This exhibition is a sequence of journeys: points of departure and arrival, presence and absence. The work on display is an exhibition of clusters and parallels, of architectural and spatial details examined: shapes, lines and curves, inside and outside, ‘choreographically’ reported on. It takes account of an observational – in situ – process that seeks to find the essence of its subject: a building, its layers, its sonic vocabulary, and its materials. In combination the building’s surfaces and flow, the movement of people through the space, sound interrupting or contaminating space, voices transported around the building – folding spaces and acoustics. It makes use of the changing environments from entrance to basement to external balcony and conjoining spaces like stairwells, raised platforms and sunken dance floors. It seeks to investigate the data that images – of any kind – transmit (architectural blueprint, sketch, photograph, illustration, medical diagram). It looks at the purposeful uses of the information images hold: subtle evocation, spatial illusion or exacting measurement. And what the viewer ‘draws’ from that information: from precision to emotion. The exhibition is a conscious arrangement – though once that finds an affinity with the improvisational – that suggests a heightened awareness of time spent in a building. An acute vigilance of being alone within a place and letting its multiple synchronised or discordant narratives unfold. The subject of the exhibition isn’t the Pavilion itself but rather the artist’s place within it. The artist’s pursuit has been to find the building as a collaborator, forming or articulating its own language at the end of an ongoing visual conversation.

Drawing by Ally Wallace

Ally Wallace works with installation, drawing, painting, sculpture, video and animation in direct response to specific sites, buildings or locations: an architect’s office, science laboratory, or here a seaside Pavilion, dance hall, leisure facility and social hub. He employs these non-gallery spaces to host self-initiated residences and in turn the exhibition of a close scrutiny, the inspection of their subject, materials and purpose.

This exhibition describes the habits of a journey, its lengths and changes from a studio in the East End, to Glasgow Central to Rothesay, Isle of Bute, on road and rail, and then across water, then returning and repeating. This conjoining of pace, time, surface and movement is embedded in the exhibition: lining up the abstract and the figurative, then an absence of figures, then passages of slowness and stillness, then moments of illusion, details close-up and far, the building’s brief and long narratives, its temperature. Held within the exhibition’s entirety is an invite to contemplate, and to relive the memory of the building’s experiences, alongside a mirroring or recollection of the occupying time of Wallace’s experience as its artist-in-residence.

Seaside Modernity Installation view by Ally Wallace

Seaside Modernity Installation view by Ally Wallace

The exhibition’s installation stages an intuitive response, in successive and joining passages, like a poem, diary or home movie. Colour and shapes, small details in pencil, or broader washes appear in interruption and intrusion; displays appear visible and then become invisible. Parts of heating systems, curved plastic warped or melted window panes, doorways or projector screens and decorative velvet rope stands are recruited into the project as rests, tables, frames and props. A lectern for the Society of the Women Citizens of the Isle of Bute becomes an appropriated object, a host for an exhibition text. Close by are marine and military images, reminders of the building’s origins from 1938 and evidence of its slow water sea air rot, its decline – its inherent vice – of the mischief of entropy, flaking, peeling, cracking, falling.

Sketches by Ally Wallace

 Sketches by Ally Wallace

Wallace’s marks and observational processes bring to mind the paintings of Raoul de Keyser, the Belgian artist who died in 2012, and in particular to works like Come on, play it again, nr. 7, 2001, 3 Hoeken III, 1971 and VISP, 1968. Their painted gestures are a description of the lines, decorations, details, hues, colours and surfaces of everyday life. This behaviour that Wallace and de Keyser share finds character in projection screen suspensions, the bringing together of overlapping or exaggerated lines, the highlighting of prominent curvatures, the illumination of small details, the extraction of curiosity and curious features. And in the short-lived exhibition in the Pavilion the line of detail and accuracy flowing from solidity to abstraction, evidence of time spent, of a conscious flow of lived experiences: alert then slow, monotonous, then enthused and sharp and repeated.

