Forewords | Hyperimages and Hyperimaging
This collection of short essays sometimes dances around issues and takes an oblique approach to the subject of the hyperimage, nevertheless serving to augment our understanding of the idea. What is unique about this book is thirty five pieces of writing, now approaching one theme, which, due to the nature of the commissioning of the individual texts, all enter the subject from different points, with differing influences and different spatial/temporal considerations.
Not only has the accumulation of the texts taken place over time, traversing projects, artists and locations; it has also occurred in tandem with technological developments which have served to shape much of our activity, both quotidian and also professionally as cultural producers.
MOSTYN x DRAF (David Roberts Art Foundation): Upcoming Exhibitions
She sees the shadows
July 14–November 4, 2018
In Addition
Editions by artists
March 3, 2018–February 27, 2021
Louisa Gagliardi / Josephine Meckseper
Opening November 16, 2018
MOSTYN
12 Vaughan Street
Llandudno LL30 1AB
United Kingdom
www.mostyn.org
www.davidrobertsartfoundation.com
MOSTYN, Wales UK is pleased to present a group exhibition of works by over 40 contemporary artists from the David Roberts Collection, marking the first off-site collaboration by David Roberts Art Foundation (DRAF).
Magali Reus, Parking (Legs At Eye Level), 2014. Courtesy the Artist and David Roberts Collection. Photo: Plastiques.
She sees the shadows
Works by: Caroline Achaintre, Horst Ademeit, Fiona Banner, Sara Barker, Phyllida Barlow, Neil Beloufa, David Birkin, Karla Black, Carol Bove, Martin Boyce, Lea Cetera, Susan Collis, Thomas Demand, Jason Dodge, Boyle Family, Theaster Gates, Isa Genzken, Rodney Graham, Harry Gruyaert, Jeppe Hein, Marine Hugonnier, Pierre Huyghe, Matthew Day Jackson, Tatsuya Kimata, Rachel Kneebone, Elad Lassry, Bob Law, Nina Beier & Marie Lund, Kris Martin, Marlie Mul, Nika Neelova, Man Ray, Magali Reus, Pietro Roccasalva, Analia Saban, Erin Shirreff, Monika Sosnowska, Oscar Tuazon, Gavin Turk, Franz West, Douglas White
Curated by Adam Carr (MOSTYN) and Olivia Leahy (DRAF)
Gallery 3, 4 & 5
“She sees the shadows… she even counts the tree-trunks along a promenade by the shadows, but sees nothing of the shape of things.”(1)
In 1886, a 22-year-old woman in Lyon saw the world around her for the first time. Objects instantly recognisable by touch were hard to distinguish with her new sight, and shadows appeared more concrete than solid forms. Her doctors described the sudden strangeness of familiar environments, and her singular experience of the world as a newly-sighted person.
In his 1932 book Space and Sight, Marius Von Senden collated the patient’s experiences alongside testimonies of similar cases dating from 1020 to the present. These captivating accounts, which later inspired writers including Maggie Nelson and Annie Dillard, express how something familiar can show a previously unacknowledged beauty when seen in a new way.
She sees the shadows is a group exhibition of works from the David Roberts Collection that resonate with the ideas found in Space and Sight. Each artist has re-conceived day-to-day objects and materials in unexpected ways—a bench, plug socket, grate, section of railing or broom—inviting viewers to see alternative qualities and narratives therein.
Each of the works in a collection, like the testimonies compiled by Von Senden, speak of personal experiences and moments. She sees the shadows is accompanied by a new publication with responses to the project from writers Orit Gat, Claire Potter and Sally O’Reilly and artists David Birkin, Jason Dodge, Marine Hugonnier, Marlie Mul, Magali Reus and Douglas White.
(1) M. Von Senden (trans. P. Heath), Space and Sight: the perception of space and shape in the congenitally blind before and after operation, 1932, Methuen & Co. Ltd.: London, 1960.
In Addition
Participating artists from July 2018:
Nina Beier, Sol Calero, Gabriele de Santis, Alek O., Jonathan Monk, Simon Dybbroe Møller and Marinella Senatore
Gallery 2
Each participating artist has produced work using paper and has been asked to reconsider the traditional model of producing an edition, where each version of a work is identical. Although appearing formally similar, each In Addition piece will offer deviations and nuances that set apart each edition as a unique work, thereby playing with ideas of the original, the copy and work made in series.
