Land/Sea included selected groups of work from Perry’s series Môr Plastig (Welsh for ‘plastic sea’), in which the artist collects and forensically photographs plastic objects such as bottles, shoes and packaging washed up on the beaches of West Wales. Perry’s work engages with significant and pressing environmental issues, in particular the fragility of the planet’s ecosystems (be that land or marine), and the tension between human activity and interventions in the natural environment.

Our staff and volunteers said, “An interesting take on highlighting the effect that human rubbish has on the environment. It inspired some of my final project at university regarding presentation of work. It was a genuinely interesting exhibition from a friendly artist.”… “It really engaged with the marine plastic pollution theme”… “I loved the materials used”… “Mike Perry brought the exhibition to the visitors attention in a very artistic way and made you think what more could you do for the environment”… “Plastic and nature collided”… “Its forensic style investigation into plastic pollution in our oceans was such an eye opener, and so topical for 2017. My new year’s resolution is to do a #minibeachclean every time I visit the seaside.“

The runners-up…

With a range of Gallery in the Cinema artist films, Gallery exhibitions and artist talks and events, the visual arts calendar has been jam packed during 2017. Here is a selection of exhibitions which caught our eye through the year…

Astro Raggi from Megan Broadmeadow – “Disco fun and interactive”… “The children I worked with were entranced. The lights, the sound, the installation all added to a multi-sensory experience that captivated and excited the young minds of the children that come to our workshops, and ignited their parents imaginations of their adults too! Loved it.”

Finding Fanon from David Blandy and Larry Achiampong – “I am a fan of CGI, have done some 3D modelling on screen myself in my profession, and being able to sit in close up to a wall sized animation on my own and just marvel at the level of detail is enough for me, without having to analyse the philosophy or psychology.”

Systems for Saying It from Ciara Phillips – “The interactivity of the exhibition was great”… “How exciting to have a Turner Prize nominee working with local groups to produce this exhibition, it was a pleasure to see the work evolve.”

Materials of Resistance from Clare Thornton – “I really enjoyed seeing the ceramics aspect of the exhibition”… “Textures and thoughtful details adorn the walls of the galleries at every turn”

Materials of Resistance is available to view in the PAC Galleries until Saturday 20 January 2018, and will be followed by the Looe Street Detectives, an exploration of the history, heritage and significance of Plymouth Arts Centre site.

Votes were cast and quotes provided by the team at Plymouth Arts Centre – with thanks to Manon Le Tual, Charlotte McGuinness, Kat Peberdy, Mason Craig, Sue Fisher, Flora, Lesley, Kathy Wray, Sam, Lolita, Maria Gammon, Dan Sealey, Pete Rozycki and Hannah Pollard.

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A recent study from The Arts Council has shown that culture volunteers are more likely than average to be involved and influential in their local communities, developing the skills and confidence that will make them more employable (and also 20% more likely to vote!).

We caught up with a couple of our volunteers who have gone on to do great things in the world of art and culture:

Abigail McKenzie, Founder of Dearly Beloved, 

Abigail volunteered at Plymouth Arts Centre as a Visual Arts and Education Programme Intern in the summer of 2013. Working alongside the curatorial team she supported them in the organisation of exhibitions and events.

Her experience of working in the marketing team for a larger gallery was a great help for Abigail, and she quickly got to grips with the variety of tasks assigned to her, 

“One day I would be researching the cost of custom signage and helping out with admin, and then I would be doing more practical tasks like helping with installation and designing promotional posters. It was a chance to see how the logistics of a smaller, more varied contemporary arts centre worked.”

Abigail now runs her own business, Dearly Beloved, which specialises in creating modern, illustrated wedding stationery and the occasional branding project. When asked how her time volunteering at PAC may have influenced the work she does now, she said,

“One of the most valuable things I developed was confidence. During my time at PAC although I was a volunteer I was involved in conversations and expected to use my initiative like any other member of staff. Not being afraid to just pick up the phone and ask questions has been great for me as a small business owner, and just being a fly on the wall to see how others approached problems within a creative organisation was invaluable.”

Discussing the importance of valuing the genuine exchange that should take place between volunteers and organisations, Abigail was passionate about ensuring volunteering should be mutually beneficial and not a one way street.

“Professionals within arts organisations are able to impart the things they have learned with people just starting out in their careers, and the people who want to give something back to the organisations. In these cases volunteering is so important, arts organisations form a huge part of our communities. So many of the good experiences I have had in Plymouth stem from the arts organisations we have here, and with current diminishing funding opportunities help from volunteers can enable places like PAC to continue their amazing work.”

Dearly Beloved was awarded the Wedding Styling Product of the Year 2016 at the Make Awards from Not On The High Street, and was also a regional finalist at the Wedding Industry Awards 2017.

Ben Cherry, Volunteer cinema usher and blog contributor

Ben has been a volunteer at Plymouth Arts Centre for 3 years, initially starting out as an usher in our cinema after graduating from UWE with a degree in Film Studies, and then also contributing film reviews to our online blog.

