CuratorialTIOS

 CHARLES DANBY

THE INVENTION OF SOLITUDE

The Nunnery
Bow Arts Trust, 183 Bow Road, London, E3 2SJ
21 September - 04 November 2006

INVENTION (2)

Leicester City Gallery Off-Site Projects
01 September - 28 October 2008
Exhibition Details: >>

ARTISTS:
REBECCA BIRCH, MATTHEW LUTZ-KINOY, ROB SMITH, ALEX HUDSON

ABOUT

THE INVENTION OF SOLITUDE brings together the work of four emerging artists. The work of each artist in some way touches on ideas of solitude. The exhibition further explores ideas of singular and collective practice through curatorial intervention. The works all engage with peripheral aspects of the landscape and are often drawn to its natural forces, and each artist connects to an isolation of site outside of the city. Individual works by each artist will be shown alongside a single mediation of those works through slide projection. The reproduced will be presented alongside the actual works.

ISBN 978-0-9549748-1-6
72pp
Full Colour
212mm x 147mm
Soft Case Cover
Published by Aston and Horrox

Texts by Lisa Le Feuvre, Ed Krcma, and James English Leary

The Invention of Solitude has been kindly supported by the Arts Council England, Axis Arts, and Knowledge Dock

Purcahse and Further Details: >>

THE ARTISTS:

In Isolation:

Rebecca Birch will present an ambitious new video work. It is complied from a series of around twenty videos that obsessively chart the movements of isolated animals in their natural habitat. Each is a detailed study of a single animal that is contained within the frame of the camera shot and the physical constraint of the television monitor. The result of two years of work, the multiple TV monitors that create the work will be stacked to create a wall-like structure. Here the wanderings of each animal will be mimicked and reflected by the movements of other animals on the other screens. In addition the work plays on conceptions of landscape, ants and lizards crawl and forage on screens near the ground, while stacked high above them gulls and eagles fly.

Matthew Lutz-Kinoy will present a compiled series of short video works. These will be specially commissioned for this exhibition and presented within the context of the objects / props and stage sets that appear in the works. Matthew Lutz-Kinoy is the subject of his own work. Again and again he finds himself unwittingly isolated within the works. In certain videos he is seen desperately seeking the attention of the viewer, aware that he is trapped. He is isolated, and his search for a way out is both apparent and full of humour. His works are deeply touching. This will be the first time that Matthew Lutz-Kinoy will show work in the UK.

Rob Smith will present a new visual-audio work. The work looks at natural phenomenon and challenges are perceptions and understanding of them. Here he will create an orchestrated soundtrack that will be played alongside the new video work. Rob Smith produces circular works, loops that transfer and translate information. Rob’s works have a strong conceptual edge and an engaging aesthetic. His new work ‘Wind Whistle’ 2005, being created especially for this exhibition, draws on the mechanism of a kite, using its chord as a medium through which vibrations will travel down before being amplified to create sound. Rob will make three versions of this work, each local to the venue at which the exhibition is occurring. The exhibition will enable this work to be made in three parts, with each part relating directly to one of the three venues.

Alex Hudson will present a selection of new paintings. The experience of walking through the landscape can induce a sense of freedom, the hallucinogenic hues and heady atmosphere of the forest or open plain creating the illusion that the symbolic order governing social behaviour in our civilized dwellings, urban or otherwise are no longer valid or at best invisible. A wilderness then, the boundaries between right and wrong blurred where the possibilities for nefarious acts and otherwise unacceptable behaviour could be conceived. Veiled beneath natures canopy and out of range of the suspicious lens of the closed circuit television camera. The landscapes depict places where human presence is marked only by the objects and structures discovered by accident, usually on walks through unfamiliar terrain. The work represents a logical and cogent development in a series of nine paintings from the Wild Wood series 2003-2004. Painted from photographs taken in or on the periphery of the New Forest in Hampshire. Recent work includes the only visible portrait and studies of Atocha Station In Madrid. The work invests the art of looking with a renewed energy. Replacing immediate gratification for a cool disclosure of metaphorical and literal readings that evoke associations similar to that of suspense induced by a horror film, findings of an anthropological survey or a picture taken from a tourist guide.

THE ARTISTS AND THE CURATOR:

In Collaboration:

All the work that is being displayed will be compiled into four slides, one for each artist. These slides will be shown collectively. This will be the first and the last space that the visitor encounters. The slides will present a preview and review of all the work in the exhibition. Four park benches will all face in opposing directions to each other. Each bench will have a plaque with the name of one artist accompanied by a short inscription of their choosing. The benches will demark either a square or rectangular area with all the benches facing outwards.

The work each artist will be projected on the wall directly in front of the bench that has their name on it. Each projection will be a single image made up from the total numerical component parts of the work of each artist. For example, Rebecca Birch’s work may consist of 18 TV monitors, each with footage of a solitary animal. This would mean that her slide would be divided into 18 sections. Alex Hudson may present 4 paintings, this means that his slide would be divided into four sections. The projection for each artist will be projected to the same size.

