New Exhibition: Sarah Foqué & James Johnson-Perkins: New Work

Sarah Foqué & James Johnson-Perkins: New Work
10 July – 29 August 2009
Open: 10 – 6pm, Tuesday – Saturday

private view: 6pm, Thursday 9th July
Cecil Sharp House
2 Regents Park Road
Camden
London
NW1 7AY

nearest tube: Camden Town

The English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS) are pleased to present
an exhibition of new site specific work from artists Sarah Foqué and
James Johnson-Perkins.

Through vividly coloured materials, both artists will respond to the
Cecil Sharp House building, the home of the EFDSS, as a starting point
for work as they attempt to directly interact with its community and
interior.

Responding to a site's history and the movement of people through it,
Sarah Foqué creates installations with straight bands of colour.
Drawing on histories of philosophy and anthropology, Foqué focuses on
the mapping and exploration of space and boundaries. Typically using
coloured tape as a material to visualise her understanding of the
space she is working in, Foqué will create a fluid portrait of the
space and its activities, alluding to traditional dance figures.


James Johnson-Perkins utilises references to popular culture of the
1980s to create works of play and nostalgia. His installation,
spanning all four storeys of the building stairwell, will attempt to
build the tallest structure ever made from Mega-Bloks. This
construction will represent an absurd May Pole in the centre of the
building, at odds with the surrounding architecture.


Artist-in-residence Matthew Cowan will be holding a free open studio
event during the private view and on Friday 10 July, 10am - 5pm.


facebook event page:

http://efdss.org/news.htm#artistsnewwork

New Exhibition: FLASH COMPANY A Handkerchief Show at Cecil Sharp House

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A Handkerchief Show at Cecil Sharp House

Continuing a visual arts programme under the curation of artist-in-residence Matthew Cowan, the English Folk Dance and Song Society is pleased to present Flash Company, A Handkerchief Show at Cecil Sharp House.This exhibition is a group show of new work by a diverse range of contemporary artists from the UK, Portugal, Australia, New Zealand, U.S.A and Japan taking as a starting point a humble white handkerchief. Artists working in a wide range of media have been invited to take part, and all have been sent a single handkerchief with which to work. The resulting works will be hung at Cecil Sharp House, the home of the English Folk Dance and Song Society.

Looking beyond their prime role in the dancing kit of Morris dancers, handkerchiefs have a rich history in the framework of society. From high fashion to perfect manners and sexual politics, the handkerchief has played its part as an essential accessory. The show takes its name from the folk song of the same name, a jaunty tale of handkerchiefs and ruin.The finished works will be hung in Cecil Sharp House throughout May and June, and entry to the show is free.
30 April – 28 June (Tues - Sat, 10am - 6pm)

Artists Participating in the show:

Lawrence Abu-Hamdan, David Beech, Mike Berners-Winters, Catherine Bertola, Bishi & Giles Pearson, Michelle Bloom, Gwen Brinton, Gail Burton, Maurice Carlin, Ele Carpenter, Billy Childish, Emma Cowan, Matthew Cowan, Michael Davies, Alec Finlay, David Foggo, Sarah Foque, Mami Fujita, Jon Garlick, Rachael Gorchov, James Johnson-Perkins, Paul Hearn/Lustrous Chemistry, Zuzana Lola Hruskova, Lee Hunter, Kathryn Johnson, Alan Kane, Maiko Kobayashi, Serena Korda, Sonya Lacey, John Lawrence, Sam Lee, Caterina Lewis, Hayley Lock, Peter Locke, Cathy Lomax, Anna Maltz, Hannah Maybank, David McKeren, Pete McPartlan, Erin O'Connor, David Owen, Hyungji Park, Michal Pashtan & Matthew Green, Clare Qualmann, Nic Rawling, Adam Rompel, Marianne Shorten, Helen Smith, Rose Smith, John Stark, Keara Stewart, Matt Stokes, Maggie Tran, Clare Undy, Graeme Walker, Clare Wilson

Private View: 29 April, 6pm
Cecil Sharp House
2 Regents Park Road
LONDON
NW1 7AY
www.efdss.org

Residency: Cecil Sharp House, home of the English Folk Dance and Song Society

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Matthew Cowan will be beginning a new post as artist in residence at Cecil Sharp House, the home of the English Folk Dance and Song Society for 2009. The post will include curating a new visual art programme at Cecil Sharp House, and working with staff and members in the EFDSS' education work. The first show curated by Matthew Cowan will open in April 2009.


