Thursday, December 5, 2013

Motorcade/FlashParade National Open 2013

Thank you to all who came to the Private View of the third M/FP National Open, particularly Axel Wieder. Thanks once again to Axel, Roy Voss and Hannah Knox for making such an excellent selection, and to Charlotte Cousins for her brilliant curation of the show.

Many of the artists selected for the show were able to attend and it was a very great pleasure to present the prize of £500 to Lewis  Khan for his powerful photographs and video. Highly commended were Linda Taylor and Sarah McNulty.




Preview:  Thursday 5th December, 6pm - late                        

Prize announcement after 7pm

Exhibition Continues: 
Friday, Saturday, Sunday 6th, 7th & 8th;
Thursday 12th – Sunday 14th December
12-5pm daily

Selected by:
Axel Wieder
Roy Voss
Hannah Knox

Curated by:
Charlotte Cousins

Artists:
Chris Fordwoh
Linda Taylor
Sarah Wilton

We would like to thank everyone who entered this year's competition. The judges were hugely impressed with the quality of work being created across the country.

Helen Grant


                                 Neil Fuller


Lewk Wilmshurst


 Lewk Wilmshurst


 Sarah McNulty


Chris Fordwah


                        Zervou and Kerruish


                       Sarah McNulty


 Sarah McNulty


Elliot Conway


 Lewis Khan


Lewis Khan


 Elliot Conway


Clare Thornton


 Lewis Khan


Sarah Wilson


 Solveig Settemsdal


Sarah Wilton


 Polly Kelsall


Charlie Godet Thomas


 Linda Taylor


Elliott Conway, Charlie Godet Thomas, Linda Taylor


Lewk Wilmshurst, Sarah McNulty, Elliot Conway, Charlie Godet Thomas


Neil Fuller, Lewk Wilmshurst


Elliot Conway, Clare Thornton


 Sarah McNulty, Charlie Godet Thomas, Elliot Conway


Polly Kelsall, Helen Grant, Charlie Godet Thomas, Zervou and Kerruish, Elliot Conway


Wednesday, November 20, 2013

PASSING THE TIME


a solo show of new projection works by Rod Maclachlan




Private View:
Friday 22nd November      6pm-late
Exhibition continues Sat 23 and Sun 24 then Fri 29, Sat 30 and Sun 1st December 
12 mid-day - 5pm
or by appointment: 07956 408 829








Passing the Time is Maclachlan's first solo show bringing together a selection of recently developed 
works that play with analogue projection and the sculptural form. This combining of media reflects Maclachlan's preoccupation with the relationships between perception and imagination, the physical and the ethereal.

The resulting installations amplify the dynamics of objects in the round; their form, texture and the play of light on planes and surfaces.

He draws on the pictorial formats of still life and landscape and the use of repetitive, hypnotic movement, resulting in the works that explore materiality, entropy and cycles of time; evoking states somehow suspended between past, present and future.

For two new works, Maclachlan has taken inspiration from objects left by his late father. These items are explored using opaque-object (episcopic) projection. The artist uses this archaic technique due to its simplicity and immediacy, finding it the most direct and non-refrential process of mediation. The images are not illusionary as the reality and the image of that reality cannot be separated.

For more information visit www.rodmaclachlan.co.uk
  
Roderick Maclachlan (born 1974) lives and works in Bristol. Studied: BA (Hons) in Fine Art: Sculpture - Glasgow School of Art in 1996, MA Fine Art, University College Falmouth in 2008. His installation works have been experienced as part of Life's An Illusion Love is a Dream, Liverpool Royal Standard (2013) One-on One Festival, Battersea Arts Centre (2011) Inbetween Time, Arnolfini (2010), and Small World Fair at Metal in Southend-on-Sea (2010).

Collaborations include working with composer Hauschka for The Bristol Proms, Bristol Old Vic (2013), with artist Harminder Judge on Do What Thou Wilt, Spill Festival, The Barbican (2011) and with composer Roly Porter on Fall Back at Faster than Sound, Snape, Suffolk (2011).




Tuesday, November 5, 2013

I D SMEAR


A SOLO SHOW OF PAINTINGS, ASSEMBLAGES AND SCULPTURE AND DIGITAL PRINTS BY ANDREW LITTEN








  1. Private View: Friday 8th November 6pm till late
    with drinks, delicious curry and music



    Exhibition continues:

    Saturday 9, Sunday 10, Thursday 14, Friday 15,
    Saturday 16, Sunday 17:

    12 mid-day to 5pm



    Andrew Litten’s work stirs from the groin – that place of raw bestiality and tenderest compassion. It is the place we all fear; a place of the extreme duality and conflicting, barely controllable urges – a bipolarity of our human beast within. Like so many expressionistic artists, Gorge Baselitz comes to mind, in Andrew’s work the rawness is also the vulnerability. Andrew is searching for poetry, the poetry of living, loving, hurting and dying; the vulnerable, the powerful, the human.

    But there is a continuity to Andrew’s work in duality, contradiction and opposition; his work carries extreme experience; passion and flippancy; allure and repulsion. These qualities and Andrew’s sense of purpose have been influenced by the powerful poetry of Louise Bourgeois, the master of interpreting our human beast within.

