10 May – 30 June 2012

Preview: Wednesday 9 May 5:30-7:30

Gallery hours: Wed – Sat 12-5pm

Jock Mooney constructs a world populated by grotesque characters, weird animals, lurid flowers and morphed effigies of historical, mythical and religious figures. Equally bizarre objects, composed of fingers, bones and fried eggs, take the form of memorial wreaths. Mooney creates a carnivalesque horror show that raises a distorted mirror to the modern world. Junk food, pop icons, religion, history, and art are all fair game, and Mooney takes no prisoners.

His figures and objects, exquisitely sculpted from plastic modelling clay and hand painted in high gloss, are often perched defiantly on plinths constructed from everyday materials, such as polystyrene takeaway cartons. With their exaggerated features, they wave a satirical finger at the traditional sculptural portraits and icons of high art, as well as the ceramic ornaments lovingly arrayed in glass-fronted cabinets in countless domestic parlours.

Mooney’s drawings are equally uncompromising, offering similarly monstrous visions of apocalypse. In his pen and ink drawings, distorted human and animal skulls grimace and howl, their empty sockets stare mindlessly at us. It’s only when we examine them closely we see they are composed of writhing fingers and hands – as gracefully drawn as those of angels in a mediaeval manuscript – stretched out in apparent supplication, as if some of the characters in Mooney’s never-ending danse macabre have succumbed to despair, drowning in madness.

Fascinated in the varying ways in which societies visually memorialise death – in particular the gaudy ceramic wreaths seen in French graveyards – Mooney’s own wreaths are collaged from hand drawn and coloured images, cut out of card, and combined and contrasted in a variety of formations. Composed of dismembered body parts and the debris of everyday life, stray fingers dance with severed heads, swirling in a wild vortex, acting as both momento mori and doorways into some terrible void.

There is no pretence or politeness here, instead we are presented with an eclectic, unashamedly alternative view of the world. The artist asserts truly lateral thinking, subversive and unique. Visually informed by both high and low culture – from pop art, underground comic books of the 1960s and manga, to pastoral landscapes, Japanese prints and nursery rhymes – all Mooney’s work shares the same imaginative manipulation of materials, intensity of labour, and quirky outlook that is equally disturbing and endearing.

Jock Mooney was born in Edinburgh, in 1982, and currently lives in London. He studied at Edinburgh College of Art, 2000-04. He has recently finished work on a collaboration with animator Alisdair Brotherston as part of a contribution to the film based on A Liar’s Autobiography: Volume VI, the autobiography of the late Graham Chapman of ‘Monty Python’, due for cinema release later this year. ‘The Eyes Turn’d Inward for the Nightmare was Real’ is Mooney’s third solo exhibition for Vane. Recent group exhibitions include ‘THE FUTURE CAN WAIT presents: Polemically Small’, Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, California, ‘Pile’, Chapter, Cardiff (2011), ‘Deadpan’, The Royal Standard, Liverpool, ‘Laboratory’, Jerwood Space, London (2010), ‘Strange days and some flowers’, Storey Gallery, Lancaster, and ‘Rotate’, Contemporary Art Society, London (2009). Solo exhibitions include ‘A Show Withdrawn’, Galleri 5, Lund, Sweden (2008), and ‘Funland was no more’, Gimpel Fils, London (2007).

http://www.vane.org.uk/

Vane
First Floor, Commercial Union House
39 Pilgrim Street
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE1 6QE
UK

T: +44 (0) 191 261 8281

Private View: Friday 20th January, 6-9pm

Exhibition Continues: Jan 21st – Feb 12th

Cedric Christie – Alasdair Duncan – Gerard Hemsworth
Karen Henderson – Ben Woodeson

The American architect Louis Sullivan’s now famous maxim ‘Form follows function’ was one of the primary principles of Modernist architecture and design, and contributed to the geometric reductivism of Modernist painting and sculpture. This language has been revisited a number of times since, but recently artists have responded more irreverently. The result has been to allow very non-Modernists elements into the paradigm: fantasy, absurdity and humour, to re-claim and enrich this once hallowed ground. Some of the artists begin with function and allow its failure to become its form, while others create forms that can only aspire to function.

Cedric Christie’s Phoenix, a giant curvature comprising of a steel exoskeleton and snooker ball anatomies, brazenly wraps itself around the space that it occupies the playfulness of Christie’s materials and also suggests the works’ debasement of the sacrosanct ideology of Modernist sculpture. De-mythologised, the piece lurches onto the horizontal; a movement from wall to floor that is a literal and figurative ‘bringing down’ of monumental form.
In the work that is made of scaffold tubes the aim is to remove scale from a material that is associated with a particular scale and development. To allow the form to become a support for colour and the surface to become space. Is the colour holding the shape, or the shape holding the colour.