"We are delighted to welcome visual artist (and morris dancer) Matthew Cowan to the EFDSS team. Matthew will be our first artist-in-residence, working with us over the next twelve months. He will be responsible for curating our exhibition programme and working with the Education Department on outreach projects; in return we provide Matthew with space to work in, and the resources of our staff, the library and archive.

Matthew hails from New Zealand by way of Newcastle. He gained a degree in English and Psychology at the University of Auckland and then an MA in Fine Art from the University of Northumbria. Matthew took up morris and sword when in New Zealand and moved to the UK to learn more about this country’s rich folk traditions, in particular the sword dances of north-east England. He was a founding member of the Newcastle-based Byker Mummers.

He describes his artistic practice as situated in the realm of traditional British customs and culture, producing work which combines elements of photography, video, installation and performance. He has exhibited in galleries across the UK and in New Zealand, Poland and the USA as an artist and curator.

Over the coming months Matthew is keen to show work which will bridge both the folk and contemporary art worlds. Using Cecil Sharp House as a base, he plans to make links between artists and folk practitioners and is excited about the possibilities these new relationships present."

www.efdss.org

New Exhibition: What Surrounds Us: Finding & Making Home

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ERNEST RUBENSTEIN GALLERY
197 East Broadway NY, NY 10002
USA

Reception:Wednesday, January 7, 6-8pm
ERNEST RUBENSTEIN GALLERY
197 East Broadway NY, NY 10002

http://www.edalliance.org/artschool

Exhibition dates: January 7 to February 11, 2009



What builds a home is difficult to pin down. It is constructed from a combination of various parts: physical and mental space, community, objects, signage, personal relationships, history, culture and familiarity.

This exhibition opens for examination these elements that assemble a home, then explores the various ways people use them to find and make home. Each artist included has a different conceptual focus, but all draw inspiration from a different aspect of home. By gathering these various reflections in one place, this exhibition aims not to build a complete vision of home, but instead to create a space that invites meditation on home as a concept.

Because of the Educational Alliance’s history in assisting immigrants in New York to create a new home here, it is an exciting and fitting space for this show. The Alliance remains a familiar place for many New Yorkers, a temporary home throughout the day in many people’s lives. By including a combination of local and International artists, this exhibition welcomes a global dialogue.

This exhibition includes the work of: Keliy Anderson-Staley, Monica Carrier, Matthew Cowan, Melissa Cowper-Smith, Julie Glauert, Lee Hunter, Elaine Kaufmann, Michal Pashtan, Saul Robbins, Nicole Tschampel.

Exhibition dates: January 7 to February 11, 2009
Reception:Wednesday, January 7, 6-8pm

Location: 197 East Broadway
Directions: Between Jefferson and Clinton Streets.
F train to East Broadway; J, M, Z trains to Delancey St.
MTA buses: M9, M14A, M15, M22

Telephone: 212.780.2300, ext.378

New Writing: Maiko Kobayashi, selected for AXIS MAstars, 2008

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"Maiko Kobayashi's artwork is expressed in drawings and paintings of an un-named character. It is a creature which is repeated over and again in her drawings and paintings. It is a simple being, appearing to be like an animal with a child-like face, but it is able to offer facial expressions which belie a deep emotional response to an unseen world.


The repetition of this character in this work is a process that draws on the spectrum of emotional expression. Kobayashi's MA exhibition consists of rows of small fragile drawings pinned close to the wall so that the paper hangs half loosely, and each drawing makes a shadow against the wall. Each single drawing contains a single portrait of Kobayashi's character and together they form a kind of emotional diary in their horizontal line along the wall.


In the second room of the installation is a large scale piece that was inspired by a visit to Auschwitz. Here the characters sit close to each other, gazing out of the image, close enough to comfort each other though perhaps not aware of each other. They have a ghost-like quality, and in their similarity it is not clear whether they are the one or many.