    Text by Jane Boyer


    For Litten, as a figurative artist representing the human form, the manipulation of materials and the manipulation of identity are intrinsically linked. Perhaps subversive, tender, malevolent, compassionate – pure expression, which is not political or demographic or defined by taste, is at the heart of it all.

    Creativity is empowering and empathy is powerful - and the need to see raw human existence drives it all forward.





Monday, October 28, 2013

VEGAS LEGS


an exhibition of new works by Lewk Wilmshurst

Private View Saturday 2nd November from 6pm to 9pm

or by appointment 29th October to 3rd November: 07807 924 881

Including a MotorMouth peer crit at 6pm Saturday.. come and join the conversation!


MAYBE WE’RE HERE [TITLE?]


In the middle of a desert, colossal neon-lit fountains incongruously spit blasĂ© displays on the hour, every hour, fifty year-old palm trees grow thick with green, and 28oz beef steaks and buttery lobsters ooze over thousands of platters all day and all night.” 
L.Wilmshurst, 2012.

Against a narrative of constant setbacks I maintain control.
There are hillsides in the Lake District dedicated to maintaining ancient stock, including a breed of sheep whose fleece is worth less than 20p, and whose meat has long since fallen out of fashion, because I say so.
We have designed a world in which the natural is unclean and savage, exotic and distant, managed, and irresistibly consumable. From shopping malls inside cavernous casinos our most selfish desires are accommodated. I amass endless credit from shelves forever stocked, in supermarkets that never close. I have accepted that the oil will never run dry, and the mango tree will continue to drop fresh, ripe, Turner sunset-coloured fruits straight into my lap, year round.
We no longer need to watch the rich and famous living out our fantasies. We can stay at home, on the sofa, at the dinner table, and watch ordinary people instead. The fantastical and unrealistic is tantalisingly close. The screens tell me that everything is a little bit more real; a little more achievable. Perhaps if I watch enough other people doing it, one day it will be me on that tiny cell phone or jumbotron, doing those things to that pornstar while gambling everything I borrowed on the hope of being able to do it all again tomorrow.
Even when we lose we feel like we are winning.

Accompanying text by Trevor H Smith

Poster by Garry Edison Cook

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

 TOWER


  1.  Matthew Roy Arnold


     a solo show of sculpture with sound composed and designed by Daniel Cioccoloni









     Private View Friday 25th October 6pm till late

     Continuing Saturday 26th and Sunday 27th  October

     12 mid-day to 5pm














     It was unanimous - makers should make...... and so construction of the Tower began.

     During this time, discussions took place - the makers debated. All ideas were embraced  and moulded into the rock.

     Then it was complete, its original forms changed beyond use and recognition. The most  important thing though, is that it was made.




     The Tower is an immersive sculpture; you are invited to put your head inside and explore  the sculptures and paintings within.



     Arnold studied Fine Art at UWE then worked in television, for a time, as a prop maker to support his practice.  Much of his work looks at the nature and purpose of art and the role of the artist within society.




Sunday, October 6, 2013

PC WORLD

Motorcade/FlashParade is pleased to present

A solo show of animated works by DAVID THEOBALD - winner of the MFP National Open 2012

Private View Friday 11 October 6pm till late

Exhibition continues: Saturday 12, Sunday 13 then Thursday 17, Friday 18, Saturday 19 and Sunday 20 October - 12 mid-day to 5pm




Motorcade/FlashParade is very pleased to be showing the work of David Theobald. His animated video piece ‘Walking Holiday in Grindelwald’ won first prize in our second National Open last year. This solo show is part of his prize.

David Theobald accepts First Prize from George Ferguson

Today, location is not so much defined by geography, but by our position within the complex web of processes that make up contemporary society. ‘PC World’ presents a series of computer animated and photographic works that attempt to capture such a situation, caught in a perpetual state of transit where increasing complexity is often presented as the illusion of ‘progress’, their looping nature both mirroring the underlying technology used in their creation and the repetitive processes that seem central to the infrastructure of contemporary society. As the global economy lurches towards an uncertain future, these complex connections that form the basis of day-to-day existence seem ever more evident and ever more precarious.



David Theobald’s Productively Perverse ‘PC World’ 
an exhibition essay by Lilly Husbands


My advice is to keep watching. Wait until the joke appears and then fades, and stay until the seriousness settles in. This is a small test of endurance. You will have some time to think. You will share this time with the work before you: to think with, against or through it, as you like. But first you must keep watching. It is up to you.