In Addition is permanently installed as an exhibition in MOSTYN’s Gallery 2, and will change shape over time as editions are purchased and as further artists participate in the future. MOSTYN is a charity registered in the UK and proceeds from the sales of the editions will be invested back into the gallery’s exhibition and engagement programme.
Louisa Gagliardi / Josephine Meckseper
Gallery 3, 4 & 5
Opening November 16, 2018, solo exhibitions by Josephine Meckseper and Louisa Gagliardi, curated by Alfredo Cramerotti (Director, MOSTYN) and Adam Carr (Visual Arts Programme Curator, MOSTYN), which are the first for both artists in a UK public institution.
CenSAMM Symposia Series 2018 – Centre for the Critical Study of Apocalyptic and Millenarian Movements
Alfredo Cramerotti and Michael Takeo Magurder for Apocalypse in ART: The Creative Unveiling
The word ‘apocalypse’ originally indicated an ‘unveiling’, and the speaker in the Book of Revelation is a ‘seer’. This is perhaps one of the reasons that this ancient text (and others like it) have generated such a ferment of creative responses in the visual arts – as well as those other non-visual strands of the arts which have their own way of engaging our mind’s eye.
The rich variety of types of artistic unveiling (visual, musical, dramatic, literary) makes an engagement with the creative arts a deeply valuable way of understanding and appreciating the idea of apocalypse, alongside more traditionally academic modes of enquiry.
This conference seeks to explore our relationship to art, its practice, its study and what the arts unveil to us. As artists or as audiences of art we can be profoundly transformed by our encounters with artistic creativity; indeed, we can find ourselves using the language of revelation to describe such encounters, regardless of our individual faith, religion or beliefs. Mark Rothko is quoted as saying, “the people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.”
Thursday June 28th
9.00 – 9.30 Registration and coffee
9.30 – 9.40 Welcome
9.40 – 10.40 Keynote Speaker: Christopher Rowland, Dean Ireland’s Emeritus Professor of the Exegesis of Holy Scripture, University of Oxford: ‘John Saw these things Reveald in Heaven On Patmos Isle’: the Book of Revelation anticipates Blake’s Apocalypse.
11.00 – 11.30 Kip Gresham, Master Printmaker at The Print Studio, Cambridge: In the shadow of Durer.
11.30 – 12.00 Elena Unger, Department of Art and Critical Studies at Goldsmiths University of London: Desert Time: The Silence at the Heart of Apocalypse
1.00 – 2.00 Keynote Speaker: Michelle Fletcher, Research Associate on The Visual Commentary on Scripture at King’s College London where she is also a Research Fellow. Author of Reading Revelation as Pastiche: Imitating the Past (London: Bloomsbury, 2017): Visualising the Apocalypse as a Thing of the Past
2.30 – 3.00 Jonathan Evens, Associate Vicar, Partnership Development, St Martin-in-the-Fields, London: A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
3.00 – 3.45 Round table discussion with artist, Michael Takeo Magruder and Alfredo Cramerotti (Director of MOSTYN Wales and curator of “De/ coding the Apocalypse”)
3.45 – 5.00 Tour of “De/coding the Apocalypse” by Michael Takeo Magruder and tour of the Panacea Museum.