This work has a quietness that highlights the vulnerability of the character in the images. The images work in a comic like style and this familiar mode gives us a framework for approaching the work, in that the cuteness of the character is a way of accessing the emotions contained in the drawings. There is though, an uncomfortable silence in the face of so many renditions of this character's sadness, when the first impression is that we are about to encounter a simple endearing creature. There is a need to develop our own narrative to explain what the creature is feeling, but the newspapers that some of the creatures are drawn on only hint at a likely predicament."


(Matthew Cowan, 2008)



Read more about Maiko Kobayashi and the MAstars programme

Fabryka Sztuki Residency Final Show

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Fabryka Sztuki Residency Final Show
Arsenal Gallery
Bialystok
private view: Thursday 28th August, 5pm

Matthew Cowan (NZ), Julie Glauert (GER),
Rachael Gorchov (USA), Lee Hunter (USA),
Michal Pashtan (ISL), Eko Séri (BEL)

Galeria Arsenał w Białymstoku, oraz Podlaskie Stowarzyszenie

Axis Mundi mają zaszczyt zaprosić na wystawę podsumowującą projekt

Pobyt tw—rczy Fabryka Sztuki

otwarcie czwartek, 28 sierpnia 2008,

o godz. 17.00 wystawa czynna do piątku,

29 sierpnia 2008

w Galerii Arsenał,

Białystok, ul. A. Mickiewicza 2

Review: 'Double Agent' at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art for AXIS Dialogue

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Dialogue sent Newcastle based artist Matthew Cowan to review the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) touring exhibition, Double Agent, at BALTIC. We wanted to see what Matthew made of the exhibition where artists use other people as a medium or as part of their work.

A title like Double Agent immediately prompts us to question the ethics of the contract between artist, the 'others' and the audience involved in their work: I wonder whether there is an expectation from today's art audiences that art might intend to deceive them?

read the whole article and see the slideshow at the AXIS website

New Exhibition: Waygood Boutique, Wednesday 23 July - Saturday 09 August 2008

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Next Show at the Waygood Boutique:
Wednesday 23 July - Saturday 09 August 2008

Bell Suit by Matthew Cowan, landscape drawings by Michael Mulvihill, ‘Fear’ paintings by Helen Smith and collaborative drawings Joe & Alice Woodhouse.


Waygood Art Boutique is a new gallery for buying and collecting contemporary art.

Waygood Art Boutique

31-39 High Bridge

Newcastle upon Tyne

NE1 1EW

UK

boutique@waygood.org


see www.waygood.org for further details and directions

Artist Talk: Galleria Arsenal, Bialystok, Poland

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As part of the Art Factory International Residency Program, Matthew Cowan will be talking about his work at the Galeria Arsenal in Bialystok, Poland on Thursday 10 July, 2008.

The artists participating in the Art Factory International Residency Program will be presenting their work to the public. The talks will start at 6pm, and there will be a Polish Translator.

For further details please visit: http://theworkshop.wordpress.com/

New Exhibition: 50 Foot Long Horse at the first Durham Arts Festival, 14th - 21st June 2008

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50ft Long Horse
Newcastle based collective 50ft Long Horse will showcase an exhibition of their work in Durham's artistic centre Fowlers yard.























Studio One, Fowlers Yard
Durham
10am - 5pm

Admission is Free

'Durham Arts Festival is a new visual arts festival for the North East. We will be introducing an impressive and varied programme of events that include artists of international acclaim, such as Lee Miller, John Foxx and Quentin Blake, community projects and workshops that will engage a wide audience across the county, world premiers of international films, local artists, and ground breaking lectures.'
www.durhamartsfestival.co.uk

New Work: Waygood Boutique, 6 - 26 June 2008

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Waygood Art Boutique is a new gallery for buying and collecting contemporary art.

The Boutique offers a choice of work by selected artists associated with Waygood.

Open 11am-3pm Wednesdays - Saturdays
from 1 May 2008

Waygood Art Boutique

31-39 High Bridge

Newcastle upon Tyne

NE1 1EW

UK

boutique@waygood.org

Trip to visit Peter Clare at his house in Oswestry.

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Trip to visit Peter Clare at his house in Oswestry.
Easter 2008

Peter met me at the train station and drove me to his place. We went out to a large barn out the back of his house, and he showed me into a beautiful old wooden gypsy caravan. He sat on a rocking chair and we drank tea while he began to tell me the story of how he came build his mechanical elephant. Peter told me that his background is in working with fairground rides, and as well as the elephant and the caravan, there was a round-a-bout in his barn.

