“I have been passionate about films for as long as I can remember. I had originally planned to apply as a volunteer on the front desk, but then an usher vacancy became available and I have been there ever since.”

Ben regularly puts his skills in writing and analysing film to use on the PAC blog, giving him the chance to develop his own style of writing and encouraged him to consider pursuing it as a career. Ben said, “It offers an amazing opportunity to write about a subject that you are interested in and for a recognised establishment.”

“Volunteering at PAC gives me the opportunity to work in an environment and an area I am interested especially in an industry that is notoriously hard to get into.”

Ben then explained that he feels volunteering offers him diversity and the opportunity to network with like-minded movie buffs, and for him that’s the most valuable part of the experience, “I get to experience all sorts of different films that I wouldn’t normally be exposed to, and meet people who are also as interested in art and film as I am.”

“Volunteering is vital to gaining experience in working within arts and culture as it shows that you are invested enough to go out in your free time to contribute to something you care about. It also is vital for people wanting to work within that industry who do not necessarily have the experience just yet.”

Speaking of his own experience, Ben recounts some of the events he’s been a part of through his volunteering at PAC, “purely through volunteering I have been able to attend and write about the Plymouth Film Festival, Open Air Cinema and I have had the opportunity to  meet (or at least be in the same room as) Pulp band members and top British directors like Ben Wheatley.”

Ben’s favourite film he’s seen at PAC since volunteering as an usher at the cinema? “Good question and not an easy one to answer! I have to choose two, Boyhood and American Honey”.

To register your interest with any of our available opportunities, please complete a volunteer application form and return for the attention of Operations Manager, Manon Le Tual.

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Archaeologists analyse the imprint of humanity on the world. They do this through study of the objects we make, the ways we use those objects to shape our environment, and most spectacularly by uncovering the impressions of our bodies that have been deliberately or unconsciously left behind. Primitive tools give information, but it is the handprint on the side of a cave or the footprint fossilised into the geological strata that enables the imaginative leap to ask who was this specific person and what was her experience?

Mike Perry’s exhibition Land/Sea seeks to extrapolate information about the present in much the same way that archaeologists do for ancient worlds. What can material culture, objects, and the landscapes shaped by them, tell us about this specific moment? The exhibition brings together two bodies of work, Môr Plastig and Wet Deserts, which are formally distinct but both explore the relationship between humans, the environment, and time. Running throughout Perry’s practice is a deep concern with environmental issues and how to make sense of the conflicting impulses of horror and fascination, beauty and desolation, fear and the sublime.

Wet Deserts is a group of photographs shot on 10×8 film of Britain’s upland moors and mountains. These are the quintessential vistas of 18th century landscape painting and Romantic poetry, the kind of places that shaped Edmund Burke’s thinking in his 1757 essay ‘Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful’. The opposition between beauty and the sublime has now been lost – sublimated, even – through the effect of Romanticism and the sublime is now seen as being super-beauty. However, Perry takes us back to the original meaning in order to contest the idea that these uplands are the last untouched wildernesses on this otherwise acculturated and industrialised island.

The reason they look so otherworldly is precisely because of their exploitation as a natural resource

While it is undeniable these expansive landscapes are extraordinarily beautiful, the reason they look so otherworldly is precisely because of their exploitation as a natural resource. They are deforested, monocultural sheep farms, eradicating the possibility of biodiversity and sustainability. Shot on 10×8 film, these analogue photographs take on a painterly quality, the colours vivid and subtle, almost seeming to emanate light. Although these scenes are as the artist found them, they seem highly composed and allegorical like the paintings of the eighteenth century English – and Welsh – landscape painters. These large scale photographs combining painterly aesthetics with a hard environmental narrative, shed a very different light on the health of the upland landscape than one is accustomed to seeing in tourist brochures or romantic paintings and photography of the coastline. This is the contemporary meaning of these landscapes – it is not the horror of nature’s magnitude, of but of the scale and impact of human intervention that is truly sublime.

Môr Plastig (Welsh for ‘plastic sea’) is an ongoing body of work that classifies objects washed up by the sea into groupings. It is an open series of photographs ordered into Shoes, Grids, Abstracts, and others. While the archaeologist is able to identify and develop local characteristics from the place an object is found, the sea is a much more chaotic, and appropriate, metaphor for globalised industrial culture. A shoe that washes up on the Pembrokeshire coast might have been made in China and lost by an American tourist paddling on a beach in Portugal.