These processes and works further bring to mind the work of Toby Paterson, and in particular his installation Ever Growing, Never Old, at The Modern Institute, Glasgow, 2009, and the sculptural works and images Asymmetric Snowflake, 2007 and Inchoate Landscapes, 2011. The isolated object, rendered in detail and in spatial illusion while purposefully engaging with an object’s intention finds resonance with the paintings of Julie Roberts, for example Gynaecology Couch, 2011. The sonic spatial portraits, that are part installation, drawing and sculpture are similar to the works of Trisha Donnelly, in particular her show at Modern Art, Oxford, 2007. While in moving image the Berlin-based experimental works in 16mm film bring to mind Ute Aurand especially In Die Erde Gebait (Building under the Ground), 2008.

Seaside Modernity detail by Ally Wallace

Casts by Ally Wallace

The building, designed by James Carrick of Ayr and opened in 1938, commencing a new process of restoration is referenced slightly in Wallace’s installation. The Pavilion’s Modernism and relationship to Scottish architectural history and its idiosyncratic placement in the seaside town of Rothesay are further postscripts to Wallace’s residency. These are the silhouette lines that the building is able to articulate anyway. It was designed to give the effect of sunrise, a pleasure building, a destination for Glasgow’s holidaymakers in the International Modernist style. What the artist does is give voice to its unnoticed or nearly unobserved existence: the lines of external hard flat surfaces with soft camp white drapes, the rhythms of techno music that circulates its ancient bones, the swirling air and thud of bullets in its hidden rifle range, the voices that drift like clouds through its halls and passageways and the honeycomb terracotta sinew that bolsters its elegant serenity.

For more from Alex Hetherington, see his current Modern Edinburgh Film School exhibition MOTHS at Summerhall, Edinburgh. Full details on Central Station here.

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Modern Edinburgh Film School combines moving image, curating, collaboration, publications and critical writing. These work together on themes of learning about film and its ideas, working with moving image artists and their films, sculpture and poetry. Find out more about their latest project, MOTHS below.

MOTHS is a partial or pretend narrative presented between public and private (hidden) spaces alluding to their multiple and prior occupancy and historical functions and across artists’ images, films, readings, performances and sculptures. It employs cues from a spectrum of dark and light and comedy and tragedy with gestures that attach to and detach from themes of human interactions with animal information, natural and synthetic substances and methods of healing, evocative, sensorial or secretive sculptural actions, their material properties and suggested narratives, and recollections of the factual and science fiction.

It has been inspired by works by the Glasgow-based visual artist Lucy Skaer, and her particular approach to sculpture and moving image: “As an artist who once claimed to have secreted moth and butterfly larvae into the Old Bailey and reportedly left a scorpion and a diamond lying side by side” as well as sculptural works in copper, resin and mahogany and screen printed photographs for her show Harlequin Is As Harlequin Does at Murray Guy Gallery in New York in 2012: “these sculptures are like figures that act, interrupt, deflect, and solicit. Each has the pretence of a narrative, the mahogany, for example, is over a century old; it was salvaged from a riverbed in Belize where it had sunk while in transit to the UK.”

The core of the MOTHS project is a broadsheet newspaper edition with a series of 8 screen printed ‘colour supplements’, a schedule of film and video screenings, a reading and performance, and sculptural objects whose material properties relate to the ephemeral and to metamorphosis. Some of the works in the exhibition are hidden or slight, ephemeral or like the newspaper and editions, made to disappear, to exit the gallery.

