IMT Gallery

Laura Pawela – Sweet Heart Now Grown So Cold

Mark — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 16:44:37 +0000

Still from ‘E.O.D.’, 2011

Laura Pawela – Sweet Heart Now Grown So Cold
20th April – 20th May 2012
Late Opening: Thursday 3rd May until 9pm

Laura Pawela, the Warsaw-based multidisciplinary artist, has joined IMT Gallery for her second solo exhibition of work in the UK.

Sweet Heart Now Grown So Cold is an exhibition of major works made by the artist over the last five years, and unseen in the UK. Specially selected to highlight themes of metamorphosis, this collection spans video, sculpture and drawing and includes a new site-specific installation.

The works in Sweet Heart Now Grown So Cold are connected by motifs that have appeared over the course of her significant contribution to contemporary art. Shifts in materials present a view of Pawela’s practice as an elemental collage of states in continuous transformation. Wisps of smoke in the video Smoke (2008) seem to reappear as hair in Untitled (2009) or as a pool of urine in Sketch for the Study of Urine on a Street (2009).

Laura Pawela was born in Rybnik, Poland in 1977. She studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts, Wroclaw and at the Institute of Art, University of Opole. She has exhibited extensively in Poland and abroad including BWA, Wroclaw; Gallery of Contemporary Arts, Opole; the National Museum, Warsaw; Centre Européen d’Actions Artistiques Contemporaines, Strasbourg; Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin; the National Brukenthal Museum, Sibiu and the Centre of Contemporary Arts, Moscow. She has recently undertaken a residency at the Triangle Arts Association in New York, and lives and works in Warsaw, Poland.

Laura Pawela – Sweet Heart Now Grown So Cold has been made possible with the support of the Adam Mickiewicz Institute.

Carlos Noronha Feio – Plant Life of the Pacific World

Mark — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 13:28:26 +0000

‘Plant Life of the Pacific World figure 83: Lantana camara’, 2011

Carlos Noronha Feio – Plant Life of the Pacific World
2nd March – 8th April 2012
Late Opening: Thursday 5th April until 9pm

IMT Gallery is pleased to announce Carlos Noronha Feio’s first solo exhibition at the gallery.

Plant Life of the Pacific World is a exhibition of delicate flower and plant forms assembled from collaged photographs of nuclear explosions, each classified in accordance with American botanist E. D. Merrill’s book from which the exhibition takes its name. In this new work Noronha Feio plays with the relationships between beauty, conflict, the foreign and the domestic.

Originally published for military use in 1945, Plant Life of the Pacific World has been transformed by Noronha Feio from Merrill’s dry classification of flora into an explosive revelry of intense, amoebic forms. The work defuses one of the most recognisable symbols of destruction, horror and power to create a sumptuous taxonomy combining the nuclear mutations of popular fiction, the evolutionary mutations of Darwin’s Galapagos and an imagined botany of Bikini Atoll, whose use as nuclear testing grounds followed the book’s publication.

At a time when the debate on copyright of audio-visual material is in the public consciousness with the consideration of the US online piracy bill, Noronha Feio’s collages are also a pertinent exploration of the transformation in meaning through the reuse of imagery. Amongst the more organic structures and those that almost resemble insignia and geometric designs, the work presents a constant interplay between chaos and order, growth and organisation, the handmade and the appropriated.

Carlos Noronha Feio is a multimedia artist whose works explore cultural, local and global identities and the instability of meaning. He has exhibited and performed widely in the UK and abroad including the Whitechapel Gallery, London; the National Centre for Contemporary Art, Moscow; Navicula Artis, Saint Petersburg; Milton Keynes Gallery, Milton Keynes; Colchester Art Centre, Colchester; Abrons Art Centre, New York; Museu Nogueira da Silva, Braga; Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian and Fundação EDP in Lisbon and Centro cultural Helio Oiticica in Rio de Janeiro.

