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The Unfinished Conversation: Encoding/Decoding at The Power Plant, Toronto

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John Akomfrah, still from The Unfinished Conversation, 2012. Collection of the Tate: Jointly purchased by Tate and the British Council, 2013. Courtesy the artist; Smoking Dogs Films; and Caroll/Fletcher, London.

THE UNFINISHED CONVERSATION:
ENCODING/DECODING

23 January – 18 May 2015
The Power Plant, Toronto

ARTISTS: Terry Adkins, John Akomfrah, Sven Augustijnen, Shelagh Keeley, Steve McQueen, and Zineb Sedira
CURATERS: Gaëtane Verna and Mark Sealy MBE

The Power Plant presents The Unfinished Conversation: Encoding/Decoding in partnership with Autograph ABP. The winter exhibition takes cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s (1932 – 2014) essay “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse” as its point of departure, exploring how meaning is constructed, how it is systematically distorted by audience reception and how it can be detached and drained of its original intent to produce specific or slanted narratives.
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Sophie Calle “For the Last and First Time”; Simon Starling “Metamorphology”; Allan Sekula & Noël Burch “The Forgotten Space” at Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal

Sophie Calle, The Last Image. Blind with embroidery, 2010 (detail)
Simon Starling, Autoxylopyrocycloboros, 2006
Allan Sekula & Noël Burch, The Forgotten Space, 2010

Sophie Calle, The Last Image. Blind with embroidery, 2010 (detail) One color photograph under Plexiglas cover, one color photograph with metal frame, one text with metal frame © Adagp, Paris 2014. Courtesy Galerie Perrotin, Paula Cooper Gallery

Simon Starling, Autoxylopyrocycloboros, 2006. 38 color transparencies, Götschmann medium format slide projector, and flight case 4 minutes Projected dimensions variable Courtesy the artist and The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow

Container Ship Image from the film Allan Sekula & Noël Burch, The Forgotten Space, 2010 112 minutes Photo: Courtesy of Icarus Films

Sophie Calle, The Last Image. Blind with embroidery, 2010 (detail) thumbnailSimon Starling, Autoxylopyrocycloboros, 2006 thumbnailAllan Sekula & Noël Burch, The Forgotten Space, 2010 thumbnail
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SOPHIE CALLE
For the Last and First Time
5 February – 10 May 2015

“I went to Istanbul. I spoke to blind people, most of whom had lost their sight suddenly. I asked them to describe the last thing they saw.”

French artist Sophie Calle , one of the most important artists of her generation, makes her debut at the MAC with For the Last and First Time. The exhibition, which reveals great artistic sensibility, consists of two recent projects: The Last Image (2010), a series of photographs accompanied by texts, and Voir la mer (2011), a series of digital films.

Continue reading “Sophie Calle “For the Last and First Time”; Simon Starling “Metamorphology”; Allan Sekula & Noël Burch “The Forgotten Space” at Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal”

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Mathew Sawyer “Please Take All Your Rubbish With You” at Maria Stenfors, London

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Mathew Sawyer, FUCK YOU to the future (without me), 2014, C-Type Print, 103 x 70 cm. Courtesy the artist and Maria Stenfors, Lonodn

MATHEW SAWYER
Please Take All Your Rubbish With You

16 January – 21 February 2015
Maria Stenfors, London

I meet with friends
no one but me is aware
I’ve tied one of my shoelaces
tighter than the other
it’s barely noticeable
but at times all-consuming
I bury the words FUCK YOU
set in concrete
to be discovered at some unknown point in the future
how big is the invisible trap?
I stack pennies
37 precarious
one from each year I’ve been here
the newest the brightest
stupid music
I drink myself drunk as I walk
collecting feathers
in the morning a sculpture
please take all your rubbish with you
Continue reading “Mathew Sawyer “Please Take All Your Rubbish With You” at Maria Stenfors, London”

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Andro Semeiko & Shino Yanai “Comedy and Menace – The Birthday Party” at White Conduit Projects, London

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Shino Yanai, “Screen Memories”, detail, single channel video installation (HD, color, sound) [11’50”] 2012. Courtesy the artist & White Conduit Projects, London

Andro Semeiko & Shino Yanai
Comedy and Menace – The Birthday Party

16 November – 28 December 2014
at White Conduit Projects, London

White Conduit Projects opens its central London location at 1 White Conduit Street N1 on 15th November 2014. It will be showcasing Japanese artists and designers alongside British and international artists in a programme of innovative exhibitions across a variety of media.

The inaugural exhibition entitled Comedy and Menace – The Birthday Party is an ambitious project showing works by two artists, Andro Semeiko from Georgia and Shino Yanai from Japan.

Semeiko has exhibited in various group and solo shows in England. This time he will produce work based on the history of the neighbourhood of the gallery, referring to knightly quests and cycling in Islington. Semeiko’s projects often feature knights. – “These clanking, forlorn knights, in their tragicomic search to find something authentic in this synthetic universe. Never perceiving that their mistake is to look for authenticity elsewhere, when it can already be found in their own purposeful, yet hopelessly misdirected quest.” (JJ Charlesworth) Continue reading “Andro Semeiko & Shino Yanai “Comedy and Menace – The Birthday Party” at White Conduit Projects, London”

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Oli Sorenson: La Société de la Place des Spectacles at POPOP Gallery, Montréal

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Image courtesy of Oli Sorenson

Oli Sorenson
La Société de la Place des Spectacles

4 – 13 December 2014
at POPOP Gallery, Montréal

Vernissage: Saturday 6 December 2014, 14h – 17h
Performance: Saturday 6 December 2014, 16h

“[…] the very means of damaging these monitors in a performative context, to leave these marks will give exclusive properties to each of them: products of mass consumption will be transformed into unique objects …” (O. Sorenson)

