Exhibitions

Hayward Curatorial Open: Quiet Revolution

Exhibiting artists: David Beattie (Ireland), Margret H. Blondal (Iceland), Matt Calderwood (UK), Alice Channer (UK), Hreinn Fridfinnsson (Iceland), Mitzi Pederson (US) and Joelle Tuerlinckx (Belgium). Quiet Revolution was an international group exhibition of sculptural works that playfully subvert our relationship with our everyday surroundings. The exhibition featured seven artists who take familiar and unnoticed materials and transform them to create artworks that challenge us to look at our world with fresh eyes. The exhibition was curated by Chris Fite-Wassilak, winner of the first of three annual Hayward Touring Curatorial Open competitions.  The expression 'quiet revolution' refers to a social or cultural shift that isn't obvious or violent. In a similar fashion, the works in this exhibition help alter public perception of the qualities of commonplace objects. From David Beattie's laconic homemade science projects and Alice Channer's explorations of space and pattern to the slapstick tension of Matt Calderwood's assemblages and the disarmingly simple poetic conceptualism of Hreinn Fridfinnsson, this quiet revolution shifts our attention to new and creative possibilities. Whether working with cardboard, wood, or flour, these artists share a light touch and a deft sense of humour in transforming what they find ready to hand. The Hayward Touring Curatorial Open programme supports emerging UK-based curators in realising innovative contemporary art exhibitions. In 2009, Chris Fite-Wassilak was chosen by a panel, including the artist Chris Evans and curators from the Hayward Gallery, Milton Keynes Gallery and the Harris Museum & Art Gallery, Preston for his proposal Quiet Revolution. The second exhibition in the series, Hayward Curatorial Open II is touring venues in the UK during 2010/11.

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Nasreen Mohamedi: Notes Reflections on Indian Modernism

Milton Keynes Gallery presented a major solo exhibition of work by important Indian artist Nasreen Mohamedi. Her diary pages, drawings and photographs combine Western influences such as Paul Klee and Kasimir Malevich with Islamic architectural forms and a South Asian sensibility, resulting in an intensely personal body of work. Born in Karachi, India (now Pakistan) in 1937, Mohamedi created a highly developed language from the 1950s to the 1980s. Early drawings often suggest plants and trees, before the artist focused on creating variations around the grid format; later works present free-floating geometric forms that evoke futuristic, mechanical or architectural devices. These abstract forms were often developed in intricately detailed diaries, written throughout the artist's life, where the written word morphs into personalised symbols, grids and diagonals. The artist traces or weaves regular patterns in her drawings, as if mapping a pulse or internal flow onto external phenomena. Her tightly cropped photographs seek out elemental forms such as the repetitive patterns found in the sea or landscapes as well as in the constructed world, in architecture and urban design. Mohamedi studied at St Martins School of Art in London in the 1950s and travelled in Europe before returning to India in 1958. As well as familiarity with artists like Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, she brought knowledge of Russian Suprematism, British Constructivism and American Abstraction to bear on her own South Asian references, from Sufism to the Progressive Artists Group founded by F.N. Souza in Mumbai. She died in Kihim, India in 1990. Mohamedi was one of the major discoveries at Documenta XII (Kassel, 2007), but her work remains surprisingly overlooked and her important position in the Modernist canon is still being affirmed. This exhibition was an expanded version of Nasreen Mohamedi: Notes – Reflections on Indian Modernism, curated by Suman Gopinath and Grant Watson, organised and initiated by the Office for Contemporary Art, Norway in Oslo. It included an additional section of works from the artist's estate and other collections, courtesy of Talwar Gallery, New York/Delhi. A variation of this exhibition travelled to Lunds Konsthall, Sweden.