David Burrows – Night is also a Sun: G-lbl Hystr-c P-nc J-peg

Mark — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 12:38:58 +0000

‘Extinction Diagram (Infected)’, 2011

David Burrows – Night is also a Sun: G-lbl Hystr-c P-nc J-peg
13th January – 12th February 2012
Late Opening: Thursday 2nd February until 9pm

IMT Gallery is pleased to announce David Burrows’ first solo exhibition at the gallery.

Night is also a Sun: G-lbl Hystr-c P-nc J-peg is an exhibition of hand-cut paper cut-outs, mobiles and audio-visual work that addresses viral mutation, propagation, repetition and collapse. A collision between visual styles, the artifice of pictograms and the characteristics of the handmade is staged through mixing the analogue and the digital.

The exhibition has one proposition: ‘Pain is also joy, curse is also a blessing, night is also a sun…’ That is, the sun – an analogy for enlightenment – is eclipsed by the intensity of its after-image, (absolute vision is blind and blinding). The exhibited work draws upon traditional, folk and mass media artifacts such as Halloween silhouettes, Chinese paper cuts and flow diagrams and presents search-engine trash as good fortune charms, sigils and diagrams and symbols of anxiety and aspiration.

Burrows has exhibited extensively in the UK and abroad including the Chisenhale Gallery London, Arts Space Sidney, Museum of Art Marrakesh, Star Space Shanghai, Circulo des Bellas Artes, Madrid and the Mori Art Museum Tokyo. He participated in Macro/Micro: British Art 1996 – 2002, Kunsthalle Mucsarnok, Budapest. In addition to his solo art practice Burrows has often worked in collaboration, including collaborations with the artists’ group BANK, Bob & Roberta Smith and DJ Simpson. Since 2005, David Burrows has been collaborating with Simon O’Sullivan to produce the performance-fiction Plastique Fantastique, which has exhibited or performed at venues that include IMT Gallery London, Akershus Kunstsenter Lillestrom, Alice Day Gallery Brussels,Tate Britain and the Royal Academy of the Arts London. Burrows was selected for Becks Futures at the ICA in 2001 and received a Paul Hamlyn Visual Artists Award in 2003.

Errant Bodies Book Launch

Mark — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 12:53:41 +0000

Carrie Bodle, ‘Sonification / Listening Up’, 2005

Errant Bodies Book Launch
Friday 25th November 6:00 – 9:00pm

To coincide with Love is Colder than Death IMT Gallery are hosting a book launch of new titles by Errant Bodies including the second volume of Site of Sound: Of Architecture and the Ear.

The event will include a performative lecture by artist and writer Brandon LaBelle, whose solo exhibition Notes Toward a Sketch of a Sonic Body took place at IMT Gallery earlier this year.

Errant Bodies has been developing publishing projects since 1995. Since this time, it has been dedicated to supporting diverse discourses and projects in the fields of sonic and spatial practices, auditory culture and performativity, and experimental writing. The project further aims to consider the specifics of location, context and media, and the co-productive details generated from cultural work and its place, through site-based research, collective actions and collaborative projects.

Gordon Shrigley – Love is Colder than Death

Mark — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 09:52:14 +0000

‘Marker Drawing’, 2011

Gordon Shrigley – Love is Colder than Death
4th November – 11th December 2011
Open Thursday – Sunday 12 – 6pm

IMT Gallery is proud to present Gordon Shrigley’s Love is Colder than Death, a six-year investigation into Drawing and the Language of Line.

In 2001 Shrigley began a project to map out a lexicography of line: “At a certain point I felt I needed to relearn how to draw from scratch by concentrating on the simplest possible type of mark: the horizontal line and seeing where this would lead me.”

Love is Colder than Death follows this quixotic journey through different practices and modes of making, tracing lines between expressive drawing, architectural draughtsmanship, text and the tally mark; overlapping the signification of mark-making in different systems of communication.

At one point sketchbooks preserved in vitrines like museum artefacts contain years of lines. They sit in front of large pencil drawings, extraordinary works composed of individually drawn, straight horizontal lines forming a block of graphite that form a monument to shrigley’s conception of how conscious has developed through the engagement with the mark.