It had started when he was at the switching on of the Christmas lights in Bolton with his round-a-bout, and the scheduled appearance of a circus elephant had to be curtailed because of the crowd. The seed of an idea was planted and he spent over seven years constructing Snowdrop, his elephant.




Peter and Snowdrop have had some fame in recent years through being included in the ‘Folk Archive’, the touring exhibition show by Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane. The exhibition toured to places like the Barbican, and Kunsthalle in Basel, and recently Snowdrop has appeared again in the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. He told me how strange and wonderful it was to have people queuing up to see his elephant as part of these exhibitions. It pleased me to hear stories like this, because I am very interested in artworks that are made by people who don’t consider themselves to be part of the art world. It was why I had originally wanted to talk to him, because in thinking about the Centrifuge Art Prize I had been thinking about artworks that people do not usually encounter as artworks. We talked about recognition, and the role that Jeremy Deller winning the Turner Prize had played in Snowdrop touring around all these art galleries in Europe.






















In his back yard Peter had been laying down railway tracks for the miniature steam engine that he was working on. At the end of the yard was a sign that said CLARE’S PRIVATE RAILWAY”.

the Bear and the Dancing Man, 24th May 2008

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'the Bear and the Dancing Man', Performance for the Waygood Wood, 24th May 2008 at the Herber Tower on the old Town Walls - behind Stowell Street, Newcastle upon Tyne.





















'Matthew Cowan’s performance is in the form of a magical reversal where the established order of a dancing bear and its keeper is overturned. It takes place down a leafy path to another world, incorporating a cacophonous parade along the route of the ancient city walls of Newcastle, coming to rest on the site of a Medieval Orchard.'

Waygood Wood is part of The Enchanted Moment:



The Enchanted Moment
A Cluster of Contemporary Art.
18 – 25 May

A week of contemporary visual art exhibitions entitled The Enchanted Moment will launch with The Late Shows on May 17th. The work exhibited will be specially commissioned or curated new work in response to a commissioned piece of writing from Joel Fisher, artist and curator.

Harry Smith Anthology Remixed at Sensoria Festival, Sheffield, UK

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Harry Smith Anthology Remixed
Featuring James Johnson-Perkins & Matthew Cowan

Sensoria Festival, Sheffield, UK
Opening: Friday 4 April 2008, 6-8pm
Exhibition: 4 – 18 April 2008

The Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA), Glasgow
21 June - 26 July 2008

Harry Smith Anthology Remixed starts its UK tour at Sensoria in Sheffield, a new festival fusing music and film.

The exhibition brings together the work of eighty-four leading artists and musicians, who were each invited to make a visual artwork in response to one track from the groundbreaking music release the Anthology of American Folk Music. The Anthology was edited by seminal New York artist, musicologist and experimental filmmaker Harry Smith, and first published by Folkways in 1952. It is considered to be one of the most important collections of information in modern society, creating a folk canon and contributing to numerous folk revival movements.

This exhibition creates a new visual collection of the Anthology, as seen through the eyes of contemporary visual artists and musicians. The exhibition includes artists from the US, Europe and Japan, reflecting a diverse and exciting range of practice including: visual art, outsider art, comic book, design, craft and illustration.

Exhibition curated by Rebecca Shatwell.