Perry gathers these plastic objects from the Pembrokeshire coast where he lives. This idyllic stretch of coastline has all the characteristics of the sublime and beautiful – steep cliffs, azure seas, crashing waves, quiet bays and rugged headlands. In contrast to the Wet Deserts, this series is a highly conceptual and minimal interpretation of the landscape genre. Where many artists on the coast will beachcomb and combine these found objects into anthropomorphic sculptures, Perry isolates this plastic detritus and takes photographs that hone in on the details and surfaces. His 15 photograph Bottles Grid of bottles washed up off the beaches of West Wales challenges all kinds of stereotypes: what it means to be an artist – a photographer – engaging with the landscape, particularly the Welsh landscape, especially the Pembrokeshire coast; it poses questions of repetition, serial reproduction, and the unique object.

Refusing the tourist brochure romanticism of the Welsh coastline

In many respects Môr Plastig connects to another eighteenth century genre of images, this time the taxonomical drawings of scientific enquiry. Floating on the page, divorced from their context, these images afford close study of the details and characteristics of the material and surface. The C18th drawings give insights into the object, but they also contain a cultural reference to the fact this expansion of scientific knowledge was intrinsically bound up with colonial expansion and the emergence of empire.

Môr Plastig addresses the state of pollution on our beaches and what we might be leaving for future generations, again refusing the tourist brochure romanticism of the Welsh coastline. It is a kind contemporary version of Graham Sutherland’s ‘Stories from the Sea’. Perry brings contemporary environmental issues to our attention, not a campaigning emotionally charged way, but through analytical examination and a reflective, poetic, manner which pulls the viewer in to think deeper about the subject.

The landscape is a fundamental element of how British (and specifically Welsh) culture and identity has been constructed, but in a way that is supposedly ‘timeless’ and mythological. The critical engagement with landscape in Perry’s practice makes landscape absolutely contemporary, shaped by industrialisation, agribusiness and the exploitation of natural resources. His work frees it from the abstract, alienating, and false ‘timelessness’ of a consumer based heritage industry and locates the landscape as an intrinsic part of contemporary culture and future possibility.

Land/Sea is curated by Plymouth Arts Centre and Ffotogallery. It is a Ffotogallery Touring Exhibition, supported by Arts Council of Wales.

Ben Borthwick, Artistic Director at Plymouth Arts Centre

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This evening I had the privilege of attending a performance of After Leonardo by Plymouth-born Artist Malcolm Le Grice and Keith Rowe at the Peninsula Arts Gallery, located within Plymouth University. As an attendee to the breath-taking show, I found myself surrounded by a large audience of other artists and members of the university who felt captivated once the performance began.

Malcolm Le Grice is known as a pioneer in the field of experimental performance art involving the multi-screen process and projection methods of installation. After studying painting at the Slade School of Fine Art, Le Grice became infatuated by the art of film-making and began his path as someone who explores the medium of moving image.

Image: Horror Film, Malcolm Le Grice, 2016. Photo: Josh Huxham

This evening Le Grice partnered up with Keith Rowe who accompanies the two performances with alluring and hypnotizing melodies. Beginning with a performance of Horror Film 1, the live shadow performance explored the technique of using different hues of colour and tone whilst combined with the use of 16mm projectors.

As the film-maker stood in front of the projector, his figure and emotion began to manifest and increase in its capacity, concluding with the performers figure completely consuming the projected space. After a short break, the next performance began to take place.

This performance explored two themes, the world-famous painting of Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci and Freud’s psychoanalytic monograph of the mind. Entitled After Leonardo, this performance piece has continued to develop over time.

The use of projectors increased for this particular performance, allowing the audience to see a wider perspective of the subjects being transported from the projectors onto the wall being used as a canvas. This performance saw the film-making engaging with the moving images upon the wall, creating a balance between three-dimensional and two-dimensional mediums.

By Josh Huxham

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Showing at Peninsula Arts and Plymouth Arts Centre, Present Moments and Passing Time is a large, ambitious retrospective, detailing the work of pioneering film-maker, Malcolm Le Grice.

Born in Plymouth, Le Grice moved to London after graduating from the Slade School of Fine Art, becoming one of the founding members of The London Film Co-operative in 1968. A group that encouraged the making, screening and distribution of experimental film, rather than outright ownership, Le Grice’s philosophy proved to be years ahead of its time.

Le Grice originally began his career in painting, but began to explore film-making by the mid 1960’s. Malcolm’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Louvre and Tate Modern. He has not only been influential during the post-war period, but continues to provoke and challenge, with Le Grice’s Castle 1 (1966) a clear influence on Martin Creed’s Turner Prize-winning Work 227 (2000).

Exhibition: Malcolm Le Grice ExhibitionPlymouth Arts Centre Gallery, Lloyd Russell

In Present Moments and Passing Time, Plymouth pays tribute to Le Grice, with a city-wide celebration of his life and work. Working across several mediums, Le Grice avoids easy categorisation. Unsurprisingly, this exhibition features everything from feature length films to charcoal sketches. Le Grice’s career, as the exhibition title suggests, muses on the effects of time; how time can transform and erode memories, art, opinions and reputations. The Le Grice landscape is concerned with the transitory nature of it all. But what is found in this exhibition is not a dry treatise. Le Grice’s art buzzes with an electric force that is eternally youthful. It questions, but is not afraid to feel.

