Exhibitions

Mark Leckey and Martin McGeown: The Life and Times of Milton Keynes Gallery

Using material sourced from Milton Keynes Gallery's archive, Mark Leckey, winner of the 2008 Turner Prize, and Martin McGeown, Director of Cabinet Gallery, London, have collaborated to make an exhibition marking Milton Keynes Gallery's tenth anniversary year. Drawing from the Gallery's ten year history of exhibitions and projects, and from the very architecture and fabric of the building, Leckey and McGeown have used video footage, installation photography, press material and architectural plans from the Gallery's archive, so that the Gallery itself becomes an incubator of its own history – a reflexive, sentient, exhibition-making machine, revisiting its past and dreaming about its future. Leckey has created two new films about the Gallery. The first, Concrete Vache makes use of the Gallery's extensive documentation, splicing together footage from numerous past exhibitions and events to create a continuous narrative which will be presented alongside a number of 3D models. The second film combines images of the empty Gallery itself, and is shown with imaginary drawings made from descriptions of the site by Viz cartoonist Lee Healey. There will also be a wall-based installation comprising hundreds of thumbnail images from past Milton Keynes Gallery exhibitions. Milton Keynes Gallery opened in October 1999 as the city's purpose-built venue for exhibitions of international contemporary art, since when it has organised over eighty exhibitions, including diverse figures such as Gilbert & George (1999), Andy Warhol (2001), Archigram (2003), Phil Collins (2005), Shirana Shahbazi (2006), Pascale Marthine Tayou (2007), Cathy Wilkes (2008) and Nasreen Mohamedi (2009). British artist Mark Leckey was born in Birkenhead in 1964 and graduated from Newcastle Polytechnic in 1990. He rose to prominence in 1999 with Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, a survey of Britain's underground club culture from the 1970s to the early 1990s. He has since exhibited widely in the UK and internationally. The artist lives and works in London and is currently a Film Studies Professor at the Städelschule, Frankfurt-am-Maine, Germany. Martin McGeown founded Cabinet Gallery with Andrew Wheatley in 1992 and has curated numerous shows, including 'PopOcultural', South London Gallery, 1995 and 'Lovecraft', CCA, Glasgow, 1997 and most recently an ongoing project entitled '120 Day Volume', A Pallazo Gallery, Brescia, 2009-2010.

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THE THE THINGS IS (FOR 3)

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Andrew Lord

British artist Andrew Lord (b. 1950) explores sculptural and pictorial concerns through clay, plaster, beeswax, bronze, drawing, printmaking and video. This exhibition charts the development of his thirty year career, from observations of nature and citations of modern art to casts from the body and the use of memory as a sculptural tool. This partial survey includes notebooks from the 1970s onwards alongside examples from key phases in the artist's practice as well as new work. The artist's first comprehensive monograph will be available from 12 October. It includes contributions by art historian Dawn Ades and James Rondeau, Curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, and has been produced in collaboration with Santa Monica Museum of Art.

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Black Dogs – MK2Morrow: One Small Step for Milton Keynes

In November 2009, Lost & Found curated an exhibition at MK Gallery with artists Graham Hudson & The Centre of Attention, encouraging the public to take an active part in the artists' installations and studio practice. MK Gallery's Director, Anthony Spira, has invited Lost & Found to curate a second exhibition this December. At Lost & Found's invitation, Leeds-based artist collective Black Dogs have conceived an exhibition that invites gallery visitors and local residents to imagine a future Milton Keynes. In late September 2010, astronomers discovered Gliese 581 g,‘the exoplanet or extrasolar planet closest in size to Earth, with the greatest recognised potential for harbouring life. This exhibition proposes that residents of Milton Keynes are best qualified as pioneers of this new world and uses the artworks as a starting point for discussion. The exhibition comprises three parts: The Pub at the End of The Universe, The MK2 Survival Kit and Massive Tiny Space Colony. The Pub at the End of The Universe is a replica of a twenty-first century ‘theme pub’.  What better environment could there be to share stories, anecdotes, facts and fiction relating to Milton Keynes? Postcards are provided to offer visitors a chance to re-envisage Milton Keynes while effectively rewriting its history. The MK2 Survival Kit gathers local skills and knowledge that will be passed on to future inhabitants of the planet Gliese 581 g. ‘How To’ cards have been contributed through a public call for submissions so that the kit becomes a growing collection of DIY knowledge. Finally, you are invited to play as architect and city-planner via the audience-generated Massive Tiny Space Colony installation; a scale model of what the MK2 Space Colony might look like and the values it will uphold. Will looking into the past and projecting into the future achieve a deeper engagement with the present? Will the MK2 Colony help build the capacity for affecting change in Milton Keynes?