EXHIBITION IMAGES

ROOM 3

Installation view of The Invention of Solitude (2006) (Front) Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, When I Die (2006), (Back) Rebecca Birch, Noise (2006)

nstallation view of The Invention of Solitude (2006) (Left) Alex Hudson, Fall (2006) and Dammed (2006), Rebecca Birch, Noise (2006) (Right) Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, When I Die (2006)

Installation view of The Invention of Solitude (2006) (Left) Rebecca Birch, Noise (2006) (Right) Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, When I Die (2006)

Installation view of The Invention of Solitude (2006) (Left) Alex Hudson, Fall (2006) and Dammed (2006), Rebecca Birch, Noise (2006) (Right) Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, When I Die (2006)

Still from Matthew Lutz-Kinoy's When I Die (2006)

ROOM 2

Installation view of The Invention of Solitude (2006), Rob Smith, Kite Sound (2006)

Documenting photograph for Rob Smith's Kite Sound (2006)

ROOM 1 & 4

Installation view of The Invention of Solitude (2006), four-part slide projection and bench presentation (2006) from left, Alex Hudson, Rob Smith, Matthew Lutz-Kinoy

Installation view of The Invention of Solitude (2006), four-part slide projection and bench presentation (2006) from left, Rob Smith, Matthew Lutz-Kinoy

Installation view of The Invention of Solitude (2006), Rebecca Birch slide projection and bench presentation (2006)

EXTRACT FROM THE PUBLICATION

MATTHEW LUTZ-KINOY
Universität der Künste, Berlin

CD –You have been living and working in Berlin for the past year, how has that influenced your practice?

MLK –One of the most tangible things was when I arrived in Berlin and began work on a project for Yukiko’s gallery in Paris. I was working with dance and a cone structure and I was researching Bauhaus dance. It was super-helpful for me to be here and have access to the type of material that is really unavailable to me in the States. I’ve searched the Bauhaus archive and had access to a lot of film footage. The use of geometric form, dance and performance was of great appeal. It was kind of what I wanted to make.

CD –I’m thinking about your drawings. Shapes and geometry are clearly important, these elements existed in the work, how has your understanding of them changed?

MLK –A lot of my work is about trying to communicate through different shapes and forms. At the beginning when I was starting to experiment with video I was interested in trying to explore ways of communicating without using narrative, even as simple as just by using colour and sound. Not having any image was really fascinating to me. That became limited and I wanted to play a little bit more with how a performer interacts with a form, how a human body interacts with form.

CD –Drawing is fundamental to your work, can you talk about it in relation to video.

MLK –Drawing and video is something that I approach from a similar perspective. As the videos have become more abstract, like Studio Dance (2005) and have become more about trying to communicate a feeling through performance, the drawings have shifted too. It’s hard. I don’t have the exact language to talk about this. I guess it’s ok to talk about feeling, the feeling of the drawing. What I see in them is a kind of tension.

CD –I guess in particular I am thinking of the video piece and series of drawings of the same title -When I Die this Summer what Shirt will I be Wearing.

MLK –When you look you don’t necessarily see the T-shirt in the drawing, but by seeing the video I hope people make that connection and that it confirms their sense that there’s something slightly darker and melancholic about the drawing. It works through the title in that this connection can be made and you can maybe see the discrepancies, the video is a lot more humorous. The drawings and the video are two different approaches to tackle the same idea; maybe it has something to do with not being completely satisfied with mediums, or not being totally satisfied with how you can communicate something.

CD –I think it’s more a case that they open up different opportunities. In that sense the drawings give you more than just the shirt, or just the reference to the artist, they provide a very real sense of landscape.

MLK –I made the video not in the city. I was in a space where there was no white space. I was thinking well what is neutral space when you don’t have white walls, when you’re not in a city, where there is no white cube. It made sense that it was not an interior space and that instead it was an exterior one. It was exciting because it was something that I realised that I had had a lot of problems with before, because the outdoors for me wasn’t a controlled environment, or at least it was something that I didn’t identify as controlled. I realised that the white space was nature in this kind of environment. It allows a space that is repetitious, it’s just that that repetition is green not white.

CD –That brings us neatly to colour. Often in the videos there will be a flash of colour accompanied by the occasional spark of sound, usually high pitched and intense. How do these structures play out in the work?

MLK –I started doing that when I decided that I wanted the videos to become a lot less concrete in any narrative sense. The types of videos that I was making made me think about a history of video and I realised how important colour and sound were to that. I was also thinking about brainwashing videos, or some kind of subliminal messaging, and I began researching colour theory and therapy and how people are influenced by sound and colour. I never wanted to make the work so much about that, but I wanted it to be there.

CD –Studio Dance (2005) does that very directly, almost to an extreme.

MLK –I really enjoyed being able to point to something and to direct the viewer’s attention to a specific thing. In Studio Dance the varying sequences are separated into groups of colour, a series of about seven or so. They’re all taken from the previous sequence so that you get these objects and close-ups of things that all have different textures and colours and that all interact with me dancing in the studio. Each part is cut or paused with flashes of colour and this was a way for me to tell people, well ok, these are all of the things that you are going to see, and you should notice them because it’s important, and these colours should affect you.

(Conversation held on the 24/08/2006)