Strain Andromeda The by Anne McGuire

Work by Mairi Lafferty

Contributing artists are Zoë Fothergill who re-screens her video ‘Fur, Bizmuth & Spiny Oyster’, a work where she explores tactility and the sensorial, the state of Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response: a perceptual and pleasurable response to visual, aural or tactile stimulus. American artist Anne McGuire will screen her video work ‘Strain Andromeda The’, the 1970s seminal science fiction film about an extra-terrestrial virus, cut scene-by-scene in backward chronology, documentation of Lucy Skaer’s sculptures will be reproduced in the newspaper alongside a new print by Edinburgh-based artist Mairi Lafferty, Glasgow based artist Katrina Vallé will present a reading which takes as its starting point an exploration of the spectrum from light to dark, dusk to dawn, while Amy Pickles will present a new performance. London based film artist Anna Lucas will be screening her film ‘Una de Gato’ which documents her journey to find the home of this rare plant, also known as Cat’s Claw, her film alludes to its association with numerous medicinal, spiritual and superstitious beliefs and in a double bill with Australian artist Allison Gibbs’ work ‘SPIRIT SHADOW SPECTRE BONES and PHANTOM’, a work based around the making of ‘Tabu: A Story of the South Seas’ (1931), the final film produced by the German Expressionist director F.W Murnau. It starts with an article published by Allison in the magazine ‘Tahiti-Pacifique’, an exploration of the Polynesian Ti plant and a visit to a medium.

SPECTRE by Allison Gibbs

Bone by Jenny Brady

Dublin-based artist Jenny Brady screens two recent films – ‘Bone’ which draws on research into methods of non-verbal exchange developed in animal science, it considers whether language is primarily an instrument of communication or control and ‘Wow and Flutter’, which alludes to a scientific collaboration between animal cognition scientist Irene Pepperberg and an African Grey parrot she trained in elements of human language. While Bobby Niven represents sculptural work from his film ‘ISLAND’, shot at Inchgarvie, underneath the Forth Rail Bridge, the film explores its intricate and strange cultural landscape, military outpost, isolated refuge for syphilis victims, later a prison and quarantine for plague victims.

The newspaper also carries a text on Henry Coombes’ film ‘Two Discs and a Zed’, which sees a wolf set free in the National Galleries of Scotland to gaze mysteriously at Rodin’s ‘The Kiss’ and Peter Paul Rubens’ masterpiece ‘The Feast of Herod’. This text makes references to Peter Greenaway’s ‘A Zed and Two Noughts’, a gothic fantasy set in a zoo, the ‘House of Wax’ and Peter Weir’s film of disappearance and the sublime: ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’.

With thanks to Gregor Morrison, LUX and Video Data Bank, Chicago.

MOTHS will be at Summerhall, Edinburgh from 4 June – 15 July 2015. 

Modern Edinburgh Film School produced a series of projects in 2013 across Edinburgh on film and sculpture and in 2014 produced ‘The Silver River’, at Gallery of Modern Art, programmed as part of Glasgow International and has curated the film programme for the exhibition ‘Ripples on the Pond’ at Gallery of Modern Art, which is currently on display until April 2016. Recent writing includes Stan Douglas, Isa Genzken, Anna Oppermann, Hugo Canoilas and Florian and Michael Quistrebert. Find our more about Modern Edinburgh Film School on Central Station here.

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Alex Hetherington founded Modern Edinburgh Film School which combines moving image, curating, collaboration, publications, talks and critical writing. These work together on themes of learning about film and its ideas, moving image artists and their films, sculpture and poetry, and new expressions founded in discussion. It produced a series of works and projects in 2013 across Edinburgh on film and sculpture including Ute Aurand: FILME at Stills, The Slow-Wave and Videotheque at Talbot Rice Gallery, The Hand that Holds the Desert Down, April Set, Lauren Gault: Granular and Crumb and Hold This Object Up Until There is Nothing Left of You at ESW, Green Screen at Embassy Gallery, 6000 Posters for Giants and Dwarfs at Rhubaba Gallery and The Good Work, New Media Scotland, and in 2014 produced The Silver River, at Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow for Atelier Public 2 programmed as part of Glasgow International, “A New Island forming…” for Annuale, Embassy Gallery and Queer Information, an anthology of experimental writing and poetry. Recent published writing includes 21 Revolutions, ‘Men Gather, In Speech’, Karen Cunningham, Stan Douglas, Georgina Starr, Anne Colvin, Isa Genzken, Anna Oppermann, Studio Jamming, Kathrin Sonntag and Counterpoint. Modern Edinburgh Film School is currently working on an essay and film programme reflecting on the subject of Women and Works on Paper for Gallery of Modern Art in 2015.