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Gerard Byrne

This exhibition will be Gerard Byrne's first major solo show in a UK public gallery. It presents the culmination of his ten years of research around the Loch Ness Monster, the myth fuelled in the 1930s by the popular press in order to sell newspapers. Including photography, film, text, sound and archival material, this project blurs the lines between fiction and documentary, exploring how images inform our understanding of myth and reality. Byrne presents his own evidence of the monster's existence, posing the question: is it possible to capture an image of something that does not exist? Byrne was born in 1969 in Dublin where he lives and works. A recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship (1994) and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Visual Arts (2006), Byrne represented Ireland in the 2007 Venice Biennale. Major presentations of his work have been included in the biennales of Gwangju and Sydney in 2008, Lyon in 2007, the Tate Triennial in 2006, and the Istanbul Biennale in 2003. Byrne's work is primarily lens based, in film, video, and photography. The film / video projects involve reconstructing particular historically charged conversations originally published in popular magazines from the 1960s -1980s, including visions of the future by science fiction writers. Developing out of his interest in acting and theatre as cultural forms, Byrne has worked on a number of projects with actors and sets in gallery spaces which test the historical distinctions between sculpture and set design, acting and non-acting, and spectacle and spectator.

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Gareth Jones

British artist Gareth Jones (born 1965) presents his first major solo exhibition in a public gallery. Describing it as a ‘retrospective of new work’, Jones returns to earlier projects and filters them through his experience of growing up in Milton Keynes. He describes the new city as ‘the most ambitious social project of its kind in the UK, a benchmark for Modernist architecture, progressive town planning and the radical ideals of the 1960s and 1970s.’ Jones came to prominence in the early 2000s with a series of exhibitions in London: Seven Pages from a Magazine (Platform, 2002) brought together a sequence of Lambert & Butler cigarette advertisements from the mid-1970s, depicting an idealised world of smokers in chic metropolitan interiors; an installation at Cubitt Gallery (2003) presented a field of structures that distorted and embellished the form of a standard plinth; while Helmut Jacoby: Milton Keynes Drawings (38 Langham Street, 2003) represented the futuristic visualisations for the new city, as drawn by one of the 20th Century’s foremost architectural renderers, to create an image of the ideal city. Often rooted in the minimalist aesthetic and utopian ambitions of the founding fathers of Milton Keynes, Jones’ work engages with the politics of identity and display, examining how images were used to generate ideals for future living. Jones’ fascination with the social vision that surrounded the formation of Milton Keynes leads him to test the fetishistic or iconic status of materials, from magazine pages and Fablon to polystyrene and stainless steel, while playing with the modular and serial construction techniques that inform the city’s famous design.  

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New Art MK: Eight Artists From Milton Keynes

This summer MK Gallery presents an exciting group exhibition by eight emerging artists from Milton Keynes, who work in a range of media including photography, drawing, painting and cross-stitching. All eight artists were shortlisted finalists in the MK Community Foundation’s Arts Bursary Award 2010. The eight exhibiting artists are:

Jamie Chalmers (aka Mr X Stitch), brings the world of cross-stitch and embroidery to a whole new audience, aiming to “restore embroidery to its rightful position within the art world”.

Caroline Devine uses the human voice as raw material for much of her work, layering sounds and exploring speech, song, text, oral history, memory and acoustic space.

Lauren Keeley recent body of bold, expressive paintings explores surface and  medium through the use of structures and systems alongside arbitrary aesthetic decisions that drive her painting process.

Jason Smith is based at Westbury Studios in Milton Keynes and makes works on paper and large-scale sculptural installations such as those shown at the Open University, MK City Centre and Woburn Abbey.

Kamil Szkopik (born in Poland) produces photographs of strangers that often play with conventions of identity, sexuality and society.

Frazer Waller has worked as a reportage photographer for extreme sport and music magazines but also produces his own series of photographs focusing on the creative exploration of social, cultural and personal issues.

Emma Wilde produces meticulously observed drawings which are rendered in pencil or paint often on cheap everyday materials like notebooks or newsprint.

