audiovisual adventures

Friday, 4 March 2011

LA MAISON DE FAY - on founding an art gallery...

La Maison De Fay #5 : Migle Backovaite & Willie Nash

on 26 May 2011, 6pm - 11pm 67A Median Road, Clapton, E5 0PJ

Migle Backovaite, The Last Supper ( 2011 )

Although the theme is derived from the religious context, these series of images are the modern interpretation of what has been seen and experienced through the work of other artists rather than just replication of the historical scenario.

http://miglebackovaite.carbonmade.com/

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Willie Nash

Willie Nash has enjoyed a life-long passion for photography. Since his early teens he has been experimenting with photography on a wide variety of projects, both personal and commercial. His photographs, often richly-colored, present the subject insuch a way that it is lifted from the "everyday" and onto another plane. Through the use of created enviroments, related objects, and lighting, he forges the "unwritten story" that takes place in each of his photographs.

http://www.willienashphoto.com/

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La Maison De Fay #4 : Carole Soulas

on 19 May 2011, 6pm-11pm

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La Maison De Fay #3

29 April 2011: Nelson SantosNelson Santos, born in Portugal, where he studied Fashion and Textiles Design, moved to London in 2007.

After working with various fashion designers Nelson works now as a freelance fashion illustrator. His illustrations have been published in magazines such has “Umbigo” (Portugal), the book “Color in Fashion” (Barcelona) “Trisickle Magazine” (Glasgow) and several projects for the web-magazine “KCTV”.

Recently Nelson showed his work as a solo artist at 10 Gales Gallery (London) and Drayton Arms (Kensington, London), and was part of a group exhibition at Fred of London during London Fashion Week.

Nelson creates unusual shapes to illustrate his view of the fashion scene, with a keen eye and passion for fashion his inspiration come from the people in the streets, to music, cinema, etc…etc…etc…in resume all his passions combined in one drawing.

KCTV: http://www.kctv.co.uk/happening_show_article.php?article=2483

Please take a look at our facebook page http://on.fb.me/oebPNz

and blog

http://lamaisondefay.blogspot.com/

What resources do you need to open a contemporary art gallery in London? Inexhaustible reserves of energy, a network of friends willing to help out on a voluntary basis, and a healthy dose of chutzpah probably helps. Surprisingly, though, you don't need much money - it's mainly down to hard work and the availability of a suitable space. Which can even be the domestic walls! Aspiring art dealer Fay Sebel started turning her house into an occasional art gallery in February, initially as a gesture of encouragement before her painter friend Ting-An Ling's Final Year show at Saint Martin's. Since then "La Maison de Fay" has hosted exhibitions by emerging artists Caroline LS Chang and Nelson Santos. Upcoming shows include works by Carole Soulas, Migle Backovaite & Willie Nash. Stay tuned!

By Yvonne Riepl

http://www.kctv.co.uk/happening_show_article.php?article=2483

Friday, 21 May 2010

"You have to fly a flag, otherwise you have nothing to wave."

Processed film:

Viewing back the developed S16 footage of the 'Gropius' shoot

on a traditional Steenbeck 16mm cutting unit at LUX studios.

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For the project we used four rolls of discontinued

Kodak Eastman 5245 / 7245 EXR 50D Colour Negative film.

The processing was done at Soho Images under the supervision of Len Thornton.

"You have to fly a flag, otherwise you have nothing to wave."

design by Jonathan Trayner

Flying, for instance, the flag with the German colours and Walter Gropius' high modernist design on this specific cornfield works on many different levels. The piece 'Stop trying to seduce us with your visions of the past' is going to be performed and recorded before the backdrop of the satellite city Gropiusstadt, on the outskirts of Berlin, a town born by Walter Gropius' ideas about social housing projects during the 1960's after the construction of the Berlin wall.

Gropiusstadt has, especially during the 1980s repeatedly been associated with the alienation of youth and despair, and has become internationally known as the setting of the autobiographical movie Christiane F. directed by Uli Edel. (Subtitled "Image of a Generation" Christiane F. is the true story of a lonely, bored teenager in the '70's who gets into the drug scene at 12, hooked on heroin at 13 and becomes a prostiture at 14 to support her habit)

DV-Stills from the test shoot during summer 2009

The scene opens with the seven flags standing in a row. The seven actors enter the scene from behind the camera take up the flags and march with them in time to the music, following a choreography based on the Palace of the Soviets symbol. The march will finish with the actors returning the flags to their starting positions, they will then exit the scene back past the camera.