Sometimes David Theobald’s animated works feel like structural avant-garde films that have been shot in the foreclosed and run-down parts of a Pixar film-world. Their resemblance to the high quality, colour-saturated hyperrealism of commercial computer-generated animations purposefully disarms us, playing with our lazy, ingrained expectations of pre-digested mainstream narrative entertainment only to actively defy the social and intellectual conformity promoted by what Adorno and Horkheimer famously called ‘the culture industry.’ Theobald draws from animation’s ability to enhance our perception of things to make us see beyond the humour, the entertainment, and even the subject’s banality into how it operates as an intelligently critical artwork that reflects on actualities in the real world. Ultimately, Theobald’s works’ clever senses of humour, glossy visual appeal, and mundane subject matters all belie the very serious critical and ethical motivations that undergird them. Indeed, humour, irony, and reflexivity are Theobald’s defences against a number of contemporary anxieties (from the unethical effects of anthropocentrism to late capitalist consumer culture’s excessive waste to the increasing sense of alienation and powerlessness brought about by globalized economies and digital technologies).

The intensive labour that goes into Theobald’s animations is perversely used to produce images of objects and experiences that we normally go out of our way to avoid seeing and experiencing. They often ‘take place’ in parts of that world that resemble what Marc AugĂ© has called ‘non-places,’ the locations of supermodernity which are characterised by their lack of character, by their prefabricated blandness whose cloned anonymity is simultaneously alien and familiar. (Not coincidently, many of his works make brilliant use of the soul-destroying effects of Muzak). He impishly invites us to spend potentially endless amounts of (looped) time with simulations of these unappealing non-places, creating ample space in which to begin exasperatedly contemplating the contemporary human condition. Theobald’s perverseness is productive. It opens up the potential for us to engage critically with certain aspects of our lives that we would normally be inclined to ignore or quickly forget. All of Our Agents Are Busy (2013), a 5 ½ minute continuous loop that Theobald describes simply as ‘digital purgatory,’ reminds us of the little moments of impotence that we face daily in our impersonal, hypermediated reality by aggressively accosting us with a sound collage of the irritating (and mildly insulting) automated voices that insist that they are ‘working hard to answer your call as quickly as possible.’ The red and green lights on the electronic panels that steadily blink throughout the work resemble an indecipherable, alien Morse code, and anyone who has ever had trouble with their broadband will recognize them as a symbol of the disconnect between our understanding of and our dependence upon the technologies that we use daily. We must meet the temporal demands of this piece in order to feel the full devastation at the heart of the work, as the compounded effect of the audio-visuals ultimately offers an overwhelming sense of the alienating nature of these particular aspects of our society.

In the works included in ‘PC World,’ Theobald has foregone the exciting potential for Deleuzian ‘gaseous perception’ offered by the flexible, dynamic qualities of an animated ‘virtual camera,’ instead opting for fixed, straightjacketed viewpoints that nevertheless offer physically and psychologically powerful experiences. For instance, The Power of Now (2012) is a particularly torturous piece, directing our gaze as it holds us in the confined space of an imagined dentist’s chair, compelling us to endure the terrible vicissitudes of numerous audio-visual indignities (in the forms of drab urban and office views, the bleakness of the revolving loan/lotto/luxury car advert, the insufferably plucky Muzak, and the alarming intensity of the dental drill). Named after Eckhart Tolle’s internationally bestselling guide to spiritual enlightenment that advocates ‘honouring the present’ as a route to self-enlightenment, The Power of Now challenges us to find anything existentially redeeming about this simultaneously unremarkable yet excruciating situation. We are tempted to wonder how the Buddha would remain enlightened and detached in such a scenario. (Would a true Zen master even bother to go to the dentist, I wonder?)

Finally, Theobald’s works can at times seem like philosophical thought experiments, showing us, for instance, how human absence narrates itself. Indeed, the visions he shares with us often seem to exist on the brink of embodiment, depicting object and animal ontologies that are typically ignored by or unavailable to human beings. In some works we are witness to the normally unseen lives of objects, begging the question of what it means to be something. On top of this, of course, is the understanding that the completely illusory fabrication and artistic manipulation of these animated images renders these glimpses into unobservable worlds ironic impossibilities. However, this impossibility does not detract from the deeply moral effort of asking us to imagine the world from alien perspectives, to see ourselves and the traces of our behaviours as they affect the things around us. For instance, in Jingle Bells (2013), Theobald’s refusal to succumb to conventional commercial animation’s anthropomorphizing tendencies plays with our desires to make meaning out of non human actions. As always with Theobalds’ work, we must decipher the work’s multiple layers of significance: we must see the still functional keyboard in Jingle Bells as a reference to the wasteful practices of capitalist cultures (such as planned obsolescence), we must see the slugs as simultaneously sentient, ‘autonomous’ beings, agents of narrative action, and the outcomes of programming and pixels. We must laugh at the joke that the slugs don’t know they’re playing music, and further, that Theobald has precisely programmed the work to look like the slugs don’t know they’re playing music.

We must at least smile, because if we don’t, we run the risk of crying.


About the Author: Lilly Husbands is a doctorate candidate in Film Studies at King’s College London. Her research is concerned with closely investigating contemporary North American and British works of experimental animation, focusing particularly on the varieties of non-normative aesthetic experience that such works offer spectators. She received her BA in Comparative Literature from Brown University in 2003 and completed her Film Studies Master’s Degree at KCL in 2008 and her Critical Methodologies Master’s Degree at KCL in 2009. Her interests include experimental cinema, animation and special effects, film aesthetics, film philosophy, spectatorship, and film music.