Alasdair Duncan makes Signs for the Future (and designs for such). His signs are stand-ins, signifying things that do not yet exist: not futurological predictions, rather they are emblems of the not yet imagined. Duncan produces colour-saturated graphics applied across a variety of media. Duncan is broadly interested in making art that addresses the unknown and unknowable not without ambivalence, but as presenting positive, progressive opportunity.
Duncan’s pieces are titled in the language of Je Zaum. Zaum (pronounced Za-oom) was a language coined by the Russian Futurist poets Velimir Khlebnikov and Alexei Krucheykh, combining the Russian prefix за “beyond, behind” and the noun ум “the mind, nous”. Zaum is described as a universal language, a language of indeterminate meaning that stands in for thoughts yet to be conceived.

Karen Henderson’s current work has been informed by research into visual strategies for spatial occupation. She has been looking at camouflage as strategies of design which are intended to complicate how an object in an environment is read, misread or visually erased in order to understand how objects can occupy space in more tenuous and temporal ways. Henderson is interested in the point where an object integrates with a space and how this succeeds or fails. This body of work includes a group of objects which draw on the Dazzle camouflage designs employed during WWI to break up the visual coherence of large targets.
Henderson is interested in how objects take up space and interrupt our visual field and in how much effort is required for this to happen over longer periods of time. The investment necessary seems to have political potential and how space is occupied and claimed and how objects are implicated in these actions, are central questions.

Gerard Hemsworth’s paintings are disconcerting and provocative in an odd, slightly uncomfortable way. He brings together signs and representations derived from modernist art alongside and integrated with signs and representations of cartoon like images derived from children’s colouring in books. Presenting pictorial and ideological contradictions to felicitate critical engagement. These representational works have the familiarity of both modernist painting and storybook pictures.
He has developed a project that has allowed him to undermine the seriousness of high modernist art and cultural values, whiles at the same time providing a space that questions its possibility. His paintings are both insistent and subversive and question the values and assumptions that the viewer brings to the work.

Ben Woodeson’s works are deliberately confrontational; the pieces confront both the viewer and the exhibiting institution with their real or implied activity and consequences. The works are performative; they inhabit a particular moment of possible action and subsequent reaction. Their physicality aims to instigate an intense and visceral relationship with the viewer and the gallery architecture. Threatened ripples of consequence are sent throughout the sculptures and audience alike. Manipulating everyday materials within a space, the works keep the viewer poised in a state of slight suspense, challenging them to respond to a unique and evolving environment of cause and effect. The works spin, roll, wobble, fall, flick, collapse, shatter and even ignite… but when?
Since 2009 Woodeson has been making the overtly confrontational Health and Safety Violation series; some works are deliberately dangerous, others only sound it…

Kerstin Drechsel’s investigation of everyday culture, artistic production and individual taste is orientated towards the rhythms of popular music, film and daily occurrences. From transvestites to sex club devotees, office workers to nuclear protestors, Drechsel captures intimate personal moments of individuals or sub-culture groups expressing or identifying themselves through their clandestine rituals or in the specific environments they create around themselves.

‘If you close the door’ is Kerstin Drechsel’s second solo exhibition at Vane. Based on several photo sessions with women friends, Drechsel’s most recent works explore lesbian club culture and thematise the darkroom as a semi-public place of erotic and intimate encounters. The focus is equally on the place itself and the bodies that move within it.

The subject of ‘If you close the door’ is intertwined with the instinctive reaction of the viewer to position themselves as a voyeur. Drechsel’s paintings show women and architectural elements in ever new configurations, details, lighting conditions and perspectives. As an installation, ‘If you close the door’ transfers the mechanisms of the sex club darkroom into the exhibition space. The reduced, sexual functionality of the ambience is juxtaposed with complex existential feelings, fears and longings, all of which combine to create the possibility of intimacy, physical fulfilment and even love, as well as that of loneliness and emotional hurt. In the interplay between authenticity and enactment, Drechsel’s paintings take up female pornographic stereotypes and at the same time undermine them by making them ambiguous. Just as the photographic sources for her paintings are neither completely staged nor documentary, the paintings change depending on the moods and relationships depicted, with their style oscillating between hard surfaces and lines, between colour gradients and gestural movements.

A new artist’s monograph, ‘Heat Storage Systems’, published by Hatje-Cantz Verlag, featuring work from the exhibition is available. With texts in German and English by Birgit Effinger, Jack Halberstam, Angela McRobbie, Jutta von Zitzewitz, and a foreword by Dieta Sixt. ISBN 978-3-7757-3251-2

Heat Storage Systems is available at the special launch price of £25 until Saturday 17 March (normal price £33).