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Anna Barriball

Anna Barriball’s first major survey exhibition, at MK Gallery, brings together drawing, video, photography and sculpture made over the last decade. Barriball often coats ordinary objects such as bags and lamps in pen and ink or makes impressions of windows and doors by meticulously tracing their surfaces with pencil on paper and magnifying the incidental details and textures created by every day wear and tear. At the same time, much of her work evolves from spontaneous discoveries, channelling natural forces with little or no physical contact. A video records a sheet of paper sucked in and out of a fireplace by a draught while new images are created as ink bubbles burst over found photographs. Other works lie at a crossroad between interior and exterior or private and public as a blown up image shows mysterious figures staring out of a window and leaves cut out of second hand curtains are strewn across the floor. Whether capturing specific instances or conjuring hazy memories, Barriball’s work combines intense, concentrated moments with slight, playful gestures, highlighting the fleeting moments and discreet surroundings that witness our passage through time and space.

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New City Art Prize

Shortlisted artists: Beatrice Gibson, Siobhán Hapaska, Jimmy Merris and Roger Palmer  An exhibition of work by the four artists shortlisted for the inaugural MK Community Foundation £10,000 New City Art Prize for the Visual Arts. The prize aims to raise the arts profile within Milton Keynes by highlighting some of the best examples of new art from across the UK. The winner will be announced on the morning of 5 December 2014. The shortlist was selected by a Jury comprising Penelope Curtis, Director of Tate Britain, Candida Gertler of Outset, artist Roger Hiorns, former Turner Prize nominee and MK Gallery exhibitor in 2006, Adrian Searle, Chief Art Critic of the Guardian Newspaper, Anthony Spira, Director of MK Gallery and Julia Upton, Chief Executive MK Community Foundation. London based Beatrice Gibson (b.1978) is an experimental and process-led filmmaker, who was nominated for the Jarman Award (2013) and shortlisted for the MaxMara Prize for Women Artists 2013-15. Her work often explores the relationship between music-making and film, particularly experimental notation. Siobhán Hapaska (b.1963) is a sculptor known for making multi-layered work combining disparate images, forms and narrative styles, ranging from the figurative to the abstract, using such diverse materials as olive trees, (fake) animal fur and industrial metals. Jimmy Merris (b.1983) works primarily with video, but also performance, assemblage and print. Some videos, shot in low resolution, often involving a collaged pop soundtrack  are short, tragi-comic vignettes of everyday life. Since the 1970s, Roger Palmer (b.1946), has worked primarily in the medium of large black and white photographs, often hung without frames. Throughout his practice, he has maintained a steady output of thoughtful, austere, poetic and pared down work with a strong political backbone and sense of history. Anthony Spira, Director of MK Gallery said: “We are delighted to be launching this important new art prize with a shortlist of this calibre. In some respects, the exhibition will reflect the diversity of art practice in the UK today and will also hopefully provide inspiration for artists in MK.” Julia Upton, Chief Executive of MK Community Foundation said, “Art and culture has always been an important element that contributes to the success of Milton Keynes’ development, and today we are recognised as one of the world’s most innovative new cities. Creating the Community Foundation’s UK Art Prize will bring a new focus on arts excellence that will contribute to MK’s reputation of fostering arts and culture which is important for the overall quality of life.”

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Flashback

On Thursday 8 October, 2015, exactly 16 years since MK Gallery first opened to the public, MK Gallery launches Flashback, an archival project exploring the organisation’s rich exhibition history. Flashback is an onsite and online display providing an opportunity to consider the wealth of international art that MK Gallery has brought to Milton Keynes to date, while the gallery undergoes a major renovation and expansion. Between now and March 2017, Flashback will present material relating to some of the world’s leading contemporary artists, from Andy Warhol and James Lee Byars to the radical Italian ‘Arte Povera’ artists Guiseppe Penone and Gilberto Zorio. Also featured will be numerous emerging artists, some of whom were subsequently nominated for the Turner Prize award, including Phil Collins, Roger Hiorns and Cathy Wilkes, as well as some of the best artists from Milton Keynes. The first archival display, Flashback: 1999 (8 October - 29 November 2015), focuses on the opening of the building and the inaugural exhibition by internationally acclaimed British artists Gilbert and George. Attracting significant national and regional attention, the artistic duo’s exhibition placed MK Gallery firmly on the UK cultural map. Successive monthly displays will each review a calendar year of exhibitions concluding with 2015. This will provide an opportunity to remind ourselves of the endlessly diverse ways in which artists investigate the world, exploring their interests, ideas and issues, through painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, film, video, performance, dance, spoken word and installation art. Some of the more unexpected exhibits to have appeared in MK Gallery over the years include a black London taxi cab, a white hearse containing a coffin made of cigarettes, a VW camper van, a mobile bar, recreations of an artist’s sitting room, a 1970s tv studio, and a Google office environment, a giant drawing made from acacia thorns, massively scaled red plastic fingernails, a pyramid of every African nation’s flag, and installations that are only completed by the visitor playing the grand piano or full drum kit provided. Speaking of the Flashback project Claire Corrin, MK Gallery’s Exhibition Organiser said: “We’ve had an exciting time rummaging through the archive and selecting the most interesting material. There will be plenty to interest people, from photography to press coverage and print (posters, adverts, and catalogues).There will also be screenings of filmed talks and events, including interviews with artists and curators. We’d love people to share their memories or any exhibition ephemera that they might find for use in the Flashback website so that we can provide a more comprehensive survey of the gallery’s history.”