My Top Five

David Bussel: Isa Genzken

I’m making resoundingly personal choices here, reflecting on certain stages of my life and work: here Bussel introduces Isa Genzken’s extraordinary Botanical Garden which I wrote about for This is Tomorrow, so that takes on a different viewing experience when looking at the exhibition and this video of it, but am “re-mindful” of my own emotional chaos that summer that Isa’s space of collage, minutiae, flowers, roses, paints, a Mike Kelley obituary, gems, toys, aerosols and Michael Jackson dance routines mirrored.

Susan Hiller: Re-Sounding

I love this video of Hiller discussing her work, its relationship to science, the spiritual, phenomenon, the unsubstantiated outside of our gaze and am reminded of my current writing and thinking about artists Mairi Lafferty and Allison Gibbs, and to traces of people I admire like Craig Mulholand, Darren Banks and Michelle Hannah, you can see them in her, and I’m reminded that Hiller’s An Entertainment was one of the first exhibitions I worked on, operating the four VHS decks that had to be started manually and in sync.

Georgina Starr: The History of Sculpture and Before Le Cerveau Affamé

I am mentioning these two documents on Georgina Starr’s project at Cooper Gallery, curated by Sophia Hao, and of Starr’s absolute generosity in allowing me to watch her make her film and performance, write about her work and think extensively about the voice in contemporary art with Ella Finer, and to the team of dancers, assistants and the photographer Ross Fraser McLean when the installation was being made – a truly beautiful moment.

Pipilotti Rist at Tramway, Show A Leg

So here is the time Tramway was turned into the inside of Swiss artist Rist’s head: sight, sound, music, transparencies, collages and video overlaps, purple walking shoes and elegant skirts, paragliding down the sides of Glasgow high rises, her naked body using a bed as a trampoline – I haunted this exhibition during its installation, with its net curtain screens, moving image poetry, positive hysteria and special craziness.

Carolee Schneemannn

I heard Carolee talk about her extensive practices, visual art, gender, sexuality and the body at a show called Wack! at PS1 in Brooklyn when I was spending a lot of time in the USA, I think that exhibition helped me focus a lot on my relationship and interests in the work of women artists and to the importance of talking to artists when shaping projects that represent them, that capture certain moments in their practices: unfolding, shaping, moving, working.

Find out more about Modern Edinburgh Film School on Central Station here.

This is the third part of an ongoing series selecting films from SummerhallTV’s archive. Take a look at the first installment by Dave Rushton and the second by Bill Millett. For a chance to curate your very own SummerhallTV film selection, please email Central Station on hello@thisiscentralstation.com.

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YES:

Endless Yes by Alex Hetherington

Mark Osborne

New Scotland New Flag by Graphical House

Jenny Soep

NEITHER:

Mr Castro

Some of you may wonder why we haven’t featured any ‘NO’ works. The answer is quite simple, we did not receive any ‘NO’ submissions.

Stay tuned for more Indy Ref related content…

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What:
This September Liverpool will play host to CAVE – a new and unique model of art fair.

Housed in Baltic Creative’s new Campus building, CAVE will give visitors the opportunity to discover the work of 45 of the UK’s most dynamic and currently unrepresented artists, offering the opportunity to buy work at a price to suit any budget. What makes CAVE unique is its focus on the artist with the organisers taking no commission or exhibition fees; the full sale price of each art work will go directly to the artist.