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Lost & Found Present: Graham Hudson & The Centre of Attention

Milton Keynes Gallery hosted an exhibition curated by Lost & Found, a group of young artists, designers, writers and musicians who have been working with Milton Keynes Gallery over the past three years, as part of its Big Lottery Funded Young People's Project. Lost & Found invited artists Graham Hudson and The Centre of Attention to use the Gallery as a site of production rather than simply for the presentation of objects. Visitors therefore became directly involved in the development and realisation of the evolving exhibition. In the Cube Gallery, The Centre of Attention (Pierre Coinde and Gary O'Dwyer) presented an installation called Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft [community and society], which refers to a book by German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies. The installation included functional, everyday objects occasionally sourced from the Gallery's offices and workshops. It invited visitors to make an artistic judgement or statement by making changes to the work (such as adding, moving, editing or combining elements). In the Middle Gallery, The Centre of Attention hosted the Lost & Found curators within a formal office environment where they organised events and produced printed matter during the course of the exhibition. Artist Graham Hudson was in residence in the Long Gallery from 23 November to 1 December. He constructed a new work called A considerable extension in time and an insignificant extension in space formed around a multi-levelled framework of scaffolding and pallets with TV monitors, record players, strip lighting and other objects from the Gallery's 'behind the scenes'. Hudson used the Gallery like a studio space, so that his working process became visible to the public, who were able to interact with the work. "...a studio visit is always more interesting than the same artist's gallery show – psychologically we've got to close that gap – and so open up new space". Graham Hudson in interview with curator Vincent Honore "All that art tries to make invisible we transform into art." The Centre of Attention "Over the last few years, Milton Keynes Gallery has served as an incubator for energetic and enthusiastic young people who are exploring career possibilities and personal development in the arts. This exhibition follows on from a number of successful film screenings, performances and events and provides Lost & Found with the major challenge of producing an exhibition of contemporary art from its conception to its delivery." Anthony Spira, Director, Milton Keynes Gallery

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Marcus Coates: Psychopomp

"...my work is all about our relationship with animals and nature...There is humour in the work, but a serious side explores how we use our relationship with animals to define our humanness." Marcus Coates This exhibition is the first survey of Marcus Coates' work in a public gallery in the UK and it includes early film pieces, sculpture, sound, costumes and photographs as well as new work. Coates often assumes the identity of an animal, such as a fox, goshawk or stoat, by simulating its appearance, enacting its habits and appropriating its language. In the film, Stoat (1999), for example, Coates totters around on ramshackle platforms, learning to recreate the animal's bounding movements; in Goshawk (1999), a telephoto lens captures the artist as a rare bird perched precariously at the top of a tree; while in Finfolk (2003), the artist emerges from the North Sea spluttering a new dialect, as spoken by seals. Coates has also trained as a shaman and the exhibition includes films of his rituals, where he achieves a trance-like state and communes with the animal kingdom to address social issues. Wearing an array of costumes such as a badger's hide, a stuffed horse's head, a blonde wig and a necklace of money (all of which will be on display), Coates has addressed issues including prostitution, regeneration and swine flu for communities worldwide and most recently in Israel, Japan and Switzerland. "...I feel that my imagination can be put to good use socially, even politically." Marcus Coates Dawn Chorus (2007) is a major, multi-screen installation in which human voices re-create the chorus sung at dawn by birds, including a chaffinch, pheasant and yellowhammer. Together with wildlife sound recordist Geoff Sample, Coates recorded individual birds singing simultaneously on a single morning. Each was slowed down to a human pitch, so that people could be filmed mimicking these lower and slower sounds in their own natural habitats, such as a hotel, osteopath's clinic or even a bath tub. The films were then accelerated until people twitter like birds and their voices precisely echo the original birdsong. Coates' interest in appearance and transformation is encapsulated in the sculpture Peregrine, 1999, where an ordinary starling has been re-cast as a powerful predator, through the simple painting of its feathers. The exhibition includes works spoken in numerous tongues as Coates exploits the spiritual and social potential of art and ultimately addresses his audiences using the universal language of the imagination. 'Psychopomp' means 'the guide of souls'; they are creatures, spirits, angels, or deities in many religions whose responsibility is to escort newly-deceased souls to the afterlife, or to act as mediators between the unconscious and conscious realms. They have been associated in many cultures with animals, such as horses, dogs, crows and sparrows. In many cultures, the shaman fulfills the role of the psychopomp.

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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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