As the work progressed it began to incorporate the accidents of materials and the frustrations of external forces: the series of identical sketchbooks containing scores of horizontal line drawings abruptly changes in size when the only factory manufacturing them burns to the ground. Pages from different years reveal moments of frustration and of calm that, for Shrigley, are suggestive of contemporaneous personal events, like a symbolic polygraph through time.

Alongside these are text works, an architectural model for his forthcoming redesign of an East End gallery and a series of filmed interviews of artist filmmakers directed by Shrigley, into what it means to be a maker of the visual. The last of these are single takes of artists discussing their works in front of a motionless camera. The films play like talking heads or Andy Warhol’s screen tests, with an air of the Dogma 95 manifesto. Unedited they are stark and revealing documents of artists communicating their ideas and their struggle for meaning.

Gordon Shrigley studied at the University of Westminster and the Slade School of Fine Art. He has exhibited in the UK and abroad including Fruehsorge Contemporary Drawing, Berlin; the Musée d’art Moderne, Saint-Etienne and the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart. He has published a number of artists’ books and art texts with Edition Solitude, Stuttgart; Monaco Magazine, London and Cardboard Folly, Liverpool. He was selected for an artist in residency at the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart in 1998 and at Hospitalfield House, Arbroath in 2000. His work is held in collections including the Staatsgalerie drawing and print collection, Stuttgart; Akademie Schloss Solitude archive, Stuttgart and the Musée d’art Moderne, Saint-Etienne.

Errant Bodies Book Launch and Talk
Friday 25th November 6:00 – 9:00pm

To coincide with Love is Colder than Death was a book launch of new titles by Brandon LaBelle’s Errant Bodies Publishing including the second volume of Site of Sound: Of Architecture and the Ear. Read on…

Epilogues: It Started with a Car Crash – Curator’s Tour with Charles Danby

Mark — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 16:06:51 +0000

Thomas Raat
Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue 2, 2011

Epilogues: It Started with a Car Crash
Curator’s Tour with Charles Danby
Saturday 15 October 11am

Curator-led tour of the exhibition Epilogues: It Started With A Car Crash at IMT Gallery. Introducing the work and practice of the five artists in the exhibition along with the wider aspects of the project through event and published format.

Free entry

Epilogues: It Started With A Car Crash is curated by Charles Danby and supported by the Arts Council England, OCA: Office for Contemporary Art Norway and 20 Projects.

It Started With A Car Crash: Alternative Educational Road Tour

Mark — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 15:53:20 +0000

IMT Gallery and 20 Projects present…
It Started With A Car Crash: Alternative Educational Road Tour
Tuesday 18 October 2:00 – 8:00pm
At the Slade Research Centre

The Bruce High Quality Foundation in Conversation with UK groups and collectives. Part of the exhibition Epilogues: It Started With A Car Crash at IMT Gallery curated by Charles Danby.

Free entry but places are limited. Please email roadtrip@20projects.co.uk to reserve a place.

Inspiring and enabling arts students to define the future of their own educational experience…

It Started With A Car Crash: Alternative Educational Road Tour seeks to open up a debate around alternative networks of education and artwork dissemination. The Bruce High Quality Foundation set up their own university in 2009 and in 2011 they embarked on a coast-to-coast road trip of America visiting educational institutions, project spaces, groups and individuals, documented in their work Teach 4 Amerika*. This is presented through an event in which the Bruce High Quality Foundation will be joined by UK based groups and collectives to share ideas on arts education.

The Bruce High Quality Foundation / The Free School / Arts Against Cuts / The Kurt Schwitters DIY School / David Burrows / This Is Not A School / The New International School

The event will be live-pressed by The Ladies of the Press with edited material being added to the publication It Started With A Car Crash.

The Slade School of Fine Art
Slade Research Centre
Woburn Square
London WC1H 0AB

Epilogues: It Started With A Car Crash is curated by Charles Danby and supported by the Arts Council England, OCA: Office for Contemporary Art Norway and 20 Projects.