Nowhere is this clearer than in Le Grice’s film Little Dog for Roger (1967).  The film short is based on fragments of a home movie, found by Le Grice in the 1960’s. Fragments of film are spliced together, with gaps in the film allowed to show through. Sprocket holes whizz across the screen; a narrative interrupted.

The film shows Le Grice’s family during a day out at Hexworthy, Dartmoor. The family dog is the centre of attention, bounding energetically across the moorland. Despite the age of the film, the subject matter captures something immediate and familiar.

Le Grice experiments with the film, by going beyond the immediate source material. The nostalgic feel is dislocated by Le Grice, who adopts a multi-projection technique, so we see several versions of the dog at the same time. It is a play on the elusiveness of memories, even when captured and laid down on film. The ‘truth’ – such as it is – gets overlaid with half-remembered fragments, things we believe to have happened. The dog appears in several realities, and each is as true / untrue as the other.

Le Grice resits chronology, both technically and thematically. Little Dog for Roger strides across the years to meet us; it is a subject both of and beyond its time. The screen lends an illusion of immortality, but Le Grice reminds us that even film, the observer and recorder, is built on moments, passing, present and gone.

Exhibition: Malcolm Le Grice ExhibitionPlymouth Arts Centre Gallery, Lloyd Russell

The exhibition takes advantage of Le Grice’s extensive back catalogue, showing several of his short films. Some just a few minutes long, they offer an insight not only into Le Grice’s process, but the ideas that have preoccupied him over the years.

In DENISINED – SINEDENIS (2006), we see a triptych of a man’s face; three views of the same subject. As the film begins, the soundtrack makes its presence felt. Featuring JS Bach’s Crab Canon from a collection of canons and fugues called The Musical Offering,  the crab canon is a musical device that features two musical lines that are complementary and backward; a musical equivalent of the palindrome. The dizzying baroque soundtrack uses the same motif over and over again to produce a layered effect, mirroring what is happening on screen, as one image of the man projects itself onto the previous one. The triptych, at first sharply defined, begins to blur as we are presented with kaleidoscopic viewpoints of the subject. Pinning down a definitive image becomes impossible, with Le Grice creating a film that dances to the rhythm of Bach’s tune.

Le Grice’s reputation as an innovator is coupled with a strong connection to art history. References abound in this exhibition, not hidden away for the viewer to discover, but there on display for all to see. The work and legacy of Leonardo Da Vinci, Andy Warhol and Edouard Manet is explored in After Leonardo (installation 1974-2015; collage 1993); After Manet (charcoal on paper, 1985; video 1975) and Self Portrait / Weeping Artist (pencil on paper, 1984-85).

Le Grice’s extraordinary career is laid bare in these works; an acknowledgement that an artist can be everything at once. Le Grice’s willingness to move from ‘traditional’ art techniques into experimental film and video, asserts the artist’s right to resist limitation. Le Grice’s self-actualisation galvanises the viewer; we never see the same artist twice, and the exhibition really serves a purpose in outlining not only the output of Le Grice’s career, but also its breadth.

In Self Portraits / Weeping Artist, Le Grice produces a series of tiny hand-drawn sketches. The repetition of the images, on first glance, echo Warhol’s iconic screen-prints. Reproducing the same image, each subtly altered, disrupts the grid-like pattern in which the portraits are placed. The neatness, like Warhol’s prints, is illusory. Look again, and the images begin to fragment. Le Grice also references Picasso’s Weeping Woman (1937). The nightmarish painting, an emblem of suffering, was itself part of a series, with Picasso revisiting the same theme several times over. With Le Grice’s portraits, the dismantling of the facial features is not so much homage but recognition of how art history informs contemporary artists. Picasso’s dissembled face is so ubiquitous it has become a type of shorthand; a rich vein to exploit in itself. Le Grice’s Self Portraits / Weeping Artist does this by subverting the male gaze so prevalent in the Picasso. Le Grice instead puts himself at the emotional centre of the piece, playing on pre-conceived notions of the artist and the viewer. The artist here is also the participant, and the viewer, by the act of looking, becomes part of the process too.  It’s a theme Le Grice returns to many times in his work, most notably in his 1971 work Horror Film 1. Using three projectors, Le Grice films himself standing in front of the projection screen, arms outstretched. As Le Grice moves away from the screen, and towards the projectors, the distortions create shadows and blurring. The performer’s image is multiplied, as Le Grice’s role as performer and artist begins to merge.

