SOLO

This exhibition focuses on the work of nine women artists who primarily work in film, video and performance. They are all present in the work immersed in a solo reverie, acting out tasks and actions that range from the very bodily and visceral to the banal and distant. 

There is a connectivity between the works on display together due to the earnest endeavours and intimate obsessions of the artists and their shared engrossment in the materials they wield, whittle or balance.

‘If we think against the grain of the solo as discrete, we can begin to hear solo in collectivity – and not just by tracing influence in uni-directional lines of influence, but lines of influence or reverberation ….as involved in call and response, or read as imbricated in collective or choral actions, “solo” in some senses casts itself into the future as ‘becoming ensemble’…citing other work, co-opting other work, creating an action by acting or reacting, enacting or re-enacting, making of the single body a stage across which whole histories (the multitudes) are brought to bear’.

Rebecca Schneider ‘Solo Solo Solo’ 2008 After Criticism: New Responses to Art and Performance

Review:

http://hastingsonlinetimes.co.uk/arts-culture/visual-arts/going-solo

Opening Event

Kate Hawkin's performance The Bollocks caused a stir on the opening night of the SOLO exhibition on the 7th of September in St Leonards on sea. The act of displaying different gun firing stances, taking aim and shooting at an expanse of canvas with a paint ball gun was executed with great finesse and theatricality.

More news and images to follow soon...

ARTISTS

Louise Colbourne

Louise Colbourne graduated from the Slade in 2006 with an MFA in sculpture. She has exhibited her work internationally and developed a number of curatorial projects, to include the Big screen and Film Gallery at the Latitude festival.


Colbourne works primarily with film, video and sculpture, often embellishing the mundane with a visually monumental presence. The work has a ‘make-do and mend’ aesthetic combining humour with a more ominous content… There is also a strong sense of physicality through the movement of the figure, sculptural forms and the camera motion itself. Repetition in much of Colbourne’s work begins, with a certain temporal overlap, which echos and resonates according to an almost musical rhythm.

Jenny Baines

Pictured is a still from the 16mm film ‘Against the Tide’, I attempt to swim against a current that is too strong and I am repeatedly washed from the frame.

Also pictured is a still from the 16mm film ‘Tipping Point’.  A china plate spins precariously on a stick and as it falls, the film cuts. The action repeats, the plate spins, falling from the frame repeatedly. 

I use what could be defined as Sisyphean rules and tasks, performing them for the camera or suggesting them within how the work is exhibited. These actions can seem like a romantic response to, or an urge to escape from the space in which they are performed.

Bettina Buck

Bettina Buck (born 1974, Cologne) studied at the Academy of Media Arts, Cologne before completing an MA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, London. She was recently selected as one of twenty-five young artists for Art Cologne’s New Positions. Recently she has exhibited in Proposal (Nacht und Träume) for Stavanger, curated by Vincent Honoré, and with Sara Barker in Bettina Buck invites… at Mirko Mayer Gallery, Cologne.

"A figure stumbles across a tufted cliff-top field. She is abandoned in her Sisyphean task of dragging a dense bluish foam monolith, half-bleached yellow by the sun and storeroom-neglect, across a grassy terrain. The video is looped, her task endless. Her travails might be read as allegorical, for they appear otherwise without purpose: the foam is being taken nowhere, and its ungainliness appears designed specifically to impede the protagonist (performed by Bettina Buck herself) from making headway. This is the lot of the artist: the physical labour; the perverse logic of forcing mute objects into relational forms; the unwieldiness of interpretation…

…Like an homage to the wobbly inconsistency of home-movies, Interlude welcomes visual erratum. The horizon bounces up and down with the extreme zoom and lack of steady-cam technology; the air is electric with a tinnitus whistling that denotes audio-overload in the camera’s microphone. In fact, these elements are all quite deliberate. The sound levels have been post-processed to a steady cyclonic buzz, and that quivering zoom is carefully utilized to capture moments of gentle absurdity (in one scene, a kindly stranger carries her load, a dog running alongside them bucolically). Also, it recalls the edginess of her location on a cliff-edge and the imperative of gravity (the sky here plummets straight to the sea and her sculptural burden slumps  towards horizontality)...

... Buck’s works forever threaten to fall over in front of us, on us, or after we have left the gallery. The challenge is to feel relaxed about the mutability of such objects. After all, should the edifice collapse, we could simply learn to appreciate it anew – sit on its newly horizontal bulk or pick it up and trudge onwards, like the protagonist in Interlude."

Extract from Interlude by Colin Perry

Jayne Parker

Jayne Parker is an artist and filmmaker whose work has been widely shown, both nationally and internationally, in major art institutions, on television and in film and music festivals. In 2003 she was the recipient of the 1871 Fellowship, researching the relationship between music and film, hosted by the Ruskin School of Drawing, Oxford and the San Francisco Art Institute. In 2008 she completed Trilogy: Kettle's Yard, funded with the help of an AHRC Small Award and the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL and premiered at The Times BFI 52nd London Film Festival, October 2008. In 2011 she presented a retrospective of her films at the BFI Southbank as part of Maya Deren: 50 Years On, a celebration of the American film maker's life.