Y Morals by James McLardy

Coinciding with the opening of the Liverpool Biennial 2012, CAVE will run from 13 – 16 September, existing independently of but alongside the festival. CAVE aims to give emerging artists an ambitious sales & exhibition platform and the opportunity to engage with wide audiences. Playing on it’s independent position; CAVE is exhibiting some of the most exciting art being produced in the UK today. Painting, drawing, sculpture and film will exist alongside performative encounters, secret talks and urban shamanic rituals.

Oliver Braid

CAVE, the brainchild of Flis Mitchell and Kevin Hunt (artists and curators based at The Royal Standard in Liverpool) was born out of a desire to create a commercial platform for emerging and unrepresented artists during the Biennial, something that has never happened before. CAVE supports the very best creative talent the UK has to offer, removes gallery mediation, and creates a dialogue directly between the artist and the buyer; stimulating the local and wider regional art markets within the UK.

Tom Nolan

Flis explained “We feel that the time is right for something different, an ambitious and exciting commercial addition at the time of the festival.”

Kevin added “People will be able to buy something bespoke, hand-made and original, for less than many factory-produced blips consumed on the high street, engaging directly, with the artists who made the work.”

When:
CAVE Art Fair runs from 13 – 16 September 2012 at Baltic Creative Campus, Liverpool.

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Modern Edinburgh Film School is an education, research and production project that aims to explore, through a temporary participatory film school, combined themes of the sculptural screen, narrative and space, event as image, and acoustics and noise as form. It is an ambitious project that develops over participation with moving image artists, a curriculum of published film essays on recent and historical figures in moving image practices, a group show and screenings and the development of a new film that seeks to identify and explore the poetry embedded in an “Edinburgh screen, an Edinburgh camera” taken from an essay an American artist wrote in the late 1960s/early 1970s about art and film in Edinburgh.

The project seeks to raise funds to assist in the costs of publications, and to pay a group of artists in filmmaking and the moving image to contribute to the School as visiting lecturers, as faculty.

The work has a venue for next year, to be finally confirmed  and has attracted some public funding and while I am attracted to crowd-funding it does not seem practical to the nature of the show, which is discreet and academic. With this in mind I have created a small temporary print shop, featuring five new limited edition prints in the hope that this will raise £400-£1000 to contribute to the print costs for the Curriculum essays and artists fees.

The School will present a series of sessions on film and poetry, with the notion of a symposium and graduation at its completion. These themes are: “On Spaces of Uncertain Function”, “A Transmitter of Mysteries”, “Filming Day for Night, its message is open and allusive”, “This space evaporates, pursues, too,  yet requests time”, “flowers and questions, indoor: blue, black, permanent”, “Sculptural revisions, additions, equally found on photographs, maybe poetry and  possibly films” and “Displayed revisions echo future actions.”

It continues my work across the possibilities of combined media: writing, performance, sculptural installation, photographic images and recorded sound, alongside a deepening enquiry into the constructs of  and ephemeral gestures of identity, knowledge, feminine connotations and perception, which has included curated projects Belle Helaine for The Briggait, Heavy Influence for ESW and The Consequence for CCA/Intermedia, the installation Leves Vos Skinny Fists Comme Antennas to Heavenfor The Embassy, the performance Untitled (2011) at Edinburgh International Film Festival, the film Linda Fratianne for CCA and writing on Rosemarie Trockel, Kate V Robertson, Tim Rollins and K.O.S. and Kai-Oi Jay Yung.

Modern Edinburgh Film School will call for participants and contributions from Edinburgh-based education sites in moving image, and contemporary visual artists by invitation.

Find more about the project on Tumblr and follow Alex on Twitter here.

Alex Hetherington is a performance-based visual artist and writer, dividing his time between Scotland and Northern California.