Exhibition: Malcolm Le Grice ExhibitionAfter LeonardoPlymouth Arts Centre Gallery, Lloyd Russell

In After Leonardo (triptych and installation), Le Grice creates a collage of the Mona Lisa image, interspersed with text from Sigmund Freud’s monograph ‘Leonardo Da Vinci: A Study in Psychosexuality’. Le Grice chooses his text carefully; the essay itself is a rarity, not freely available in book form in Britain since the 1930’s. It has now been made accessible – and been endlessly reproduced – in electronic PDF format. Le Grice displays a paperback copy of the text in a glass display case, along with a delicate, fragmented copy of the Mona Lisa head. Both are tattered and beyond repair, they are given the reverential treatment normally reserved for precious artefacts. On the wall behind the display case, a series of images are projected: snippets of text, fragments of Leonardo’s most famous work – that enigmatic portrait –  is broken down into pieces, endlessly reproduced until nothing discernible is left. After Leonardo debates how meanings and theories are projected onto art, even the pieces where (you would think) everything has already been said. Le Grice’s work shows us how the meaning of art can alter with these readings. Freud’s analysis of Da Vinci remains ground-breaking. A reading of Da Vinci’s career without the inclusion of his sexuality, and how it coloured his work, is to read him with a piece of the puzzle missing.

Exhibition: Malcolm Le Grice ExhibitionAfter LeonardoPlymouth Arts Centre Gallery, Lloyd Russell

However, Le Grice goes one step further and suggests that these readings are ultimately temporary. Despite the attempts to dismantle Da Vinci, (it has been suggested that the Mona Lisa is a portrait of the artist himself) our ability to understand him remains elusive. He / She is at once instantly recognisable – and utterly unknowable.

Le Grice’s After Manet (1975) is a 50-minute video that takes Edouard Manet’s painting Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe (1862) as its starting point.  A piece of art with a unique place in art history, Manet’s painting of two clothed men having a picnic, accompanied by a nude woman looks, even to our eyes, strange and incongruous, and that is entirely the point. Manet’s juxtaposition of two elegant men-about-town and the classical female nude lifts the Impressionist painting out of any easily-identifiable context. All the signifiers are there, but they’ve been jumbled up to create a painting that plays with convention. Manet turned his back on the traditional modes of representation, and in the clamour by authorities to censor his painting (which unsurprisingly met with great scandal on its debut), Manet became one of the first modern art celebrities. Manet’s work lends itself to reinterpretation, and Le Grice’s video borrows from the bold, questioning spirit of Manet’s painting to create a piece that is similarly disjointed. Filmed on four cameras, Le Grice had each camera operated by one of the actors appearing in the video; Annabel Nicholson, Gill Eatherley, Willian Raban and Le Grice himself. The artist becomes a performer, and the performers become stakeholders in creating the final piece. The performers recreate a picnic scene, and each person’s film is projected onto a screen, giving four views of the same subject. Switching from black and white, positive and negative, After Manet inverts the rituals of daily life; skimming through a book, drinking a glass of wine. It, like the painting, becomes otherworldly and unreal. Le Grice is well-known for his love of jazz music, and After Manet is a perfect example of how his art work riffs on established themes, in order to create something new. It is more than a reproduction; it is a new piece of art, with its own life. The piece then takes on its own history as it ages; meanings, readings – art viewed through a selective lens. Le Grice’s work, as viewed across this retrospective, admits that the temptation to grade and objectify is an impulse that is all too human. But maybe, suggests Le Grice, art should be more than the sum of its parts. This may be an exhibition of many moments, but in the end, there is one thought that binds them: perhaps there is no such thing as the last word, or final cut – and that’s just how it should be.

Helen Tope is a freelance blogger working and living in Plymouth.

@scholar1977

The post Exhibition Review: Malcolm Le Grice: Present Moments and Passing Time appeared first on Plymouth Arts Cinema | Independent Cinema for Everyone | located at Arts University Plymouth..

The exhibition celebrates the innovative and ground-breaking work of Plymouth-born Malcolm Le Grice, and how he pioneered the ‘British Expanded Cinema’ movement with multi projection and performance works, as well as making the UK’s first computer art films. These breakthroughs can be traced in his early paintings incorporating flashing light bulbs and more recently in his 3D video installations.

Present Moments and Passing Time is a dual site exhibition at Peninsula Arts and Plymouth Arts Centre, delivered in partnership with the History Centre and Plymouth City Council (Arts and Heritage). It is free to attend and runs from 20 January – 18 March 2017.

Gallery of Photos from the preview of Present Moments and Passing Time by Bethany Ditchburn at Peninsula Arts and Charlotte McGuinness at Plymouth Arts Centre

The post VIDEO: In Conversation with Malcolm Le Grice appeared first on Plymouth Arts Cinema | Independent Cinema for Everyone | located at Arts University Plymouth..

Astro Raggi is in the PAC Galleries until January 7th 2017.

This exhibition begins with the story of Pasquale Quadri. Or rather a story about him. Megan Broadmeadow first heard of the Italian optician, who was also a cinema projectionist, and member of a band, from a lighting designer friend. Already pieces of the narrative were drifting into myth — he was a chemist, not optician — but it is well documented that his frustration with the poor quality of stage and nightclub lighting in the early-1970s led him to invent the Astro Raggi, the first disco light with motorised optics and lenses that cast beams of moving light around the room. It is said that his mother used to help him build prototypes and mirror balls on the kitchen table, and gradually this homemade DIY endeavour evolved into Clay Paky, one of the world’s leading lighting companies. The exhibition does not tell the story of Pasquale Quadri’s life, but rather imagines his relationship to the machines he invented.