Friday June 29
9.00 – 9.30 Registration and coffee
9.30 – 9.40 Welcome
9.40 – 10.40 Keynote Speaker: Eleanor Heartney, author and journalist, contributing editor to Art in America and Artpress, New York: Revelation as Inspiration: The American Apocalypse
11.00 – 11.30 Rebekah Dyer, PHD candidate, School of Divinity, University of St Andrews: Reserved for Fire: Creative fire performances at David Best’s Temple and Shetland’s Up-Helly-Aa festival
11.30 – 12.00 Lilla Moore, Lecturer at BA programme in Mysticism and Spirituality, Zefat Academic College and Cybernetic Futures Institute (UK): Technoetic Aesthetics of Revelation and Transcendence – The Horse in the Mind
1.00 – 2.00 Keynote Speaker: Natasha O’Hear Lecturer in Theology & Visual Art at ITIA, University of St Andrews. With Anthony O’Hear, author of Picturing the Apocalypse: The Book of Revelation in the Arts Over Two Millennia (Oxford University Press, 2015): Visualising the Biblical Vision
2.30 – 3.00 Massimo Introvigne, Managing Director of CESNUR, the Center for Studies on New Religions: Filming the Age of Kingdom: The End Times and the Movies of The Church of Almighty God
3.00 – 3.30 Matthew Askey, artist, curator, and Anglican priest. Currently serving as school chaplain at Southwell Minster, Nottinghamshire’s cathedral: The Cross and the Zombie Apocalypse: Two Images for our Time
3.30 Closing comments.
Shezad Dawood & Mike Perry // In Conversation at MOSTYN
Saturday 23 June, 2018
12 Vaughan St | Llandudno | LL30 1AB | UK
11am Exhibition Tour | 2:30pm Conversation with Artists
The two artists, currently showing at MOSTYN, each address contemporary issues around environmental sustainability and the impact of human activity on our natural world.
Forms of Tension
Ewa Axelrad // Profile of the Artist
By Alfredo Cramerotti
THE SEEN
Download the full Artist Profile here
Evgeny Antufiev Organic resistance: body and knife – crossing the border | Press Coverage
MOSTYN
18 November – 18 February 2018
Guardian Guide | Exhibitions Openings: Evgeny Antufiev, 24 November 2017
Mousse Magazine | Evgeny Antufiev: “Miles of Creativity” at Mostyn, Llandudno, November 2017
The Artists Information Company | NOW SHOWING #228: The week’s top exhibitions, 15 January 2018
Daily Post | Creative Surprises to be found around town, 29 December 2017
Daily Post | Spotlight on local arts and crafts, 12 January 2018
https://www.facebook.com/plugins/video.php?href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2FITVWales%2Fvideos%2F1492338550813332%2F&show_text=0&width=476“>ITV Wales Coverage, November 2017
Alfredo Cramerotti in conversation with Francesco Jodice Italian Cultural Institute, London
Francesco Jodice, What We Want, Phi Phi Ley, R18, 2003
Saturday 19 May 2018 | 6pm
39 Belgrave Square SW1X 8NX
The exchange between the artist Francsco Jodice and the curator Alfredo Cramerotti is centred on the question of “fragments”. What we usually expect is a linear explanation of the phenomena we encounter (in the Western philosophical tradition) but in reality there are areas of our existence that we can only give meaning to by approaching them in a circular way.
The snapshot of a system (in this case, a given society) is also the snapshot of the people who compose it, and especially of the artist who works on “giving sense” to that system in which he is living.
For the Love of Air Liquid
Opening exhibition 18th – 30th April 2018, Chamber of Public Secrets’ new media art production and exhibition space, Media Art Research Center (MARC), Antalya
Fernissage 18th April 2018 at 17:00 – 19:00
Artists: Ferhat Ozgur, Stefano Cagol, Ursula Biemann, Oliver Ressler, Khaled Ramadan and Hanna Ljungh
Curated by Khaled Ramadan and Alfredo Cramerotti
For the love of air liquid
Water’s impact on human happiness
I his book, Blue Mind, biologist Wallace J. Nichols published the surprising science showing how being near, in, on, or under water can make us happier, healthier, more connected and better at what we do.
Nichols analyzes the emotional, behavioral, psychological and physical connections that keep humans so mesmerized by water. He studies seas and oceans, lakes and rivers, and even swimming pools, and urges people to get closer to water if they wish to change their neurological, psychological and emotional experiences. Nichols draws on science, art, and narrative, as well as plenty of experience, to explain his blue mind in detail. Not just what it is, but how we can enter into this state, and, perhaps most importantly, why we should do so.
In order to know why water is one of our sources of happiness, or even a source of misery, we need to observe and analyze a very complex social science in conjunction with natural science: human relation to nature and the natural.
