Tuesday 8 November 2011

Charlie Plumb : The Attempted Onion Cry!

Wednesday 2 November 2011

Edgar Martins @ The Wapping Project

EDGAR MARTINS

The Time Machine
21 September 2011 – 5 November 2011

Edgar Martins, Alto Lindoso power plant: Control room, 2011, C-type print

Working exclusively with photography, Edgar Martins (b.1977) has gained international critical acclaim with his perplexing yet familiar urban landscapes, presented as visibly artificial environments. Martins joined the gallery this year and The Time Machine is his first solo show at The Wapping Project Bankside.

The Time Machine is a body of previously unseen works, shot between 2010 and 2011. Structured as a topographic survey of hydro-electricity generating plants in Martins' native Portugal, The Time Machine deals with the succession of radical transformations in the Portuguese society and its traditional industries, during the 20th and 21st centuries.

Working closely with the EDP Foundation, Martins gained exclusive access to 20 power plants located across the country. Many of the power stations were built in the 1970s, towards the end of António de Oliveira Salazar's regime, a time of hopeful prospects of rapid economic growth and social change. Their tacit raison-d'être was to fuel the country's expansion and propel it into a prosperous future. Forty years on, and now largely automated, most of the power stations are operated by half a dozen employees at the most, including specialists, cleaning and security staff. Computerised mechanisms regulate the complex hydroelectric system, which underpins the production and distribution of energy, lending consistency to the fantasy of machines ruling over man. Although the power stations were conceived at a time when man and machine envisaged a shared future, today, they allude to the paradox of this impossibility, and reveal the broken promises of this unrealised prospect of modernity.

The Time Machine – a monograph by Edgar Martins available in both, standard and limited edition, with essays by Geoff Dyer and João Pinharanda will be published in October 2011.

Edgar Martins’ project was funded by the EDP Foundation and 50 large scale images will be exhibited at the Museu da Electricidade, Lisbon (13 October – 11 December 2011)

Tacita Dean @ Tate Modern

The Unilever Series: Tacita Dean

Tate Modern 11 October 2011 – 11 March 2012

FILM is an 11-minute silent 35mm film projected onto a gigantic white monolith standing 13 metres tall at the end of a darkened Turbine Hall. It is the first work in The Unilever Series devoted to the moving image, and celebrates the masterful techniques of analogue film-making as opposed to digital. The work evokes the monumental mysterious black monolith from the classic science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film feels like a surreal visual poem, including images from the natural world among others, with the epic wall of the Turbine Hall showing through, in a montage of black and white, colour, and hand-tinted film.

About the artist

Tacita Dean is a British artist now based in Berlin, best known for her use of film. Dean’s films act as portraits or depictions rather than conventional cinematic storytelling, capturing fleeting natural light or subtle shifts in movement. Her static camera positions and long takes allow events to unfold unhurriedly. Other works have attempted to reconstruct events from memory, such as an infamous thwarted attempt to circumnavigate the world.
Dean’s interest in the cinematic also extends to her work in other media. The Russian Ending 2001 borrows its title from the early Danish cinema tradition of making two alternate endings for a film: one happy for the American market and one tragic for the Russian market. In this work, Dean annotated postcards of catastrophes with director's notes.
Many of Dean’s works show the ways in which architecture can be transformed by the camera's lens. Craneway Event 2009 follows the choreographer Merce Cunningham (1919–2009) and his dance company rehearsing in a former Ford assembly plant, built of glass and steel and overlooking the San Francisco Bay. Dean’s film allows the ever-changing light of this environment to fall in rhythm with the dancers’ movements.

Videograph @ The Ritzy

a presence in Liverpool St

the photograph does not exist

Marc Swanson @ Houston Contemporary Art Museum

Perspectives 175:
Marc Swanson: The Second Story

On View: July 1 – October 9, 2011

Opening Reception: Thursday, June 30, 2011 | 6:30-9PM

From his earliest works, Brooklyn-based artist Marc Swanson has made his topic the construction of self as an incomplete and always fragmentary project. Everything—including heavy metal, the Yeti, and hunting trophies—have become part of his artistic language. Perspectives 175: Marc Swanson: The Second Story features new sculptures by the artist that consider the worldview of the generations that have grown up since AIDS placed a final marker on the early era of gay liberation, severing the ties to that culture’s rich history. It’s been left to younger artists like Swanson to decipher and reinterpret the stories and images of that elder generation. The Second Story was a gay bar in San Francisco, long gone when the artist lived there but—in its punning name—haunting. The name might just mean that it was located on the second floor of a building, but it also suggests the layers of narrative that overlap in each patron’s life—the true, the false, and the mythic.