The Astro Raggi begins and ends the exhibition. Scenius (no.1 on the floorplan) is a domed sculptural installation that positions visitors inside the Astro Raggi, giving a disco light perspective of a dance floor. Could this be what Quadri saw in his mind’s eye when he created the Astro Raggi? Each ‘lens’ is a porthole covered in scrim onto which a video of a breakdancer is projection mapped, beams ghosting through the screens onto the floor to create a multiplicity of colours, shapes, and body parts. A classic Italo-disco song plays and the dancer’s repetitive moves have a machinic quality and at times he appears to be wearing a Cyclops mask which flares when he looks directly at the camera.Scenius captures the sensation of being on the dance floor in a dark club, so immersed in the atmosphere it is as if individual identity starts to merge with, or take on the characteristics of, the immediate environment.

Upstairs in Gallery 1, Cybernetic Love (no.8) develops the idea of desire creating an identity that is a fusion of the body, space, and machines. The video’s point of departure is the anecdote of Quadri’s mother assembling components on the kitchen table. A dancer performs a series of folding and kneading actions from the domestic realm that gradually morph into a robotic and industrialised hallucination. Her movements begin to echo those of the projector which throws the image around the room, as if video, dancer and projector are joined in ecstatic unison. The camera viewpoint becomes more and more immersive until, again, she is suddenly wearing a Cyclops mask emitting a beam of light.

Broadmeadow’s research for this project included a residency in Venice studying carnival costumes. The Cyclops mask makes reference to the 18th century Servetta Muta (meaning mute servant woman), a strapless mask with large eyes but no mouth — its wearer held it in place by biting on a button or bit — making pointed reference to the relations between the liberating anonymity and temporary identities conferred by costumes and carnival, but also the silent role of women’s labour in the domestic sphere and how it supports, even performs, the work of acclaimed men.

Be There Or Be Square (no.3) is a large sculpture made from lengths of metal truss used in lighting rigs. The mechanical sound of an attached robotic arm is offset by the percussive clank of suspended metal plates as they are dragged slowly across the floor. This mechanic assemblage takes on bodily qualities, its sound like rasping breath while the angles and shadows imply movement, perhaps shapes on the dancefloor. The metal plates are like industrial versions of the African masks so fetishised by Picasso and the surrealists, their anthropomorphic qualities implying either a tangle of bodies or a series of freeze frames recording a body in motion.

The possibility of bodies becoming machines and objects implying bodies is confirmed by the realisation that the plates are, in fact, fascias to another classic Clay Paky disco light, the Golden Scan, but also the same shape as the dancer’s masks in Scenius and Cybernetic Love. This oscillation between bodies and machines is perhaps most pronounced in the sound pieceSuperCallibrateOrganicMotionLightExposures (no. 5) that fills the space with the sound of moving-head projectors. There is something not quite right about the whirrs and buzzes — instead of clean robotic cuts, certain sounds end with a vocal quality betraying their source: they are a lighting technician’s impressions of his machines, rendered with the accuracy and affection of an ornithologist mimicking birdsong.

In the same gallery is Expo (no.6), a reconstruction of Clay Paky’s futuristic lighting booth based on an archive photograph of a 1970s trade fair. The final work in this gallery is When The Lights Go Down(no.7). This video, and Super Scan Zoom (no.2) downstairs in the cafe gallery, were both shot in the Clay Paky factory near Bergamo. These more documentary elements of the exhibition are supplemented by footage of Quadri’s band Scalo Farini, with him visible playing the Hammond organ.

The final gallery is only visible through a peephole. Having started the exhibition from the perspective of being inside the light looking out, Are You Dancing (no.4) imagines the mind of its inventor. The machine itself is privileged: an original Astro Raggi light that would normally be mounted high up on the ceiling is up close on a plinth. Its’ optics and lenses are so precise that in moments of clarity the lightbulb and filament are visible on the wall, bringing to mind the modernist machinery of Lazlo Moholy-Nagy’s 1930 electrical kinetic sculpture Light Prop for an Electric Stage (light-space modulator). But the smoke machine also hazes the room, transforming light from an immaterial projected image into an opaque sculptural form that occupies space much in the way of Anthony McCall’s minimal 1973 installation Line Describing A Cone, but for the disco generation. The peephole gives us a partial view of these shafts of angled light spinning around the room, evoking the futuristic aesthetics of 1970s sci-fi and alluding to the fact that while we can speculate based on the objects he left behind, we will never really know what this Italian chemist/ cinema projectionist/ musician intended when he imagined a nightclub of the future.