Lodged under the signs of paradox, Oli Sorenson’s performance entitled La Société de la Place des Spectacles is presented on December 6th at 4 pm in Montreal’s Belgo Building. This performance taps right at the heart of spectacular fervor, while investing in the denial his own representation by continuing his series of “revisited works.” This corpus, triggered by a will to comment on the existing work of other creators as much as mass-produced objects, is here explored under the logic of destruction. Strangely, Sorenson’s exercise in transfiguration aspires to restore a stamp of uniqueness onto already original creations. Continue reading “Oli Sorenson: La Société de la Place des Spectacles at POPOP Gallery, Montréal”

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“Confusion in her eyes that says it all” at Maria Stenfors, London

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Confusion in her eyes that says it all. Installation view. Courtesy Maria Stenfors, London

Confusion in her eyes that says it all

7 November – 13 December 2014
at Maria Stenfors, London

Artists: Tamsin Casswell, Jennifer Douglas, Hans Rosenström

Confusion in her eyes that says it all brings together three artists who each in turn explore perceptions of intimacy and communication, deceptive illusion and control. Humble, everyday materials are transformed, creating new narratives and spaces that draw us in and make us question the nature of experience. Hereby, the exhibition examines the unique perspective an individual experiences at a particular moment in time, and the altered perceptions evoked by an artwork. Continue reading ““Confusion in her eyes that says it all” at Maria Stenfors, London”

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Emma Nourse/Chris Van Eeden/Sidy Diallo/Zina Saro-Wiwa at Brundyn+, Cape Town

cave1Brundyn_564Emma Nourse, Cave I, 2014. Wood, Brass, glass beads. Courtesy the artist and Brundyn+, Cape Town

Room 1
EMMA NOURSE
Pause
4 September – 18 October 2014

Emma Nourse’s first solo exhibition since graduating from the Michaelis School of Fine Art will be exhibited at the BRUNDYN+ gallery. Titled Pause, this body of work continues Nourse’s preoccupation with representations of environmental entropy and the deepening influence of human interference.
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Leslie Mutchler / Jason Urban “UNIVERSAL” at Atelier Circulaire, Montréal

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UNIVERSAL, exhibition view at Atelier Circulaire, Montreal. ©Photo: Jason Urban

Leslie Mutchler / Jason Urban
UNIVERSAL
18 September – 17 October 2014
at Atelier Circulaire, Montréal

It is a representation of purpose.
It is a shared workplace.
It is a place of tools, materials and making.
It is a site of production.
It is where the magic happens.

As artists and collaborators, Leslie Mutchler and Jason Urban are interested in the handmade (or in this case, hand-printed) and the duality of actual and virtual, experience and meta-experience. In an increasingly digitized world, traces of the human hand are often revered as signs of authenticity and reality, even when viewed on a screen. For the exhibition, UNIVERSAL, their first large-scale collaborative project, Mutchler and Urban are showing a body of work developed at Artists Image Resource (AIR), Pittsburgh, PA. While in residence at AIR, the pair generated prints and recorded the act of printing, an inherently tactile experience, to be presented as a meta-experience alongside the physical. The creation of three nearly identical prints – a silkscreen, a lithograph, and a woodblock – started an inquiry into the nature of making and the nature of documenting making. Continue reading “Leslie Mutchler / Jason Urban “UNIVERSAL” at Atelier Circulaire, Montréal”

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“Ideas in Things” at Maria Stenfors, London


Alan Currall, Silent dog whistle, 2014. Wooden stick, bite marks, beeswax, acrylic stands. Courtesy the artist and Maria Stenfors, London

Ideas in Things
27 June – 26 July 2014
at Maria Stenfors, London

Artists:
David Blackaller
Juan Cruz
Alan Currall
Siân Robinson Davies

Curated by Dean Hughes

“Now I am not what I was when the word was forming to say what I am.”
– William Carlos Williams, The Great American Novel

Ideas in things presents an equal sense of wonder between both ‘things’ and ‘language’. The artists included in the exhibition are collected here for their resonance in how each charts the movement of the making of an artwork from a natural to an artificial phenomenon. This transition presents a classic artistic or, more commonly associated, poetic problem of the desire to evoke uniquely personal experience through a public medium. The drive to force the conventions of a language to express the private nature of experience is the bedrock of creative work. In working with quotidian objects the dilemma that presents itself is that in choosing to talk about ordinary matter is to risk falsifying – yet equally and at the same time to remain silent or speechless is to risk creative annihilation. Continue reading ““Ideas in Things” at Maria Stenfors, London”

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Philip Newcombe “COMPANY” at Maria Stenfors, London


Philip Newcombe, ‘6 pink gym balls liberated from a lifetime of physical abuse’ 2014, 6 gym balls; ‘Clap’ 2014.Rubber band snapped to the sound of a loud clap. Installation view. Courtesy the artist and Maria Stenfors, London. Photo: Mike Taylor

Philip Newcombe
COMPANY
2 May – 7 June 2014
at Maria Stenfors, London

Newcombe often uses familiar and democratic objects such as lollipops, darts, folded up paper, thread, perfume, other people’s business cards and scent dispensers. By adding to or subtracting from these with subtle and well aimed interventions, the possible narratives seem ambiguous, contradictory, open ended and looped; revealing truths, half-truths, red herrings and trip-ups. Sometimes not all is what it seems to be. Although titles can describe an activity (’20 pints of milk dispersed throughout a city’, for example), there is rarely any photographic documentation of the event or a date or any other superfluous conceptual padding to justify the action. There seems no need. Instead they stubbornly hover in the territory between fact and fiction. Continue reading “Philip Newcombe “COMPANY” at Maria Stenfors, London”