When we intend to shape nature, it changes and influences our living conditions. Due to this out-of-balance climatological interrelationship several vital elements of our survival are being affected. Water is becoming scarcer in some parts of the world while in other parts people suffer from the extra quantities of water falling from the sky or pumping from underneath.
In the scenarios of the world’s water bodies, only 3 percent of the water on the earth’s surface is fresh and drinkable, while 97 percent of the water is salty. The 3 percent fresh water is shared amongst the billions of the world’s population. Water shortage will soon hit cities and towns across the world, and the problem is increasing as populations are increasing. Industrialization and pollution are causing damage, and the greenhouse effect is having a negative impact, which leads to climate change that directly affects water sources. In an increasingly crowded and congested world, water supply has become scarcer and more contaminated.
Waste from industries and human settlements in most underdeveloped countries are drained into rivers and seas, leading to dying oceans. A good example of this is the Mediterranean Sea. Another example is one of Asia’s longest rivers, the Mekong River, where thousands of people have settled by the riverbank. The same analogy can be applied to the Nile River in Africa and to other rivers across the world. Lakes, rivers, seas and oceans used to be a source of human happiness and prosperity, but mass contamination, overfishing, and water scarcity have reduced many of them to transportation highways.
The exhibition,For the Love of Air Liquid, presents an opportunity to address the issue of water in a time of a crashing climate. The works of the invited artists examine our fascination with the water scene in detail. They are dedicated to helping us understand and enjoy a selection of contemporary art that provides inspiration and knowledge.
Curators
Khaled Ramadan and Alfredo Cramerotti
More information here.
Sean Scully: Standing on the Edge of the World @ Hong Kong Arts Centre
Curated by Alfredo Cramerotti
28 March 2018 — 29 April 2018
Born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1945, Sean Scully spent most of his childhood and adolescence in south London, where, before he was even ten years old, he knew he would devote his life to making art. Shortly after leaving school in the mid 1960s, he enrolled at Croydon College of Art, and it was here that he first encountered Abstract Expressionism and Op Art. Influenced by figures on both sides of the Atlantic, including Mark Rothko and Bridget Riley, Scully abandoned his early figurative work, and during his studies at Newcastle University in the late 1960s and early 1970s, began formulating his own abstract language, based on the grid. It was not until he moved to the United States in the mid 1970s, however, where he encountered minimalism, that he first broke free from the grid, and from what he has described as ‘the binding, horizontal and vertical’. It was at this time that he produced his first works that were composed entirely of horizontal bands and lines. Writing from Zurich in March 2006 about this significant epiphany in his nascent oeuvre, Scully reflects: ‘It’s habitual to think of abstraction as abstract. But it’s not, it’s a self-portrait. A portrait of personal conditions, one could say. I left London, and its stability, for New York, and its instability. Correspondingly, I dropped the vertical out of the paintings, along with my own “personal” architecture, so that I could travel along my own horizon’.
Now dividing his time between New York, Germany and Spain, Scully’s journey with the languages of abstraction has evolved into a veritable odyssey, the horizontals and horizons perhaps pursued most clearly today in Scully’s ongoing series ‘Landline’, which brings ideas of abstraction into dialogue with the landscape. Alongside several notable examples from this series, the exhibition also includes works from another major series, ‘Wall of Light’, which began in 1998 and brought together horizontal and vertical bars in part inspired by several trips by the artist to Mexico since the early 1980s, and the remarkable qualities of light he observed falling on ancient stone walls there. ‘Walls, especially old ones, are custodians of memory, witnesses to the passages of human beings, surfaces that bear the traces of history’, he has said.
With an emphasis on new and recent works, including some exhibited for the first time, the exhibition ‘Sean Scully: Standing on the Edge of the World’ features a number of pieces from the past thirty years, selected and arranged by curator Alfredo Cramerotti. The works range from large-scale paintings to small works on paper, accompanied by a number of photographic prints, which, as Cramerotti explores in his illuminating essay for this catalogue, reveal not only some of the complex dynamics at work in Scully’s practice as regards relationships of colour and form, but also encourage viewers to consider the notion of ‘edges’, and in particular the connections between edges in his paintings and those in architecture and in nature. With both the built environment and the natural world, through his paintings, drawings, photographs and sculptural works, Scully invites us to stand on the edges and to look back in through the prism of abstraction.