The publication, along with a selection of limited edition prints, catalogues and work by Vane artists is available to buy online at www.vane.org.uk/shop

http://www.vane.org.uk/

The Hammersmith Morris Men celebrated the 50th anniversary of the dance ‘Hammersmith Flyover’ by performing on the half-mile stretch of elevated road that inspired it.

The dance was written for the group by John Kirkpatrick in 1962 – the same year the flyover was completed.

It was closed just before Christmas so rusty cables could be repaired.
Last year, Morris dancers were dismayed to discover the ancient folk tradition had been overlooked for the opening ceremony at the London Olympics.

Barry Goodman, president of the Morris Federation, called the decision ‘appalling’, while fans of the dance said they intend to organise flashmobs, which will suddenly leap into action among crowds of spectators.

The film opens on a montage that shows the spirit of the early 60s in New York City. The creative boom in advertising design the artists hang outs like the Cedar Bar, where they would go to find warmth on cold nights. They were all there Jack Kerouac, Dennis Hopper, Jackson Pollock…. a rampant stream of creativity that recalls Paris in the first half of the century. A community of artists.

Henry Geldzahler, an art historian fresh out of Yale and Harvard, enters the New York scene in 1960, the year JFK was elected. These were optimistic and exciting times. Artists, living in cheap downtown lofts were breaking from the influence of Europe and Abstract Expressionism. Something entirely new was happening. Something purely American.

The 60s were experimental times. All assumptions were questioned and rules broken. The vanguard audience went to all the openings, happenings and parties, blending the social world and the art scene. There were new voices of smart young people Beat poets, James Dean, New Wave films, new appliances and cars, and product design and advertising. Cheap rents and a street lifestyle could let anyone get started and do their thing. And Henry quickly became a familiar figure downtown.

In 1970, Henry Geldzahler, the young curator of contemporary art since 1962 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, mounted the largest exhibition of modern art ever shown at the museum: New York Painting and Sculpture 1940-1970. Taking over the 18th and 19th century painting and sculpture galleries, he exhibited over 400 works of art by living American painters, including Chamberlain, Di Suvero, Flavin, Frankenthaler, Johns, Kelly, Kline, Noland, Oldenberg, Olitsky, Pollock, Poons, Rauschenberg, Rothko, Lichtenstein, Motherwell, Newman, Segal, Stella, and Warhol.

In part, that centennial show changed the direction of the museums commitment to living artists and at the same time brought in a new public interested in modern art. Henry gave American art its stamp of approval. American painting was now not just good, but important and a good investment.

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Lanfranchi’s Memorial Discotheque was Sydney’s favourite artist-run space, situated on the second level of an inner city warehouse. Lanfranchi’s doubled as a residence and unauthorised performance venue for five years, growing from unlikely beginnings to become what director Neil Armfield (Candy, Belvoir St Theatre) described as a ‘major strand of our city’s cultural DNA’. The decaying warehouse hosted hundreds of shows and was an accessible starting point for Sydney’s emerging performers, artists and musicians. That is, until property development gets in the way and Lanfranchi’s residents are given sixty days to vacate the building.

The story of Lanfranchi’s is told through ex-residents such as Lucas Abela (Justice Yeldham); an experimental musician who plays amplified sheets of broken glass with his mouth. A show he developed at Lanfranchi’s and has since performed in more than forty countries. Others soon to be displaced include Dorkbot; a community of electrical engineering artists, the bastard cover band Winner, experimental theatre-comedy group Cab Sav and the Marrickville Jelly Wrestling Federation.

Despite the impending eviction, the parties roll on during the final days of Lanfranchi’s, until the building’s owners and police intervene. But with no replacement, and with Sydney’s vibrant underground art communities fractured, where will the city breed its cultural DNA?

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In the early decades of the twentieth century, a storm of modernism swept through the art worlds of the West, uprooting centuries of tradition in the visual arts, music, literature, dance, theatre and beyond. The epicentre of this storm was Paris, France. Paris The Luminous Years – Toward the Making of the Modern explores a unique moment in Paris from 1905 to 1930, decisive years for our contemporary culture when an international group including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall, Igor Stravinsky, Ernest Hemingway, Jean Cocteau, Gertrude Stein, Vaslav Nijinsky and Aaron Copland, among numerous others, revolutionised the direction of the modern arts.

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The verb to ‘curate’ is a recent addition to the lexicon of the art world. How has the role of the curator developed and, as the boundaries are increasingly blurred between the artist and the curator, is there a fundamental difference of position between artist and curator? Curator and writer Andrew Renton chairs the discussion with the Director of The Showroom Emily Pethick, Tate Britain Director Penelope Curtis, artist Steven Claydon and lecturer, writer and artist Pavel Buchler.

Video Art Manual, 2011 by Keren Cytter.

“the stuff masochistic art critics live for”.