Ben Borthwick – Artistic Director

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Katya Sander’s Publicness is showing at Plymouth Arts Centre from 1 September – 29 October. Helen Tope reviews the exhibition.

Publicness is an exhibition that takes stock of Katya Sander’s career to date, with many of the pieces revisited and recreated by Sander especially for Plymouth Arts Centre. It lends the exhibition an immediacy that is sometimes lacking in traditionally-staged retrospectives, giving Sander’s ideas a freshness and vivacity.

Born in 1970, Katya Sander lives and works in Copenhagen and Berlin. Sander balances an impressive academic career with a busy exhibition schedule. Most recently showing in solo exhibitions at Tate Modern and MOMA, Sander’s work has travelled the world.

Indeed, in reviewing the details of Katya’s career, it becomes clear is just how much of her work is shown internationally. In an essay on the Danish contemporary art scene, critic Lisbeth Bonde discusses how ‘pluralistic’ young Danish artists’ work has become. Through the support of organisations such as the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and the Danish Art Council, artists are encouraged to network – not just across Europe, but showing their work in creative hubs such as New York and Tokyo. As a result, Danish artists are creating work that speaks many languages. The Danish art scene itself has undergone a ‘golden age’ over the past 15 years, with artists such as Tal R, Elmgreen & Dragset and Olafur Eliasson building an international reputation.

Working in a variety of mediums, Sander’s work takes on a restless, roaming quality. The mind is never quiet – but always searching, always asking. Having participated in group and solo exhibitions, Sander has developed a singular voice. Questioning societal structures, patterns, obligations – and our place within them – Sander creates work beyond nationality. The work is everywhere and nowhere at the same time, and it soaks up influence from wherever it has been displayed. Sander’s work never stays still for too long – it is the consummate traveller and needs no translation.

There is a strong DIY aesthetic throughout the exhibition, with the production of the artwork (excepting the videos) taking place on-site. This gives a personalised, improvised quality to the exhibits. Sander’s choice to work quickly and within set contexts gives the artwork real specificity. Talking about her work at Plymouth Arts Centre earlier this month, Sander remarked that she tends to focus on ‘nerdy’ details – and it is the absolute focus on a question, or a supposition, that makes her work so individual.

The exhibition takes in several pieces from Sander’s career so far, and one of the most accessible pieces (especially for film buffs) is The 100 Most Watched. Originally created in 1998, the artwork is based on IMDB’s list of films in order of their global ticket sales. Painted in bold black letters on the ground floor wall, the graffiti-style, rambling narrative is allowed to drip and run into the line below it.

For this exhibition, Sander has gone back to the list and updated her artwork – which is why we see films such as Avatar (2009), next to films such as Star Wars and Titanic, which would have been featured in the original.

In looking at the box-office appeal of Hollywood’s leading men, Sander decides to investigate the power of the narrative by inverting the gender roles in each film, meaning that every male character becomes female, and vice versa. By taking the films out of their original context, Sander re-tells familiar stories. Not only does the narrative seem to change, but how we read it appears to change also. It neatly explores how we graft certain personality traits onto gender (bravery, heroism, a sense of adventure = must be male). Located next to the Arts Centre cinema, it’s a great, thought-provoking piece and the perfect place to start exploring the exhibition.

Sander’s work stretches over several mediums, from light, quick sketches to edited film. In the first of two videos featured in the exhibition, Exterior City (2005) shows a woman putting up posters – ‘a manuscript’ she calls it in one scene – around a city. The posters are lists of names – addressing groups such as ‘Dear workers, bosses, tenants, landlords…”

Sander presents this city as an imagined state – sat ideologically somewhere between Vienna and Malmo (Sweden’s third largest city). Sander’s references are deliberate – both Sweden and Vienna have a long history of providing social housing. For Sander, it raises questions around what happens when the residential (personal) and political coincide.

In a group exhibition Home Sweet Home (Sweden, 2011) Sander’s contribution was a lecture titled ‘The usefulness of inadequate models’. In the lecture, Sander discusses how social dictations are created by society, and in turn how they influence individual thoughts and actions. In Exterior City, Sander creates a tension between real and staged actions. The woman in the video often looks off-camera, questioning where she should go next. Interspersed with this are real interactions between the woman and people who see her putting up the posters. Some ask questions, others simply read the poster as she tapes it up. When asked by one of the bystanders if she is acting, the woman replies that the process of putting up the posters is an act. The bystander pretends to understand and walks away.

What I found particularly interesting, and it’s a thread running through many of Sander’s works, is just how vocal the pieces are. Words are everywhere in this exhibition – written and spoken. Rather than dictating terms, I found that the constant presence of words and sentences provoked me to ask questions. In Exterior City, there are subtitles: some reflect what is literally being said, others provide commentary on what is implied by the action on-screen.