This particular piece is an extract by Alex from, The Consequence, an installation work with Glasgow artist Janie Nicoll at the Centre of Contemporary Art in 2008. We suggest you take 5 minutes to immerse yourself in the work, then click through to see more of Alex’s work.

Find out more about the work here.
See more film work by Alex here.
Visit Alex’s site here.
See more work on Alex’s flickr here.
Follow Alex on Twitter here.

Mexico City is like no other I have ever experienced.   A city of extremes drenched in traditional values yet radically liberalised in recent years. A vast sprolling metropolis with ample breathing space.  The world’s richest man lives and walks amongst some of the poorest.  Perhaps it is it’s antiquity or turbulant past or the gentle hum of the city but something takes hold and resonates inside you long after you leave.

There are over 22 million people living in the city, making it the third largest city in the world.  I travelled the equivalent distance of Glasgow to Dundee, Dundee to Edinburgh, Edinburgh to Glasgow to view one art gallery.  Euthanasia is legal. Every Sunday morning the current mayor, Marcelo Ebrarad, closes the main motor thoroughfares to traffic allowing cyclists and skateboarders free access to the city’s roads. Venders sell hand-cooked crisps (better than Kettle Crisps) on the street corners. Mexican’s eat chilli lime and salt with everything.

Galleries and or sights of interest in no particular order:
Roja Artspace, House of Gaga, OMR, PerrosNegros Palcio De Bellas Artes, Teotihuacán, Arróniz, MUCA, Coyoacán, Museo Frida Kahlo, Museo Léon Trotsky, Ciudad Universitaria Biblioteca Central, Espacio Escultórico, Galería Nina Menocal, Torre Latinoamericana,  Cuauhtémoc, Museo Nacionel De Antropologia, Condesa y Roma.

I also made a zine entitled Chilli Lime Salt which you can download here.

an installation by artist Morelos Leon Celis

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My Creative Scene is an insight into different creative & cultural happenings in cities where your members and readers live. Browse through more insider guides here or contact us to write about the arts scene where you are.

But for your consideration this is a description of the communities which form the San Francisco visual arts, an overview published in the archives of Shotgun magazine, which now forms part of the brilliantly composed online publication Art Practical: What Defines the Bay Area Visual Arts Community

To describe San Francisco will be for me a description of the very active engineers of my experiences here; most often these individuals are my friends, but nevertheless they have assisted in the ‘scripted’ narrative that that has facilitated or enabled my ‘screenplay’ here of denizen, transient, ghost, hallucination and authentic pseudonym:

David Cunningham Projects
Enter Slowly at The Lab, curated by David Cunningham features the work of European artists Anna Barham, Cath Campbell, Maud Cotter, Laura Gannon, Alexandra Navratil, and Linda Quinlan. Cunningham’s space, DCP, in Folsom Street is now closed, but during its short-lived (2007-2010) incarnation, it presented a sumptuous array of screening, performances and shows formed from Cunningham’s interest in the trajectories of vivid and immersive aesthetics bonded to conceptual variations on gender, queer and performative procedures best seen in his screenings of Kenneth Anger’s Magick Lantern Cycle, which includes the films Scorpio Rising, Invocation of My Demon Brother, and Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, the psychedelic group show Jigsawmentallama, featuring Grant Worth, Sonja Nilsson, Ryan Trecartin, Jack Smith and Kalup Linzy, the video installation of selected works by Lukas Beyeler and the radical The Fall and Michael Clark themed group show, residency and performance re-enactments I Am Kurious Orange, guest curated by the independent curator and elegant operator, artist Anne Colvin. Enter Slowly for The Lab, situated in the Mission offers artists “preoccupied with the ways in which architecture, language and memory function as framing devices and filters deployed in the manipulation of perception and the construction of ‘meaning’”.