The corn field setting is itself also part of the former death strip dividing East and West and would during Berlin wall years have only be accessed by DDR (GDR) security guards.

Therefore, young adults carrying the flags while marching naked at dawn over this particular corn field to the neo-romanticist tune of Carl Orff expresses in itself a problematic gesture somehow signaling a defiance to the perceived failure of a possible progressive high modernism in favour of a reminiscent and accepted totalitarianism.
The flags are a shortcut ,
they are symbols representing certain aspects
of the Enlightenment project.

The flags flown all represent particular aspects of the enlightenment project, the progressive drive that led to the development of modernism as an overarching thematic structure, and which contains so many antagonistic strands. Some of these strands developed out of others, out of the merging of others or in response to them but all of them are distinct and the core ideologies that drive contemporary politics.

For more information on his ongoing project involving flags check Jon Trayner's page on http://www.trayner.org/taz/flags/

Sunday, 21 March 2010

Background & additional information

Stop trying to seduce us with your visions of the past – film development proposal

Location:Gropiusstadt(former death strip)

Scene: Dawn, a feld in Brandenburg, just outside Gropiusstadt, Berlin/Germany (before 1989: GDR)

Actors: Seven actors (both male and female). In their twenties, fit, normal build, ethnicity unimportant. Naked.

Props: Seven flags (see image) on poles.

Music: Carl Orff, Ecce Gratum.

Duration: Approximately 5mins.

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Design by Jonathan Trayner

Background: The film is the follow on from Jon Trayner's artist residency in Berlin last year with Pilotprojekt Gropiusstadt where he produced a test shoot for this film. This was produced with only one actor and a small MiniDV camera.

How the public will engage with the work:

The work will be exhibited in one of Manchester's foremost galleries with a history of public engagement both within art audiences and the wider community and has been submitted to art festivals around Europe (for 2010/2011)

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Unity in diversity

The Bauhaus' "novel method of education in design has been widely misunderstood and misinterpreted. The present generation is inclined to think of it as a rigid stylistic dogma of yesterday whose usefulness has come to an end because its ideological and technical premises are now outdated. This view confuses a method of approach with the practical results obtained by it at a particular period of its application. The Bauhaus was not concerned with the formulation of timebound, stylistic concepts, and its technical methods were not ends in themselves. It was created to show how a multitude of individuals, willing to work concertedly but without losing their identity, could evolve a kinship of expression in their response to the challenges of the day. Its aim was to give a basic demonstration of how to maintain unity in diversity, and it did this with the materials, techniques, and form concepts germane to its time. It was this method of approach that was revolutionary…” -- from “The Role of the Architect in Modern Society,” address given at Columbia University (March 1961) by Walter Gropius
(I found this quote on a recent blog which is followed by numerous responses by the blog's subscribers regarding Gropius’ ideas about gathering artists and collaborating together, see
http://roberttracyphdhonors400.wordpress.com/2009/09/16/german-bauhaus/)

Friday, 12 February 2010

"Stop trying to seduce us with your visions of the past"

Symbolism:

The starting point of this body of work is a symbol extrapolated from a photograph of a model that is the only surviving documentation of Walter Gropius' entry for the international competition to design the Palace of the Soviets in Moscow (1931). This proposal, along with those of Le Corbusier and Ginsburg was amongst those that were rejected by Stalin’s panel in favour of a 400m high neo-classical structure topped with a 100m high statue of Lenin in full declamatory pose.

For more information and test shoot see http://www.trayner.org/gropiusstadt.html
& http://trayner.org/test_shoot.html

Proposed date for Casting: April 2010
Filming: one day in May/June 2010

Friday, 5 February 2010

From Susi

From womb

through emergency room

to tomb in bathing costume.

Thursday, 4 February 2010

Back To Film

Experiments on Super16 film applying the principles of chromatics
onto S16 white leader during the Motion Graphics course
with Pete Maloney at Chelsea College of Art & Design

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16mm project, shot on a Arriflex SR2 camera
at University of Westminster
under supervision of Andy Powell

Wednesday, 3 February 2010

At the LUX

LUX is an arts agency which explores ideas around artists' moving image practice through exhibition, distribution, publishing, education and research.