The artists are: 
Dave Allen, Jonathan Allen, Diane Barcelowsky, Marcia Bassett, Eric Beltz, Hisham Bharoocha, Jesse Bransford, Vashti Bunyan, Jelle Crama, Jaron Childs, Rob Churm, Marcus Coates, Karen Constance, Christian Cummings, Dearraindrop, Arrington di Dionyso, Graham Dolphin, Bill Drummond, Jorn Ebner, Peter J.Evans, Yamataka EYE, Jad Fair, Feathers - Meara O'Reilly, Kyle Tomzo, Shayna Kipping, Kyle Field, Alec Finlay, Devin Flynn, Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, Luke Fowler, Chris Graham, Susie Green, Doug Harvey, Rama Hoffpauir, Dan Howard-Birt, Zoe Irvine, Rich Jacobs, James Johnson-Perkins and Matthew Cowan, Juneau Projects, Seth Kelly, Jeffrey Lewis, Linder, Derek Lodge, Lone Twin, Robert AA Lowe, Ant Macari, The Matinee Orchestra, Maya Miller, Paul D.Miller aka DJ Spooky, Gean Moreno, Heather Leigh Murray, Michael Nyman, Dylan Nyoukis, John Olson, John Orth, Paper Rad, Mike Paré, Plastic Crimewave, Dave Portner, Devin Powers, Adam Putnam, The Rebel, Ginny Reed, Clare E.Rojas, Chris Rollen, Arik Roper, Giles Round, Royal Art Lodge, Mathew Sawyer, David Sherry, Brooke Sietinsons, Ross Sinclair, Andre Stitt, Philip Taaffe, Vernon & Burns, Daryl Waller, Flora Whiteley, Michael Wilson, Simon Woolham, Andrew Jeffrey Wright, C. Spencer Yeh, Yokoland, :zoviet*france:

Toetap, Gallery Glue, Sat 19th Jan- Fri 22nd Feb

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Toetap

Sat 19th Jan- Fri 22nd Feb (PREVIEW Friday 18th Jan).

An exhibition demonstrating dance as a movement, a cabaret, a performance and simple as an art form. There will be a series of dance classes running alongside the exhibition, encompassing everything from tap dance to techo rave.

click here for more info: www.gluegroup.org.uk

Performance for Rag and Bone Magazine Launch, TUESDAY THE 4TH OF DECEMBER 2007

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The launch for the first issue is on TUESDAY THE 4TH OF DECEMBER, at Kilburn's The Luminaire. Performing are New York's angriest yodelling banjo player, Curtis Eller, London's own Yo Zushi, Matthew Cowan (with his one man Morris Dance), beautifully crafted country songs from Cherry Mash Cherry and Russian gypsy music from Sasha Ilyukevich! Contributors to our first issue include Billy Childish, Matthew Cowan, Clare E. Rojas, Jack Zipes, Espers, Htein Lin, Rob Ryan, Chris Bianchi, Fergus Hall, and many more.
























For more information, please contact: info@ragandbone.org.uk

Editors: Zoe Taylor (zoe@ragandbone.org.uk),
Yo Zushi (yo@ragandbone.org.uk)

New Writing: Essay for 'I Won the Maths Prize at School', James Johnson-Perkins and Dr Conor Lawless

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Essay for 'I Won the Maths Prize at School', James Johnson-Perkins and Dr Conor Lawless, Red Nile Project Space, New City Building, 56 Nile Street, Sunniside, Sunderland SR1 1ES www.rednile.org/mathsprize.htm

Exhibition dates: 6-13 Oct, 2007
Preview and artist talk: Fri 5 October, 5-8pm (talk at 5pm)

Collaborations between artists and scientists often produce
work which neither the artist nor the scientist would have
dreamed of. Although there are massive tracts of common
land between the fields of art and science, it is in a
way of looking at the world that artists and scientists
approach their work differently. Visual Artists often work
with notions of what constitutes a finished piece in their
mind, while practitioners in the field of sciences work
with a process where rules and methodology are to the fore.

Johnson-Perkins’ and Lawless’ collaboration at the Rednile
space throws light on these different methods of working,
while also producing the potential for some beautiful
artworks that demand both scientific and artistic scrutiny.
For their period of residency in the rednile space, Johnson-
Perkins and Lawless will further explore questions they
have begun to ask in the realm of chaos and randomness.
The Fibonacci numbers are used as the basis for creating
colourful grid of numbers, an exercise in concentration as
much as a dazzling set of figures. Recently their video
works make use of the concept of the automaton, utilising
James' penchant for Lego constructions.

Complimenting the Lego structures are an array of films
that dazzle you with their colours and ever changing
blocks of primary colours. They take for their basis,
randomly generated colours and operate through using basic
shapes, and regular transformation to become a hypnotic
visual knock-out. Like the eyes of the old snake Kaa that
hypnotises Mogli in the Disney film of The Jungle Book,
these films have a hypnotic effect, and play with the way
that our brains process colour and movement. They make you
want to keep looking at them, in order to try to process
their patterns and movement.