Ishan Clemenco, Afterlight and Leaving Colours Time
Clemenco’s current solo show Leaving Colours Time at Noma Gallery in Maiden Lane (a gallery sitting on a narrow street filled with expensive boutiques: Chanel, Hermès, Marc Jacobs, and YSL) is a considered, authorative, minimal installation, a hybrid inquiry on colour, sound and space: chalk lines, powdered residue and vivid colour gels evoke a process of fragile ‘instrumentation’. A former composer Clemenco lifts a sonic atmosphere onto pure iridescent surfaces, a notation on sound as architecture best seen on a transparent role with white and orange lines framing the clutter, offices, buildings and exteriors outside of this deliberate, serene mechanism. On the 8 January the gallery launched an accompanying 10 inch vinyl recording, pressed onto lurid yellow vinyl, feature two tracks: Afterlight and Untitled (typewriter) dedicated to the Danish composer and frequent Beuys collaborator Henning Christiansen and the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett. Afterlight is a fragment of a cycle work using found pianos discovered in old churches, theatres and music rooms, where the instruments were found to have “atmospherically’ tuned themselves. The reverse side is a recording of an old typewriter engaged in a wordless communication. Together these works deliberate on the materials of their making and engagement: void technologies (vinyl, typewriters, clockwork film cameras and optical gels) reasserting their value, tuning themselves to the resonances (beyond the bulk and burden of the digital, simulated or saturated) of quiet seductiveness.

Karla Milosevich and Right Window Gallery
Right Window is part of a species of artist-run spaces in San Francisco and elsewhere that provides a platform for ingenuity, emergence, experimentation and assumes a flexible immediate and considered curatorial track. Occupying a space and window, to present 24 hour activities: video, performance, installations, it is run, with some fervor by a group of artists, curators, musicians and writers, a model in multi-tasking and self-empowerment: Dodie Bellamy, Katie Bush, Craig Goodman, Cliff Hengst, Scott Hewicker, Kevin Killian, John Koch, Cheryl Meeker, Karla Milosevich, Paula Pereira, Jocelyn Saidenburg, and Wayne Smith. I  have a particular affinity to Milosevich’s interests and forays  into the genre and phenomenon of ‘covers’ pop bands and the appeal of the pop video, the amateur video as artwork seen in her collaborative gendered alternative recreations of songs from The Fall, Scritti Politti, Kraftwerk and Siouxsie and the Banshees. The correspondence of pop and punk cultures framed by visual art DIY and DJ cultures and lo-fi aesthetics remains a tendency in my practice and one that I explored with a number of artists, including Milosevich, at my group show Heavy Influence at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop in 2009.  Meanwhile her recent series of Cyanotype videos, places video portraits of her friends and colleagues into the language of blueprints and altered chemically stimulated, photographic processes and manipulated perceptions. Screened at night they echo “another unusual characteristic of the cyanotype is its regenerative behaviour: prints that have faded due to prolonged exposure to light can often be significantly restored to their original tone by simply temporarily storing them in a dark environment.”. She uses this ‘characteristic’ and these technologies to regenerate through the screen her relationships to these individuals using the process as a restorative construct. They inhabit similar concerns to the blue-infused photography of Catherine Yass and the relationships, complexities and intricacies between the individual and a broader social, cultural map of the works of Gillian Wearing: “I’m always trying to find ways of discovering new things about people, and in the process discover more about myself.”

