists commissioned to create permanent integrated artworks for the three new acres of public realm next to the River Thames. Art on the Tideway is an ambitious public art programme for London, inviting leading contemporary artists to meaningful connect with London’s past and future as the tunnel is built. With over fifty temporary and permanent commissions, it challenges artists to animate new environments and create engaging interventions for the city’s diverse audiences, marking the River Thames as a new cultural venue.

The artworks will be completed in 2021.

 

More info https://www.tideway.london/our-community/art-and-heritage/art-on-the-tideway/

Related post: https://www.kent.ac.uk/smfa/news.html?view=2812

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

music, news, research

MAAST Concert in Royal Dockyard Church on Friday 25th May 2018

 

On Friday 25th May at 5.30pm in the Royal Dockyard Church, the School of Music and Fine Art, University of Kent, Medway is delighted to present an exchange concert (the second in the series) between Greenwich University and SMFA students.  It will involve multi-channel electroacoustic compositions of spatial sound and audiovisual works by students.

Music and Audio Arts Sound Theatre (MAAST) is a portable and flexible sound diffusion system designed for the performance of electroacoustic music and research in spatial sound.

The system comprises a custom-made 32-channel Gluion console, two MOTU audio interfaces, an array of Genelec loudspeakers which include sixteen bi-amplified 8020s, twenty 8040s, four tri-amplified 1038s, 7060B and 7070A subwoofers, and custom-made loudspeaker stands that can be extended up to 3 metres in height. The console controls the sound diffusion through OSC and Max/MSP. The system allows for diffusion of stereo and multichannel works, and its setup is flexible, depending on the spatial characteristic of concert and sound installation venues.

FREE to attend but booking via Eventbrite.

music, news, research

SMFA’s Dr Ruth Herbert performing with her trio Table Music Friday 2nd March in London

Table Music – left to right: Ruth Herbert (piano), Natalie Rozario (cello), Mandhira de Saram (violin)

 

Dr Ruth Herbert, Lecturer in Music Performance, will perform with her trio Table Music at Schott Music, London on Friday 2 March 7.30pm – 9.30pm. They are joined by renowned jazz pianist Tim Richards and Ruth’s daughter Asha Parkinson (BBC Young Jazz Musician Award semi-finalist 2016) on soprano sax for an evening of music featuring contemporary, jazz and world influences, including commissioned works from Tim and Asha, plus music by Piazzolla and Zimmerli.

Formed early in 2017, and at core a piano trio, Table Music break new ground with a focus on new, recent and 20th century music displaying a rich mix of influences: contemporary classical, jazz and world, sometimes incorporating improvisation and other instruments. An album is planned for 2019.  More info https://www.tablemusic.co.uk/

 

As a professional pianist, Ruth has performed with various ensembles, notably recording soundtracks for silent films commissioned by the British Film Institute (BFI) with the piano trio Triptych, subsequently touring these works at major venues in the UK and USA (e.g. Barbican and Lincoln Centres).

Academic positions held include Head of Performance Studies at Dartington College of Arts and Lecturer in Music for the Open University. Prior to her appointment at Kent, Ruth held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Faculty of Music, University of Oxford and a Junior Research Fellowship at Jesus College, Oxford.

 

For concert reservations, ring Schott Music: 0207 534 0710. Tick­ets: £10 (full-time stu­dents £5) https://schottmusiclondon.com/

Alumni, fine art, news, research

SMFA Fine Art PhD student Stephen Connolly shortlisted for a 2018 BAFTSS Award

Stephen Connolly

 

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 been shortlisted for 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.  The results will be announced in April.

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.

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

fine art, news, research

Sarah Turner, SMFA’s Reader in Fine Art & Deputy Director of Research is published in The New Soundtrack journal

Sarah Turner

 

Sarah Turner, SMFA’s Reader in Fine Art & Deputy Director of Research is published in The New Soundtrack journal, with The Sound of Memory in Public House appearing in Volume 7 Issue 2. Click here: http://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/sound.2017.0103 and https://www.schoolofsound.co.uk/sos/blog/

The New Soundtrack brings together leading edge academic and professional perspectives on the complex relationship between sound and moving images, providing a new platform for discourse on how aural elements combine with moving images, and encourages writing on more current developments, such as sound installations, computer-based delivery, and the psychology of the interaction of image and sound.

Sarah Turner is an artist who writes and makes films. Her work spans single screen gallery pieces (rooted in the formal preoccupations of the avant-garde from which she emerged) to feature length projects that explore the interplay between abstraction and narration.