The show will be launched in a different way from past Masters Shows in that we are having an Open Doors daytime launch on Saturday 28th August. This means that visitors to the show can get to know the works, students and staff through talks, tours, workshops and screenings.

A selection of events are presented by each of the Masters courses : Master of Design, Master of Fine Art, MSc Media Arts & Imaging, MSC Medical Art, MSC Forensic Art, and except for a couple of screenings at DCA in the morning, will all happen within the exhibition spaces.

There will also be a more traditional evening event on the last Friday of the show run.

Please see below for basic listing info and more detailed schedule is to come. DJCAD is also developing a dedicated website for the show which will have profiles and photos of the students’ work.

DUNDEE MASTERS SHOW EXHIBITION AND EVENTS///

MASTERS OPEN DOORS///
Saturday 28 August, 11am – 4pm

A day of free talks, screenings, tours and workshops from students and staff of Master of Design, Master of Fine Art, MSc Media Arts & Imaging, MSC Medical Art, MSC Forensic Art.

EXHIBITION///
28 August – 4 September, Mon – Fri, 10am – 8 pm, Sat & Sun, 10am – 5pm (except Saturday 4 September when the exhibition will shut at 1pm)

MASTERS EVENING EVENT///
Friday 3 September, 6 – 8 pm

I got to meet Superfly Guy who I have exchanged several emails with and circulated info to our students about his projects in the past.

I have been thinking about how the links made can be maintained but my daydreaming has now gone further than that: As I was recounting some of the day during a conversation today with someone who was not able to come it made me think could the Popup Tour happen again next year…..It took a lot of work but it was work done together and benefiting from what each other was doing. It was a collaboration and will hopefully nurture further collaboration. We have Open Doors days and I suppose the Dundee Popup Tour organised by Central Station was a hyper equivalent of that with social media involved! Anyone else interested in doing it all again next year?

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To find out what Dundee Popup was all about or to read more reviews & blogs  from the day, click here.

My first foray into Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) was straight into the bowels of the building, as we went down the stairs into the Visual Research Centre (VRC). The VRC is dedicated to practice-led research, and is home to research staff and doctoral students from the Schools of Design, Art & Media.

As a researcher by trade, I am fascinated by archives and research led spaces. It’s such a luxury to have time and space to sit and take in work, theories or products – in a quiet space and in a considered manner, rather than the throng of information that google offers up when carrying out a search. (And the folks at team Censta know what a web lover I am, so that’s a fairly strong comment coming from me!)

We visited 3 spaces at the VRC.

First the Rewind Micro Cinema. A collection of early artists videos, ranging from the 1960s to 1990s. Rewind has catalogued and preserved the works, which are now available to view in a dedicated room at VRC. A small white cinema, with space for 2 or 3 to cosily sit and enjoy an afternoon of secluded viewing. It felt almost like a white washed spanish villa inside, with white curtains and feeling like being cocooned in a serene space. I watched, or listened to one piece, Clapping Songs from Tina Keane (1979 so very much drawing me back to an age that would have me knowing these songs too). I needed to leave, as we had more to visit on our Dundee Popup tour, but would recommend a few hours spent in the VRC to anyone who enjoys immersing themselves in the work.

What also struck me about the VRC was the way in which Rewind has preserved the works. The practitioners who produced the videos have been interviewed to find out where the work was displayed, how it was installed – was it a TV installation, at a festival etc, so the original screening can be recreated.

The Rewind works do tour, but you can also book in time to go and view the videos at the DCA. Get in touch with the Duncan of Jordanstone folks, or visit theRewind site.

IMAGE 2

Photo Credit: Ross McLean

We also visited the Centre for Artist Books, and had a peek into a Phd installation about to be unveiled this week, but you’ll have to wait till my next installment to hear about those. As even an internet addict has to go offline sometimes!

Thanks very much to Laura Simpson for the tour and talk.

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To find out what Dundee Popup was all about or to read more reviews & blogs  from the day, click here.

This partnership has recently been able to announce the site – right next to the Discovery ship, on the Tay Estuary. Georgina said that the new museum would be built on an island in the Tay with sightlines throughout the city and even a beach area around it (which might bring the seals to this cultural attraction!)

The building is expected to cost in the region of £47million with one third of the money coming from each of the following sources: Scottish Government, partnership funding from Trusts and Lottery sources, and the final third from money raised by the University of Dundee through private sponsorship (one of Georgina’s responsibilities).

The interior of the building will total 7000 sq m, which, for reference, is about half the size of the Baltic in Gateshead. I found it good to hear that the V&A at Dundee would focus on contemporary art and design work, no earlier than the 1940s, ‘Not an outpost of V&A with decades old collections’. Georgina went on to say that the works on show would be ‘Post 1940s but very much focused on today, with 1200 sq m of the galleries given over to touring exhibitions from the V&A in London (similar to the famous V&A blockbuster with Kylie’s outfits).

The pattern for this would be for the first three years, one V&A blockbuster plus two smaller exhibitions, reduces after that point when exhibitions can be developed and toured from other international organisations that curate design.

