Stay Illusion

Adam Chodzko
Erin Shirreff
Klaus vom Bruch
and experiments with Ted Serios from the Jule Eisenbud archive

Curated by Eoin Donnelly and Sara Knowland

21/11 – 19/12/2015
open by appointment
opening 21/11, 17.00 – 21.00

Ted Serios claimed he could project visions directly from his mind onto photographic film. The video presented here is from the archive of Jule Eisenbud, a psychiatrist who believed Serios’s “thoughtography” to be genuine, and set about trying to prove it under laboratory conditions. The activities of Serios and Eisenbud point toward the tricky web of relations within photography, suggesting no distinction between a mental image and a photograph, confusing the subject and object, the viewer and the viewed.

For Roland Barthes, to reflect on the essence of photography meant restraining his tendencies as a semiotician and putting aside all technical and scientific classifications. Similarly, in Mimesis and Alterity, Michael Taussig refutes “terms like representation and expression …which depend on and erase all that is powerful and obscure about the mimetic”. The essential property of photography that compels both writers is something that evades critique – a complexity which derived from photography’s dual nature, as credible witness, and also a subjectivity that destabilises the real.

Today discussion of digital photography similarly employs a kind of numinous language – digital images are described as incorporeal, immaterial transmissions, the suggestion being they circulate as if having no physical support to facilitate their movement. This requires a doubling of consciousness – a sense in which the technical and scientific is appended to the wayward and irrational.

It’s a kind of provisional fiction that seems to bring us closer to the ontology of images, an illusion that we draw from or bestow upon them.

Special thanks to Danish Art Transport

Experiments with Ted Serios from the Jule Eisenbud Archive

Adam Chodzko, Mask Filter, 2013, Trap made from woven twigs, FireWire 800, leather, silver and camera lens adapter

Erin Shirreff, Ansel Adams, RCA Building, circa 1940, 2009, Colour video, silent

Klaus vom Bruch, Immaculate Conception, 2006, Diasec on Dibond Aluminium

Klaus vom Bruch, Neo Man, 2005, Diasec on Dibond Aluminium

The Word, The Image
and The Gun

Brad Grievson
James Harrison
David Musgrave
Newspaper Reading Club
and screening The Word, The Image and The Gun (1991) by Don DeLillo, directed by Kim Evans

24/08 – 26/09/2015, by appointment
opening 27/08, 17.00 – 20.00

In 1991 the BBC screened a documentary film made in collaboration with Don DeLillo titled ‘The Word, The Image and The Gun’, directed by Kim Evans. In this film DeLillo “wanted to use the documentary form to explore the relationships between gunmen and the novelist, words and images, the power of news and the obsession with apocalypse.”
     ‘The Word, The Image and The Gun’ is an exhibition in which four artists; Brad Grievson, James Harrison, David Musgrave and Newspaper Reading Club present works alongside a screening of DeLillo’s documentary film. The exhibition takes DeLillo’s complex and wide ranging exploration of these ideas as its point of departure, bringing together four artists who work with material drawn from the world of mass media, newspaper and television. In doing so, these artists reflect on and interrogate the power of written and televised news and media, and the relationships between the image and the written word. This exhibition offers a group of varied contributions to the conversation initiated by DeLillo, and his proposal that “Today it’s news that has begun to influence the way we see the world. It’s news that has become so extraordinarily dominant. I think we’ve come to depend on news, the darker the better. In a way we need it, because it is the tragic narrative of our time.”

Brad Grievson (1986, UK, lives and works in London) studied at the Royal Academy Schools, London, 2010 – 2013. Recent and forthcoming shows include Supplement, London (solo), To the Editor, Dear Sir, Vi,Vii, Oslo (solo), Carl Kostyal, Stockholm (solo), and the Italian Cultural Institute, London (solo).

James Harrison (1984, UK, lives and works in Los Angeles) studied at the Royal College of Art, London, 2008 – 2010. Recent and forthcoming shows include End of the Night Café (with Lucas Knipscher and Charles Mayton), Thomas Duncan Gallery, Los Angeles, Independent Art Fair with White Columns, New York and Open Studio, Camden Art Centre, London.

David Musgrave (1973, UK, lives and works in London) studied at Chelsea College of Art, 1994 – 1997. Recent and forthcoming shows include Marc Foxx, Los Angeles (solo), Luhring Augustine, New York (solo), Greengrassi, London (solo), The Noing Uv It, Kunsthalle Bergen, and The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things, The Bluecoat, Liverpool, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, De La War Pavilion, Bexhill-On-Sea (curated by Mark Leckey).

The Newspaper Reading Club was established in 2011 by Fiona Connor and Michala Paludan while they were studying at California Institute of the Arts. The Newspaper Reading Club is an ongoing project that takes many forms including performances, radio broadcasts, publications and posters. Central to the project is an investigation of how people retrieve their news and how they engage with larger narratives of current affairs. Recent and forthcoming projects include Lisa Cooley, New York, 13^th Istanbul Biennial and Artspace, Auckland.

Brad Grievson, Newspaper Drawing 4 (Heavy Handling), 2015, Carbon Paper Drawing on Jesmonite, 130 x 100 cm

David Musgrave, Television Drawing no.1, 2005, Graphite on Paper, 32.8 x 24.8 cm

James Harrison, Single Cigarette, 2014, Ink and Watercolour on stretched Paper, 100 x 70 cm

Peles Empire

boy&girl

04/06 – 03/07/2015
opening 04/06, 17.00 – 20.00

Peles Empire (Katharina Stöver, 1982, Germany, lives and works in Berlin, and Barbara Wolff, 1980, Romania, lives and works in Berlin) studied at the Städelschule, Frankfurt, 2002 – 2007 and the Royal Academy Schools, London, 2007 – 2010. They have recently shown in solo exhibitions at GAK Bremen, Germany, Wentrup Gallery, Berlin, Salts, Basel, CH, and a group exhibition at The Moving Museum in Istanbul, Turkey. Previous solo exhibitions by Peles Empire in 2013 include Cell Project Space, London; Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Germany; and GSS, Glasgow. They have also exhibited at Shanaynay, Paris, NKV Wiesbaden, Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, (all 2013), Temple Bar, Dublin; V22, London; and ‘Bold Tendencies’, London (all 2012). In 2011 they were selected for Frieze Projects at Frieze Art Fair, London. 2009 shows include ORTON.nl, Rotterdam. In 2007 they were invited by MAK Center for Art & Architecture at the Schindler House, Los Angeles to exhibit in ‘The Mystery of Life’, as part of their residency.

boy&girl 2, jesmonite, pigment, paper, Diptych, each 42 x 30 cm

boy&girl 3, 2015, jesmonite, pigment, paper, Diptych each 42 x 30 cm

Detail, CPH 1, 2014

Detail, CPH 2, 2015