More information available here.
Programme information provided by: Hong Kong Arts Centre, Timothy Taylor, London and New York, and Ben Brown Fine Arts, London and Hong Kong
Upcoming Exhibitions at MOSTYN
Shezad Dawood Leviathan Cycle, Episode 1: Ben (production still) 2017 HD Video, 12’52”. Courtesy of the artist and UBIK Productions
Shezad Dawood
Leviathan is an episodic narrative around notions of borders, mental health and marine welfare issues of foremost concern, resonating profoundly with both coastal locations and contemporary life.
A ten-part film cycle that will unfold over the next three years, the work draws connections between human activity and marine ecology. Three films have already been premiered in Venice, in conjunction with the 57th Art Biennale, with a fourth to be released in early September 2018.
In dialogue with a wide range of marine biologists, oceanographers, political scientists, neurologists and trauma specialists, Leviathan explores interconnections between these fields of work and will be presented through sculpture, textiles, museum specimens, films, conversations and online resource material.
As part of the first iteration of Leviathan after its Venice debut, Dawood will also show a newly commissioned painting drawing upon this specific context, and work with community groups based on the coastal location asking questions about how these issues might come to evolve in a future 20 to 50 years from now, and what that future might look like.
The exhibition is curated by Alfredo Cramerotti, MOSTYN Director, in dialogue with the artist.
Shoe 22, Playa Santa Maria, Havana, Cuba 2014. Fencing, Treadog Bay, Llŷn Peninsula, Wales 2016.
Mike Perry
Mike Perry’s work engages with significant and pressing environmental issues, in particular the tension between human activity and interventions in the natural environment, and the fragility of the planet’s ecosystems.
This major new exhibition brings together recent bodies of work addressing how the natural biodiversity of landscapes and marine environments is undermined and made toxic by human neglect, agricultural mismanagement and the pursuit of short-term profit at the expense of long-term sustainability.
Combining conceptual aesthetics with a pressing concern for the marine environment, Perry’s images shed a different light on the health of the seascapes one might see in tourist brochures.
Môr Plastig (welsh for ‘Plastic Sea’) is an ongoing body of work that classifies objects washed up by the sea into groupings; bottles, shoes, grids, abstracts, and others. By using a high-resolution camera to capture the surface detail, the artist allows the viewer to ‘read’ markings and scars etched into the objects by the ocean over months and, in some cases, years. The viewer is intrigued and challenged by how a polluting object can be so aesthetically appealing.
In Perry’s words, “in addition to seeing these pieces as symbols of over-consumption and disregard for the environment, I also see them as evidence of the beauty and power of nature to sculpt our world”.
Land/Sea is originally produced by Ffotogallery, Cardiff, and curated by David Drake, Ffotogallery, and Ben Borthwick, Plymouth Arts Centre. The exhibition in MOSTYN has been developed in dialogue with Adam Carr, Visual Arts Programme Curator, and Alfredo Cramerotti, Director. The accompanying publication includes contributions from the writers George Monbiot and Skye Sherwin.
Jonathan Monk, Picture Postcard Posted From Post Box Pictured, 2014.
In Addition
Participating artists from March 2018:
Nina Beier, Sol Calero, Gabriele de Santis, Alek O., Jonathan Monk, and Marinella Senatore
We are pleased to present ‘In Addition’, a new edition series of works, by internationally renowned artists, available to purchase at an affordable price.
MOSTYN is a charity registered in the UK and proceeds from the sales of the editions will be invested back into the gallery’s exhibition and engagement programme.
Each participating artist has produced work using paper and has been asked to reconsider the traditional model of producing an edition, where each version of a work is identical. Although appearing formally similar, each In Addition piece will offer deviations and nuances that set apart each edition as a unique work, thereby playing with ideas of the original, the copy and work made in series.
In Addition will be permanently installed as an exhibition in MOSTYN’s Gallery 2 from March 2018, and will change shape over time as editions are purchased and as further artists participate in the future.
In Addition has been curated by Adam Carr (Visual Arts Programme Curator, MOSTYN).
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