'K' 1989 13 mins b/w 16mm

Making external order out of an internal tangle.

(K. abbreviation of 'to knit')

Part 1: a woman pulls her intestine out of her mouth and lets it fall in a soft pile at her feet. Then she knits the intestine using only her arms.

Part 2: she stands on the edge of a pool and makes herself dive again and again.

'I bring out into the open all the things I have taken in that are not mine and thereby make room for something new. I make an external order out of an internal tangle.' - J.P.

Performer: Jayne Parker
Camera: Anna Campion
Sound: Sharon Morris
Director/editor/production Jayne Parker

Kate Hawkins

Kate Hawkins has exhibited internationally and performed her work at the Barbican Art Gallery, the ICA gallery, the Zoo Art Fair and Christies Auction house in London amongst many others.

For solo Kate will undertake a performance exploring the abstract expressionist ‘gesture’ as performative identity. Throughout the duration of the performance she will undertake her own abstract expressionist gesture using a large expanse of canvas (in the vein of Pollock) and a paint-ball gun. The performance will exist in two halves. The first will form an introduction to different styles of handgun shooting. The second will involve a demonstration of those styles using a series of choreographed, repeated gestures. Throughout, the repeated gestures will become increasingly abstract so that the individual shooting ‘styles’ no longer make any sense in their disrupted context, resulting in a dance of sorts.

Lisa Peachey

Lisa Peachey studied at De Montfort University, Leicester (1996), and The Slade School of Art, UCL,London (2006). Previous exhibitions include Latitude Contemporary Art, Suffolk (2012), Artist of the Day at Flowers Gallery Central, London, (2011), and the Jerwood Drawing Prize, London (2006). In 2008 she was shortlisted for the MaxMara Art Prize, in association with the Whitechapel Art Gallery. She has also curated projects, including ‘In its wake’, at Elevator Gallery, London, and has written texts for Moot, Nottingham and Site Gallery, Sheffield.

She lives and works in London.

‘One has never seen the world well if he has not dreamed what he was seeing. In a reverie of solitude, which increases the solitude of the dreamer, two depths pair off, reverberate in echoes which go from the depths of being of the world to a depth of being of the dreamer. Time is suspended. Time no longer has any yesterday and no longer any tomorrow. Time is engulfed in the double depth of the dreamer and the world. The World is so majestic that nothing any longer happens there, the world reposes in its tranquillity.’

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie pp118

Many of the works have concentrated on the idea of reverie, or the absent minded but lengthy rendering of 

an ‘image’.

The artist is seen whittling a rough Concorde from a lump of chalk. When the plane breaks and the artist continues
to whittle, questions arise as to whether it is the form that is being made that is important, the pile of chalk dust being drawn in her lap, or the reverie of the lengthy process in itself. The ambiguity between the formed representation and the formless, perfection and failure, the utopian dream of flight and the falling amorphousness of the dust, are played out, while the viewer is seduced into the action of creation.

Zoe Brown

Zoë Brown is a London based artist and film-maker. She studied BA Hons at the Slade and then went on to the Royal College to graduate in 2006. 

Brown experiments with the use of 16mm film using loops to create an experimentally expansive narrative which often features characters from a fantastical circus trope. Each character is locked in a solo performance damned to repeat each action, eternally oblivious of the other.

Bronwyn Platten

“Meeting Nude Woman Walking on Balls (after Hans Baldung Grien) 1514”

I am wanting to express to you a range of thoughts and ideas I have had in relation to both the work here by Hans Baldung Grien,  ‘Nude Woman Walking on Balls’ from 1514 and my own performed response, ‘Meeting Nude Woman Walking on Balls’ ( video still above).

I have been fascinated by this image (gesture at image of Grien’s) for some twenty years. It seems to tell so many stories. What I first reacted to and what still haunts me remains the arcane strangeness of a naked woman pictured walking with balls strapped to her feet. It is a mystery – why did the artist, Hans Baldung Grien in 1514 draw a woman this way. What was he trying to say?

My idea of performing the act was to become the woman, in order to understand both the meanings of the image better and to somehow ‘meet’ with it’s central character.

an extract from: Performance Lecture text for Body Parts RSA, Edinburgh 19 Feb 2006

Bronwyn Platten, born in Adelaide, South Australia, is an artist, researcher and curator based in Manchester, United Kingdom.

Bronwyn's work explores embodiment, gender, sexuality and identity and utilises a range of media including sculpture, performance, film and installation. She has exhibited her own work internationally as well as developing creative arts projects with individuals and groups from diverse communities.