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States and Spaces: A Survey by Project Art Works

Through inclusive curatorial initiatives, Project Art Works conducts practice led enquiries into the lives of people with complex needs. The exhibition at MK Gallery will present an ambitious survey of projects developed and produced by Project Art Works and associated artists over the last ten years.  This first major survey of its work focuses on innovative, collaborative investigations of built space and their impact on the perception of people with neurological impairments.  Selections from a huge body of work include immersive and sensory installations, film, physical works and sound. The interest and motivation in much of Project Art Works practice, is the ‘unknowability’ of another persons experience of the world, especially if they are unable to communicate using language.   Through collaborative projects, it explores different forms of response and communication using visual art based materials and data. The exhibition incorporates work from a long-term project between MK Gallery and Project Art Works centering on the exploration of constructed and open space and referencing the urban grid of Milton Keynes, perception and visibility in the city. Cube Gallery Cathedral of Trees An immersive and ethereal sound installation of The Cathedral of Trees in Milton Keynes from recordings taken during a visit by an unusual band of collaborators during September 2011. Also sharing the space, a floating object and paper based works that chart experiential surveys of the land between the gallery and this arboreal sanctuary in the city. Middle Gallery Not Knowing of Another The Not Knowing of Another is a multi screen video and sound installation by Kate Adams that reveals synchronized and alternative viewpoints of a short walk through an industrial building, over a railway bridge and finally out on to an expansive beach at sunset. “…it is a noble project, given that consciousness is such a notoriously elusive subject for any artist to tackle.” The Independent’s Pick of the Week July 2008 Long Gallery Physical presences A range of works from the Project Art Works archive that reveal topographies of engagement through constructed spaces, expansive paintings and a series of etchings tracing presence and physicality.

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Daria Martin: Sensorium Tests

Daria Martin’s first survey exhibition in a UK public gallery presents a selection of short 16mm films made over the last 10 years, including the premier of an ambitious new work, Sensorium Tests. Throughout this period, Martin has pursued a sustained enquiry into numerous pressing issues relating to film, art and culture, including enchantment, voyeurs and artificial intelligence.  The exhibition includes the following films: Closeup Gallery (2003), in which a magician and his assistant engage in a strange game where cards dance, as if equivalent with inner worlds; Soft Materials (2004) where intimate relationships between man and machine are nurtured in an artificial intelligence laboratory; Harpstrings and Lava (2007) a dark narrative that animates dream images through clashing textures and structures; and the new film Sensorium Tests (2012), which revolves around a recently recognised neurological condition called ‘mirror-touch synaesthesia’. People affected with mirror touch synaesthesia experience a physical sense of touch on their own bodies when they see other people, or sometimes even objects, being touched.  Using staged scenarios based on a real life experiment into this condition, the film explores how sensations might be created and shared between people and objects. Encountering art has always produced varying degrees of engagement and interaction, whether triggering personal memories, associations or feelings, or more recently in literal, physical responses to immersive, participatory installations. In some ways, Martin’s work turns these distinctions on their head, using mirror-touch synaesthesia to render virtual or remote activities indistinguishable from literal actions. Martin’s work often raises questions about what it means to be ‘touched’ by cinema and alternates playfully between luring the viewer through sensuous images and lush archetypes, and pushing them back into an awareness of artifice. This intentionally crafted push and pull, Martin says, is a reflection of the essential contradictions of the medium of film: its ephemerality together with a physical realisation of fantasy. Combining elements of painting, sculpture, performance art, dance, music and science, Martin’s films re-enact on a modest basis the historical ideal of the ‘gesamtkunstwerk’ or total artwork in order to create new frictions. Her casts frequently include musicians, choreographers and actors, and practitioners of professions or members of subcultures not normally placed before the camera. The cast of Sensorium Tests comprises the Romanian actress Anamaria Marinca as well as several non-actors, including the synaesthete James Wannterton, who ‘tastes words’.

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