Terry Smith – About Face, 2013
Wanderers through a sea of fog:
A talk by artists; David Blandy, Samuel Levack and Jennifer Lewandowski, Terry Smith and curator David Gryn about the Film and Video Art Commission for the Royal College of Psychiatrists
Date: 6.30pm on Tuesday 15 April 2014
Venue: Royal College of Psychiatrists, 21 Prescot Street, London E1 8BB
The College President, Professor Dame Sue Bailey OBE FRCPsych, will introduce the talk.
The artists were selected and commissioned to create a moving image work for the foyer of the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ new building at 21 Prescot Street.
Their art works were conceived and modified specifically for the new space and their presentation on a bank of three screens, offering staff, members and visitors contemplative and a visual provocation.
The College’s decision to prioritise the inclusion of contemporary art in this way signals both a recognition of psychiatry’s importance to visual and aesthetic culture, as well as the importance of the institution to work with a wide array of partners from across the cultural spectrum.
The lecture will begin at 6:30pm prompt and will be followed by a drinks reception. Please note: there is a charge of £5 per place to attend this lecture, payable on the evening.
Places are limited for this event and will be allocated on a strictly first-come-first-served basis.To reserve your place, please email Thomas Kennedy at tkennedy@rcpsych.ac.uk by Monday 14 April 2014.
http://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/usefulresources/rcpsychenewsletters/enewsletters2014/april2014/eveningevent.aspx
About the artists:
David Blandy – Wanderer Through a Sea of Fog, 2013
David Blandy – Wanderer Through a Sea of Fog, 2013
“Wanderer Through a Sea of Fog” is a three screen video work that forms a meditation on our relationship to the sublime in the digital age. The work documents an unending transition between psychological states, a passage of the soul, from fog to clarity, with the constant presence of the “dark wood” of Dante’s Comedy. A digital version of the artist, as though exited from an old computer game, walks through landscapes formed from adapting and combining paintings by the Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich. Our environment has changed, as we move to a more digitally-mediated life, but our anxieties, confusion and awe in the face of nature remain.
David Blandy is an artist who investigates our relationship with the popular culture that surrounds us, investigating what makes us who we are. Blandy has exhibited in galleries and museums internationally, including Kiasma, Helsinki; Künstlerhaus Stuttgart; Baltic, Gateshead, and was the recipient of the Great North Run Moving Image Commission 2011. In 2010 he was Winner of “The Times/The South Bank Show Breakthrough Award”, and he is represented by Seventeen Gallery. His films are distributed through LUX.
Samuel Levack and Jennifer Lewandowski – Solstice, 2013
Samuel Levack and Jennifer Lewandowski – Solstice, 2013
Shot over the course of a few days prior to the Glastonbury Festival 2013, on the ley line running through the Vale of Avalon, Solstice is an exploration of the histories, landscape and atmosphere of what has come before and what will be. A landscape film in which the artists play with light and architecture to create a dreamy montage of loosely connected and at times abstract imagery, leaving the narrative up to the eye of the viewer. A poetic offering of something that is both myth and reality.
Samuel Levack and Jennifer Lewandowski live and work in London. Their multi-disciplinary practice encompasses video, music, performance, installation, screenprints and sculpture. Their work has been shown in London, New York, Berlin and Paris. Recent group exhibitions include Oblique at David Dale Gallery, Glasgow; Les Urbaines, Lausanne, Switzerland and E-Vapor-8 at 319 Scholes, New York. Recent performances by their band Das Hund include Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge; Zabludowicz Collection, London and Cell Project Space, London. Their Artists Commission was published in Issue Ten of Art Licks Magazine, which also featured them on the cover. Their 2012 solo exhibition Danse-moi vers la fin de l’amour was the culmination of a two year project by the artists, exploring the freedoms that result from the hedonistic ritual of dance. In 2011 they were shortlisted for the Converse/Dazed Emerging Artist Award with The Whitechapel Gallery. They also run French Riviera a gallery space in Bethnal Green, London, which operates as an extension of their long-standing collaboration.
Terry Smith – About Face, 2013
In the diagnosis of many physical and mental conditions observation is paramount. But every day we all make decisions about our fellow travellers by their dress sense, demeanour and disposition; we have soft forensic eyes that observe constantly. Artists have used portraits and in particular self-portraits to explore the nature of looking and being looked at, this work About Face attempts to bring this painting characteristic to the moving image. Assembled from hundreds of still images, this is a stop-motion animation synced to three screens.
Terry Smith lives and works in London’s East End. He has created large-scale installations and site-specific interventions worldwide since 1994. The building interventions began with a series wall cuts in houses ready to be demolished in East London by gaining illegal entry and making the work in secret. Other works that evolved from this period include Capital, 1995 an intervention in Gallery 49 at the British Museum, six wall cuttings at Tate Modern during its reconstruction in 1996, and at MACBA, Barcelona where he fired 35,000 staples into the walls of the museum.
Preoccupied with exploring and experimenting in new media, recent projects, have included Broken Voices 2007, The Foundling 2009 both works that incorporated a tour of performances from Liverpool to Venice, and made a series of works for a choir in Caracas, Venezuela called Caracol 2010. In 2011 his solo show Parallax, curated by David Thorp at the John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, brought together for the first time many of the diverse strands to his practice. In 2012 he made two performance works, Combine and Unsung. In 2013 he has had a major presentation of his work in New York, one in partnership with the New Museum and Ideas City, which consisted of a 20m x 12m drawing on the outside of buildings in the East Village, and the other at The Drawing Center.
Curator
David Gryn / Artprojx
David Gryn is an internationally renowned art curator and was instrumental in selecting and working with the artists for this project. Gryn screens, curates and promotes artists’ moving image and other art projects, working with leading contemporary art galleries, museums, charities, art fairs and artists worldwide.
http://www.artprojx.com
david gryn blog 