Lawless’ and Johnson-Perkins’ work overlaps in many ways,
but it is their different approach to achieving similar aims
which is the most rewarding aspect of their collaboration.
Johnson-Perkins' work has previously set about making
colourful and hypnotic films using colours from the colour
wheel and an artists eye, but the addition of the potential
to utilise a mathematician's principles, random colours and
programmed sets of coordinates gives rise to an infinite
number of pieces of work. These works have the feel of
being lighter and structural for being numerical sequences
connected to simple aesthetic rules, and this method
increases the capability for exploring and assessing colour
and shape by iterating the creative process repeatedly using
a machine.

Matthew Cowan
September 2007

(to read the full borchure in a pdf click here)

www.rednile.org/mathsprize.htm

New Performance for Glue Group Sound Art Festival

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24 July 2007, at Echo Bar, Chillingham Road, Newcastle upon Tyne

Arts Council England Artist Placement Programme Showcase

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Arts Council England North East 'Artist Placement Programme' Showcase

Artist Placement Programme - Showcase Event

Friday 6 July, 5.30-7.00

Xsite Architecture, Foundry Lane Studios, Foundry Lane, Ouseburn, Newcastle upon Tyne NE6 1LH

Xsite Architecture and Arts Council England North East would like to invite you to attend a Showcase Event to celebrate the success of the Artist Placement Programme to date. This will be an opportunity to meet the host companies and artists involved in the 2006 and 2007 schemes and to view a selection of work produced as a result of the programme

A Morris Dancer Should Never Appear to Touch the Ground

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Billboard image for the Waygood Gallery's Harker Herald Billboard, July 2007.





















"A Morris Dancer Should Never Appear to Touch the Ground is a billboard image that arises from instructions given as to what a morris dancer should be thinking about when learning to dance. Morris dancing is traditional dance form that is native to England, and is over 500 years old. It has never been more popular than it is today.”



Harker Herald is a billboard outside the Waygood Gallery & Studio’s temporary home in the Harkers Building, 548-560 Shields Road, Byker, displaying work by a different artist each month.

It can be seen on the left hand side of the road by passengers on the number 15 and 22 stagecoach buses from Walker to Byker, the 301 and 302 from the coast to town and by motorists travelling towards Byker on the A193 before the large retail park. It is located just after the large Siemens factory, and opposite the Parsons Turbine Hall. It is also a short walk from Chillingham Road or Walkergate Metro stations.

For more information see www.waygood.org or ring Waygood Gallery & Studios on 0191 265 6857.

Here is a link to the video of Mat Cowan dancing Lumps of Plum Pudding
at the launch of his harker herald billboard poster.

New Writing: Introduction for Andrew Burton, New Work at the Exsertus Space

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Andrew Burton
private view: 6-8pm, private view:

Tuesday 29 May
Exsertus Project Space, Waygood at Harker's Building
548-580 Shields Road, Newcastle upon Tyne NE6 2UQ

At first view Andrew Burton's new work in the Exsertus space plays with your sense of scale. The work is a wall constructed from thousands of fired bricks dividing the space into two. The bricks however are finger sized, a kind of lego-like miniature construction block from which Burton has built a wall that would be well over head height if normal sized construction bricks were used.

The wall structure gives the sense of creating a boundary, or in a space that lies along the route of Hadrian's wall, a frontier. In stepping over the barrier and viewing the work from the far side of the space, we can see that the wall has been filled with street tags, but due to the tiny size of the bricks and the scale of the wall, the graffiti writing is of a miniature scale.

Burton's inspiration for working with fired bricks came from the experience of working in India, and observing what at first appeared to be piles of discarded bricks, but were actually the product of local brick yards. These piles of bricks had an order to them, and could be found all over India, an example of the staple Indian building material. The chances of seeing these discarded bricks may become a rarity, as the Indian government moves towards financing large-scale construction from concrete and more modern building materials.

This piece, constructed in the Exsertus space is one of a number of works that Burton has constructed from the same bricks. Here they have taken on a life of their own as they are reused in successive sculptures, bringing with them remnants of the paint and glaze from the works that have gone before.

