A Big Night in Manchester

Thursday night (15 April) in Manchester feels like a real art festival (unlike the Manchester International Festival) but one that appears to be a happy accident. Castlefield Art Gallery, the Chinese Arts Centre, Cornerhouse and Rogue Project Space are all previewing their latest exhibitions, all within walking distance of each other.

Castlefield Gallery
David Osbaldeston:
Out of Time (The Light of Day / The Action of the Play)

I’m looking forward to seeing this show by my newly discovered neighbour, David Osbaldeston. Through manipulated images of news photography and a print series of interpretive book cover designs from Luigi Pirandello’s celebrated play Six Characters in Search of an Author, the exhibition will explore relationships between the gallery and theatre staging, displacement, reality, illusion and social discord.

The journalistic images are taken from photographic records made between the 1970’s and 1990’s of protests or accidents that report a breakdown of social and economic order such as the LA Riots, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Waco Siege, the Piper Alpha disaster and the Iraqi Highway of Death. Re-photographed, appropriated and re-presented by Osbaldeston with textual snippets, amplified in scale and printed on 1980s Ilford photographic paper; the works draw playful attention to the constructed nature of the photographic image.

Exhibition Continues: Friday 16 April – Sunday 6 June 2010

http://www.castlefieldgallery.co.uk/Default.asp?eKey=333&eP=1
Address: 2 Hewitt Street, Manchester, M15 4GB

Cornerhouse
Contemporary Art Iraq

The first comprehensive UK exhibition of new and recent contemporary art from Iraq since the first Gulf War, examining practices that are emerging with fresh perspectives from a culture marked by conflict and turmoil. This has a bad taste because of the evil racism of UK immigration policy with 5 artists refused entry to the country because they don’t have bank accounts in Iraq. See
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/iraqi-artists-denied-entry-to-britain-for-their-own-exhibition-1934726.html I wonder whether the shameful Foreign Secretary and the Iraqi Ambassador will turn up to the preview, and if they are booked to make opening remarks.

Exhibition continues: Fri 16 April to Sun 20 June

http://www.cornerhouse.org/contemporaryartiraq
70 Oxford Street, Manchester M1 5NH, UK

Chinese Arts Centre
Lan Wei / Decaying End
anothermountainman (Stanley Wong)

Exhibition continues: 16th April – 12th June 2010

Lan Wei / Decaying End is anothermountainman’s first solo photography exhibition in the UK. It features a number of haunting large-scale photographic prints of abandoned, incomplete building projects from across Asia. Following the opening of its doors to foreign investment in China in the 1980s there was frenzied investment in real estate, which was exposed to corruption and contributed to the eventual collapse of the property market in the late 1990s. When the bubble burst huge numbers of building projects were abandoned and left unfinished. This wave of abortive building construction spread across other Asian cities that also experienced the same pattern of meteoric economic growth and collapse. The photographs in the exhibition were taken in China, Taiwan, Thailand, Cambodia, Turkey and Singapore.

I’m also looking forward to meeting Wang Jun (picture), the current artist in residence and who is opening his studio also on this full evening. Since his recent residency in China, Phil Davenport has told me a lot of good things about Wang, whom he worked with out there.

http://www.chinese-arts-centre.org/
Market Buildings, Thomas Street, Manchester, M4 1EU

Rogue Artists' Studios & Project Space
Tom Hobson, In the blessed abyss of the eternal ether

Exhibition continues: 15th – 24th of April 2010 (By appointment only)

With a monumental effort comparable to the great men of history and the inventiveness of a mad professor, Hobson has created a device for talking to the sky and turned mountains upside down for this (his first solo) exhibition.

http://www.rogueartistsstudios.co.uk/
Address: 66-72 Chapeltown Street, Piccadilly, Manchester, M1 2WH

Studio visit

The Bury Gallery show following "Agency of Words" (Text Festival) has a working title of "Not At This Address". The initial impetus for this was the observation that there are some very interesting artists working in Manchester (but with clearly international locus and impacts), who have not been properly presented in the city, because of the Manchester's curatorial weaknesses, previously touched on here. It is of course a similar situation with the poetry scene - internationally significant poets disconnected from the local structures. (A case in point, the other day, I bumped into Michael Schmidt, http://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?owner_id=665 who seemed much more interested in his just-bought bags of summer berries and fuzzing over Barney than he was that Ron Silliman had been in town. And he didn't mention the Text Festival at all!).

So in preparation for the next exhibition, I visited 3 artists at Rogue Studios last week, http://www.rogueartistsstudios.co.uk/opportunities.asp : Pat Flynn (picture), Andrew McDonald and Magnus Quaife - all of whom will be in show. I don't know whether they would agree but while each artist had a very distinctive voice, I sensed a single commonality in their individual questioning of the divergent boundary between reality and conceptual space. Coincidentally Pat and Andrew are both routed in sculpture but have gravitated toward digital practice: Pat Flynn (re)creates objects and environments in software generating images and sculptures eerily mathematically real but reflecting the uncanny valley of between consciousness and object. Andrew McDonald also resolves sculptural dimensionality by turning to the digital. Andrew's scratchily drawn remarkable Beckett landscapes and unspecified warehouse interiors around which a headless man called John endlessly circulates are at once both tragic and affirming. http://www.axisweb.org/ofSARF.aspx?SELECTIONID=15794 He also creates shocking lightening room-illuminated cinematic tableau.

In similar questioning of perception, expectation and reality, Magnus Quaife takes images and interrogates them directly on that ground. Primarily working in watercolour, Magnus has a series of rural idylls, some rough re-paintings historic landscapes, featuring the box cabinet of one of the first super-computers used to simulate the real world; or seeing images of May 1968, and finding instead images of quirky images of life of the period, which converted into faded graphics accumulatively create an unreal era of non-memory.

Other artists so far confirmed for the show are: Sarah Sanders, Brass Art, Jesse Ash, Maurice Carlin, Amy Pennington, Rachel Goodyear, Rachel Well, and Alison Erika Forde. There will also be a sound art event during the show. It was interesting talking to the 3 artists that none of them had visited Bury Art Gallery since its innovative programme began (and that's probably nearly a decade now!); just as they don't situate their practice in the local and therefore why should they, Bury positions itself in the international context; However, my thinking is that the curatorial practice assumes that important artistic debates are moved forward more significantly through the dialogue between artforms as well as within them - hence events like the Text Festival.

(Tomorrow: down to London for the Comtemporary Art Society reception at 11 Downing St.)