Christine: Green Fingers: Israel

Anne Colvin
Colvin, an Edinburgh-born US-based artist and independent curator best known for her gallery space Tart, which brought artists like Douglas Gordon, Duncan Campbell, Graham Fagen, Stephen Sutcliffe and Luke Fowler for the first time to the Bay Area, her contribution to No Soul for Sale, New York, and a sequence of events contiguous to her publication series Skank Bloc Bologna – inspired by Semina, a free-form journal published sporadically by artist Wallace Berman and his circle in California in the 1950s and 1960s – continues to push the envelope with a recent series of presentations at the Berkeley Art Museum’s L@te Friday Nights programme. Here she has presented, in a broad socially-minded circumstance, a reenactment of Jack Goldstein’s Two Fencers (1977) by Laura Glass and Keith Tsang, members of the Cal Fencing Club, The Greens, a Scritti Politti cover band with local artists Cliff Hengst, Scott Hewicker, Kota Uetsu, and Karla Milosevich, The Beast in Space—a 1980s Euro-sleaze space saga, unearthed in the basement of a condemned Bologna porn cinema and Fool Me, the voice issue of Fools in Print—a Scottish artist-run press edited by Lucy Keany and commissioned by New Media Scotland. Colvin summarizes: “I create experiences that draw on sources such as literature, music, and film. My video and photo-based work and hybrid curatorial projects explore psychological investigations in time and the deconstruction/construction of the image… Be prepared for outrageous outtakes, meditative moments, stunning sojourns, raucous rituals, earnest explorations, sonic surprises, and eccentric egos.”

Margaret Tedesco, 2nd Floor Projects
Similar to Alhena Katsof’s A. Vermin project artist and curator Tedesco presents exhibitions in a back-room in her apartment. She presents solo exhibitions and group shows accompanied by editions, prints, writing by a corresponding cultural producer. Recent shows include paintings by Bruno Fazzolari, photography by Daniel Minnick, drawing and collage by Matt Burroso and video by Nao Bustamante and editions by the likes of Larry Rinder.

SFMoMA and Yerba Buena
Currently at the Museum of Modern Art is The More Things Change which “draws from their collection to present a range of works made since 2000, offering a selective survey of the art of the last 10 years and a thematic and psychological portrait of the decade. Revealing the museum’s collection as a seismograph of shifts in contemporary culture, this continually evolving exhibition considers how the past persists in the present and how art engages with the world at large.” Collaboratively curated across the museum’s different departments, it is sequenced across themes of fragmentation, fragility, entropy, metamorphosis, and reconfiguration, its highlights include works by Rachel Harrison, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, and Pae White, elsewhere in the museum’s current survey of its 75-year histroy are gems by works by Tom Marioni, Marilyn Minter and an elegant sound piece by Bill Fontana. Across the street at Yerba Buena Centre for Arts is a show dominated by a “reversal the role of the audience from that of spectator to subject, exposing the dramatic mechanisms underlying public gatherings of people. By focusing the viewer’s attention on the characteristics and behaviors of individuals in a group environment – body language, facial expressions, attitudes, gestures and actions – the artists challenge our perceptions about participation in civic life.” Audience as Subject offers up mainly video work, the highlight being Stefan Constantinescu’s film, Troleibuzul 92 (2009), which features a man on a bus making several phone calls, which are threatening and abusive, in view of the other passengers, this fictional staged performance, entraps these passengers into an unwilling, uncomfortable “theatricalization” of a normally mundane journey. Alongside this show is an overview of Los Angeles-based Mexican artist Yoshua Okón‘s video installations which are “built on improvisational narratives created by the artist and his collaborators, mostly non-actors willing to participate in a game of social chance that may easily spiral out of control.” The best piece in this uneven show is Hipnostasis (2009), a collaboration with Raymond Pettibon which explores the subculture of old hippies and beach bums from Venice Beach in Southern California, it depicts individuals existing out-of-time, registered by 60s disillusionment, drug and alcohol dependency and a refusal or inability to function “appropriately”, these individuals sit on the rocks at the beach antagonistically anti-authoritarian, underscoring social collapse in the territory of accelerated superficiality.

I would also, finally, like to mention Jessica Silverman’s amazing space Silverman, the deft programming at Triple Base and Ratio 3, and to the writing at Stretcher and Art Practical.

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My Creative Scene is an insight into different creative & cultural happenings in cities where your members and readers live. Browse through more insider guides here or contact us to write about the arts scene where you are.

Untitled still, Triangle of Need by Alex Hetherington. See more work here.