Bricks are a universal material for construction, and they are found worldwide. Their versatility as a method of construction lend themselves to forms that are solid and permanent. They give us a sense of solidity and comfort that they will not fall down. Burton's piece is neither solid nor permanent. Its precarious nature invites danger in the simple act of stepping over it. The precariousness of the construction reflects the precarious nature of the area that Harker's building is situated. Industrial buildings are being levelled on virtually all sides reminding us that the Exsertus space itself, like the Harker’s Building is only a temporary home for artists.

Matthew Cowan

Glue Group Presents 'Shop', Preview Friday 8th June 2007, 7pm

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Glue Group Presents 'Shop', Preview Friday 8th June 2007, 7pm

8 June, 7 - 9pm Exhibition runs 8 June - 1 July

Artists include: Clare Ruddock, Ele Carpenter, Oonagh Hegarty, Theresa Easton, James Johnson-Perkins, Matthew Cowan, David Beech, Eva Bauer, Peter Ashley Jackson, Lianne Bell, Katie Cole, Scott Patterson, Edwin Li, Pete Hindle, Hannah Marsden, Laura Kirby, Claire Rowlands, Steven Walker, Felicity Langthorne, Mark Pembrey, Hannah Mackay, Lesley Ann-Rose, Michelle Cassar, Nicola Warwick, Nick Cross, Graeme Walker, Michael D.W. Paterson, Glenn Cruddas

www.gluegroup.org.uk

New Writing: Introduction for Carole Luby at Exsertus

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Carole Luby
Exsertus Project Space, Waygood at Harker's Building
548-580 Shields Road, Newcastle upon Tyne NE6 2UQ
Monday 19th March to Wednesday 4th April.

The performance consists of a daily blog and performances in the Exsertus space. The performances will run from Saturday 31st March to Tuesday 3rd April between 6-8pm culminating in one final event on Wednesday 4th April from 6-8pm.


















To be asked to feed someone with a spoon is to be asked to participate in a deliberately challenging and uncomfortable act. It asks you to interact with another person in a very intimate way. The performer does not lift her arms, only touching the spoon with her mouth. It is as if feeding a child or someone of extreme old age, when they are unable to physically to feed themselves. In this act, each participant is asked to confront the helplessness in another human.

The Polynesian spiritual concept of tapu governs many aspects of sacred and everyday life, in particular food its consumption. In some situations designated members of society, as sacred practicitioners are unable to feed themselves because they are in a state of absolute tapu, and to touch the food itself would represent a transgression of their tapu state. They have to be fed in a special way, so as not to contaminate the food by touching it themselves. It elevates the status of the food itself as a sacred object.

The atmosphere in the performance space here too is one of a sacred realm, with sheets of paper containing fragments of writing - spanning a large central circle in the middle of the space. These pieces of writing are not literal or concise but hint at the elements of the performance in which they are a part of. Some contain text from Carole’s weblog, a parallel ingredient to the performance. The words describe her time, removed from everyday life, in the space as being a kind of retreat, drawing from the monastic traditions of solitude and contemplation, but with a focus on hunger. Arranged in the circular shape they map a well-trodden path over the course of the residency.

Matthew Cowan

Conjunction 06, 4 July to 14 July 2006

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Conjunction 06
4 July to 14 July 2006

Opening Times: 3-7pm
Preview Night: 30/06/06 7pm-11pm
Featuring: Doug Fishbone, Laura White, Matthew Cowan

Red Gate Gallery

Red Gate Gallery 209a Coldharbour Lane London SW9 8RU Tel.: 0207 326 0993

Uk - London
Nearest Tube: Brixton
http://www.conjunctiongroup.org/

CONJUNCTION 06 - "Transpositions" Conjunction 06 is the Conjunction Group's 4th annual exhibition taking place at galleries in London, Birmingham and Stoke-on-Trent throughout July 2006. Conjunction 06 will give artists from across Britain the opportunity to show in cities where they have never worked before, allowing them to create new networks and engage with new audiences. This year's lead curators have used the theme "Transpositions" to call into question the values and associations assigned to place. The Exhibition runs from July 4th - July 28th at the Red Gate Gallery, Brixton, Seven-Seven, Londonfields, The Works Gallery, Birmingham, and the Conjunction AiR space, Stoke-on-Trent. more information can be found via www.conjunctiongroup.org or by emailing enquiries@conjunctiongroup.org