*Teach 4 Amerika was produced in collaboration with Creative Time. Teach 4 Amerika is not affiliated with or endorsed by Teach For America.

Pigeon Magazine launch and film screening

Mark — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 12:56:24 +0000

Pigeon Magazine launch and film screening
Saturday 24th September 6pm – 9pm

As part of Epilogues: It Started with a Car Crash and Artist Books Weekend, Pigeon Magazine will launch their first published issue ‘Studio’, casting a perceptive eye over the role of the studio within current changing modes of artistic practice.

‘Studio’ is devoted to the relationship of artists to their places of work; mapping what an artist can and cannot be without their studio. The frustration of a removed physical studio space within the educational environment has led Pigeon to reach for a broader understanding of the very term studio.

In the late 1960s artists questioned and overturned the traditional modes of production, circulation and reception of artworks causing the notion of the studio to gradually diminish. The diffusion of the artistic workplace across globalised networks has led to the pervasive acknowledgment of the ‘post-studio’ era. In the case of the post-studio Pigeon considers the lengths to which the term does justice to the current nature of the space and place of art production. There is an ongoing debate within art education about the necessity and significance of providing art students with a studio. In an era where students work ever more systematically, does an architectural or institutional workspace remain valid?

Pigeon questions the connection between the artist and the physical space of their activity. Pigeon ask us to pay the studio a visit, to consider the innumerable spaces where artists are at work, creating along the way a studio of image, text, paper and glue.

Contributors include Mateus Domingos, Mike Stubbs, Leo Powell and Vanilla Galleries.

Alongside the launch, Pigeon present a connected film series of ‘moving portraits’ inviting viewers to enter the usually private workspaces of artists including Bill Culbert and Mike Stubbs. Unexpected and unforeseen moments are captured, projecting Pigeon’s perception of the artists at work, their studios and the transition of their work from the studio to public presentation.

Pigeon Magazine
Artist Books Weekend

As part of Epilogues: It Started With A Car Crash the event is supported by the Arts Council England, OCA: Office for Contemporary Art Norway and 20 Projects.

Epilogues: It Started With A Car Crash

Mark — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 12:34:59 +0000

The Bruce High Quality Foundation
The Gate, not the idea of the Thing but the Thing itself, 2005

Epilogues: It Started With A Car Crash
17th September – 23rd October 2011
Curator’s talk with Charles Danby: Saturday 15th October 11am

The Bruce High Quality Foundation
Ray Johnson
Alastair MacKinven
Thomas Raat
Vibeke Tandberg
Curated by Charles Danby

Epilogues: It Started With A Car Crash examined how artists address the contexts, ideologies, and histories that surround them in the work of their contemporaries and predecessors.

The exhibition looked at the nature of archives, ideas of dialogue and exchange, and of education both inside and against educational institutions; a timely response to today’s climate of cultural and institutional instability.

Vibeke Tandberg’s works, produced across multiple media, cut through handed-down, inherited, and culturally generated mythologies of gender and identity. Her video work Old Man going up and down a Staircase (2003), showed a manipulated self-portrait (whilst pregnant) of the artist dressed as an old man, connect through multiple channels to the work, lifestyle, and myth making of Marcel Duchamp, whilst the silhouetted portraits from her more recent (2010) Winehouse Variation (Amy) works add further dimension to this interplay.

Alongside was a new and significant work by Thomas Raat, a 1:1 scale replica in vinyl adhesive of Barnett Newman’s Who’s afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III (1966-67) following its vandalism at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam in 1986. An extension of an earlier series (from 2006), Thomas Raat shows the slashes to be irreversible marks that confront and collapse ideas of singular and stationary origin. Also showing by Thomas Raat is the work, Das Sprechen (2010) which is a turnaround of the celebrated piece Das Schweigen von Marcel Duchamp wird Überbewertet (The Silence Of Marcel Duchamp Is Overrated) (1964) by Josef Beuys.