The video’s narration jumps about, from 1st person to 3rd person, with male and female narrators. ‘I’ moves to ‘she’ with alarming ease; “She imagines a catastrophe”. Sander keeps the viewer engaged with questions, spoken or inferred. It is a singular motif that you can identify in the works featured in the Publicness exhibition. Sander questions the politicisation of architecture and our place within it, and as we move through the exhibition, it becomes evident that Sander’s interests move between the political and the individual, producing work that questions the social constructs we take for granted.

You can see in this exhibition how Sander’s exploration of social constructs is informed by her interest in commerce. In Statements in Relation to a Bank, Sander fills an entire wall with rainbow blocks of colour. Handwritten across those blocks of colour are excerpts from interviews Sander held with investment bankers.

The original piece was produced in 2008 in collaboration with Nykredit, one of Denmark’s largest banks. Sander gained access to this world by asking unexpected questions as a ‘way in’ (eg: asking during a tour of a bank’s premises, if she could touch the server) It was an attempt to throw the interviewees off-guard, to get beyond the well-practised, corporate patter.

The excerpts from the interviews, taken out of context, become highly revealing – Sander’s attempt to throw the bankers off-balance makes for interesting reading. The colour blue, we learn, is a shade favoured for outlining corporate identity in the banking world – quite literally “blue-chip”. One interviewee reveals that Pantone 280 is their institution’s corporate shade – a very sober shade of blue. They talk a lot about imbuing trust in their customers, their clients. Is blue an honest colour? Barclays certainly seem to think so.

Statements in Relation to a Bank plays with colour – its moods, tones and associations. As the questions get more serious, the handwriting strays into the more playful shades – pinks and yellows. The insecurity of the finance world is written on the wall for all to see. Sander asks about the physicality of this world? How solid is a banknote? Why is it considered more ‘real’ than numbers on a screen?

Servers are now storing information – huge servers – so money (even as electronic data) is taking up more physical space than ever before. But even this vastness is transitory –it will be replaced by another technology in time, and the servers will be defunct. The shuffling of numbers on a screen – profit and loss– is at once enormous and ephemeral. With the jargon tailored to the banking world, Sander illustrates how the people working within the system are literally speaking a different language.

In order to engage with the interviewees, Katya had to learn the lingo (words such as ‘derivatives’ and ‘futures’ have very specific meanings in the finance world). Definitions of these terms can be found on websites such as Investopedia – and just glancing through this website gives an insight into how differently the world is viewed through this particular lens. It’s both fascinating and unnerving, and I think this is why I found this piece to strike most clearly at the heart of Katya’s work.

Created just before the advent of the global financial crisis in 2008, this piece now, by necessity, is read differently. We cannot help but project experience onto it – and the tone changes. Gentle inquisitions take on a darker hue. Our value is a number on a screen, and it is this idea that Sander explores further in Financialisation.

It is a video taken from an earlier work where Sander interviewed statistician Emmanuel Didier about the role statistics have to play in the global financial markets. Here, Sander gives us the footage of the full interview with Didier.

In Financialisation, Sander muses on our relationship to money: how we ourselves are both debt and risk. Through student loans, credit cards, mortgages, we assimilate debt and through that debt, we become risk. A bank buys multiple high-risk debts and that risk then becomes diffused – any impact through loss becomes minimised. In this context, a person becomes merely a calculation of loss and risk – you are a standardised fragment of yourself.

Financialisation is one of the most open-ended pieces in the Publicness exhibition – it touches on many of the themes that have influenced Katya’s career. How notions of value, commerce and identity exist within a collective subconscious. It’s a space without limits and boundaries, as it’s constantly shifting and evolving. Publicness may be a summary of where Sander is now, but it’s clear from this exhibition that there will always more to examine.

While retrospectives remain highly popular with art galleries, exhibitions featuring mid-career reviews seem far thinner on the ground, and yet with Publicness, there’s a compelling case to be made for them.

What ties this collection together is how work changes over time. Even when created in a very specific context, we see here that artwork continues to evolve and adapt, because we imprint our experiences and thoughts onto it. Sander’s exploration of the financial world not only highlights its separateness, but its tendency to dehumanise. Learning that we are considered statistical fragments isn’t too much of a surprise, but it also explains why the financial markets are so eager to take risks. It’s a high-stakes game where the consequences are shouldered by someone else. The pain is deferred, and the game plays on.

It’s this dehumanising that Sander seems to be rallying against in much of her work. The hand-crafted, improvised technique that goes into creating many of her pieces, is a refreshing antidote to the glossy, industrialised productions associated with contemporary art. Her hand is visible in all of this work, and it makes the exhibition an intensely personal experience. Nothing is perfect in Sander’s world; the raw edges – physically and metaphorically – add to the sense that Katya is always revising, revisiting. Nothing is finished, and that’s entirely the point. No work is complete because its meanings will change and adapt as the world moves on. New obsessions and talking points will reveal themselves. In Publicness, art is never done. The artist looks back, then forward – and the work continues.

Helen Tope

Twitter: Scholar1977

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