Duchamp remained a haunting presence and recurring point of focus for Ray Johnson who, through Black Mountain College and the New York Correspondence School, challenged institutional orthodoxies and initiated the mail art programme. Epilogues: It Started With A Car Crash included selected, unseen mail art pieces that highlight the control, sharpness and play of Johnson’s conversational exchange and reflect the connective nature of his legacy to other works in the exhibition.

Alastair MacKinven’s All the things you could be now if Robert Smithson’s wife was your mother (2008) is an archival record of a performance that restages the making of Nancy Holt’s earthwork Star Crossed (1979). In conjunction with its title the work concludes as the artist crawls naked through the work, contesting the agency of inheritance and handed down futures.

Nancy Holt’s husband Robert Smithson also features in works by The Bruce High Quality Foundation. The Gate (2005) is a documented performance in which the Collective set about installing a scale replica of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s The Gates (2005) onto Robert Smithson’s Floating Island to Travel around Manhattan Island (1970/2005). The Collective’s work draws on the circumstance of two unrelated works presented in New York in 2005.

In conjunction with Epilogues: It Started With A Car Crash there was the offsite event It Started With A Car Crash: Alternative Educational Road Tour at the Slade Research Centre and a Pigeon Magazine launch and film screening at IMT Gallery in association with the Artist Books Weekend:

Pigeon Magazine launch and film screening
Saturday 24th September 6pm – 9pm

Pigeon Magazine launched their first published issue, casting a perceptive eye over the role of the studio within current changing modes of artistic practice. Read on…

It Started With A Car Crash: Alternative Educational Road Tour
Tuesday 18th October 2pm – 8pm at Slade Research Centre, Woburn Square, London WC1H 0AB
Read on…

It Started With A Car Crash: Alternative Educational Road Tour sought to open up a debate around alternative networks of arts education and artwork dissemination. The Bruce High Quality Foundation set up their own University in 2009, and in 2011 they embarked on a coast-to-coast road trip of America visiting educational institutions, project spaces, groups and individuals, documented in their work Teach4Amerika (2011). This was presented through the event in which the Bruce High Quality Foundation was joined by UK based groups and collectives including the Kurt Schwitters Summer School to open and share ideas on arts education.

Also accompanying Epilogues: It Started With A Car Crash is It Started With A Car Crash a publication produced from invited contributions from publishing collectives, zine artists, and writers. Contributors include Pigeon Magazine, The Ladies of the Press, IRP and ZEENE.

Epilogues: It Started With A Car Crash was curated by Charles Danby and supported by the Arts Council England, OCA: Office for Contemporary Art Norway and 20 Projects.

Lucy Beech and Edward Thomasson – TWIST

Mark — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 16:10:29 +0000

’7 Year Itch’, 2011
Performed at Bloomsbury Theatre, London

Lucy Beech and Edward Thomasson – TWIST
Thursday 4th August 6:00 – 9:00pm

IMT Gallery is pleased to present ‘TWIST’, a new performance by London based artists Lucy Beech and Edward Thomasson.

TWIST, 2011 focuses on the potential that performed actions have in displaying meaning and communicating narratives. A Solo performer is observed and later joined by a small group in a movement based presentation within the gallery space. Meandering between Chiropractory, First Aid and Latin dance, and underscored with live sound construction, TWIST presents movement as a form of therapeutic release, a strategy that can be learnt through instruction and performed in the safety of one another’s company.

Collaboratively Beech and Thomasson’s practice recognises the limitless possibility and potential in the unsettling distance between the audience and ‘stage’. They utilise repetitive body based movement and employ the rhetoric of theatre as a strategy to intensify this gap rendering the audience unable to repose into one mode of experience.

Beech and Thomasson’s recent collaborations include: 7 Year Itch, More Soup and Tart, Barbican Theatre, London; Holding it Together, Night and Day, Modern Art Oxford; The Cigarette Game, Testing Ground: Live, Zabludowicz Collection, London and in Making Mistakes at Paradise Row, London.

Lucy Beech and Edward Thomasson’s exhibition ‘One Another’s Company‘ is currently showing at the gallery until the 21st August 2011.

Supported by the Arts Council England.