Georgina said that she was using the term Design in its most inclusive sense and that the V&A at Dundee would also provide intellectual support for practitioners through its development as a professional centre for those practitioners which would have ownership by the practitioner body of Scotland. It would be looking at collaboration, introducing new thinking, exposing research agendas and drawing on a multidisciplinary pool including scientists and philosophers to deliver new products into the marketplace.

One of the key exhibition spaces will be the Designs On Scotland Gallery which will be about and for contemporary practitioners. This will focus on process as well as products of practice, where often the artwork is the end of one process and the start of the next. The selection mechanisms will always be based on the quality of work. There will also be a special collection from 1940s onwards looking at design.

Recent progress in the project has seen the steering group of the project move to being a charitable trust which will lead the project through to completion. The Chair Person for this trust is likely to be announced next month.

They have also recently called for notes of interest from architects and have been inundated with initial contacts from over 250 practices or individuals from ‘just about every country in the World’.

In March the project will see its most important meeting to date with the Culture Minister and Finance Minister which should be the ‘final pushing of the green button and enable us to fully go ahead with the Architectural Competition’.

Georgina said that she was looking forward to seeing the submissions, but glad that she wasn’t going to be short-listing. It is expected that the large number of applications would be shortlisted to 6-8 who would present their ideas on 3 A1 boards and 1-100 scale models that would be exhibited here and in London.

The project will develop an engagement strategy beginning in autumn 2011 and they expect to open a V&A exhibition in another venue in Dundee, as part of that, before the new building opens in September 2014.

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To find out what Dundee Popup was all about or to read more reviews & blogs  from the day, click here.

Barry Esson and Bryony McIntyre gave a presentation about Kill Your Timid Notion, a festival which their Edinburgh based company Arika has run in Dundee (at Dundee Contemporary Arts) since 2003. KYTN can be seen as one of the most successful festivals of its kind within Europe.

As well as KYTN they also do other event and festival projects including Shadowed Spaces and Install. Install, which has a focus on music and performance has taken place at the Arches in Glasgow in the past but is moving to the Tramway this year.

KYTN’s focus has been on experimental sound, image and music and they will continue with this but in a different format this year. The festival, taking place between 21 – 28 February is being built from artist proposals rather than artist objects. In relation to this Barry said that the idea was that ‘films, paintings, sculpture or any object does not incarnate art – the process which produces these is the art’.

With KYTN this year it’s the first time the public focus has been over a week, with Investigations happening right through from Sunday 21 to mid evening on the next Friday. These Investigations will tie in with the artists’ proposals to produce the festival weekend events (and possibly longer term changes / projects and hopefully engagement). The phrase used was: the proposals will be ‘re examined with you the public – people like yourselves and people unlike yourselves’, through the Investigations.

Barry said that he found that the history of theories and practices (especially in his background of sound) was important but should be regularly rewritten. I think that this maybe is related to dealing with / getting free of assumptions – of audience, practitioners and maybe even funders and press about the more elusive or experimental practices that Arika tend to work with, and also I know that it relates to their reconsidering of their own practices as organisers (something I respect and will try to emulate for myself this year).

Arika says that ‘if you spend time with us we will consider it spending money with us’ and so have devised a tally card system that means that if you attend the Investigations you can get gratis passes to the weekend  pay events. (2 investigations = one day pass, 4 investigations = full weekend pass).

If you are interested in taking part – you need to act though as the Investigations are filling up, look at the programme online.

Other free highlights will be a free screening of a film from the legendary British filmmaker John Smith – see you there…

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To find out what Dundee Popup was all about or to read more reviews & blogs  from the day, click here.

Lyall Bruce and Johanna Basford have worked together over the last year on a couple of projects. Closest to home is the poster for Central Station Dundee Popup, which allowed them to develop on from a previous collaboration for NEoN (North East if North) in 2009.

They created both of the  works by passing the design between the two of them. Lyall, who is a graphic designer and sooperdd entity, always works digitally (he said he had attempted to include a pencil sketch he had made at the start of the project but was too embarrassed!). For the NEoN piece he started with the image of a wee guy in a hat slumped over and holding up a placard reading ‘The Future is Coming’ in the vector based imaging programme Illustrator, adding in tonal colour by ‘painting into the image in Photoshop’ using a graphics tablet.

Johanna is completely opposite in her process where she always works in a lo-fi and hand made way. Her artwork is characterised by intricate and decorative hand drawn patterns. Johanna showed the audience her drawings for both the projects which were drawn in black ink on thin white paper. She said that part of her process with Lyall had included balancing a pyrex dish on her knee with a lamp angled under it to make a d.i.y. light box so she could trace through parts of Lyall’s design to work around. Having said that, Johanna does use Photoshop to scan and clean up her drawings to use in different formats.

Lyall was in charge of combining the two images. Lyall was nervous about adding colour, (he had coveted amending Johanna’s drawing with marker pen for a while) but bravely went ahead and  brought a few points of colour into Johanna’s monochromatic design to tie it with his Photoshopped character.

For the Central Station leaflet they also included photographs of Dundee scenes and buildings, which Lyall overlaid with artworks, design and logos from the artists and organisers involved in the tour. Central station – photos from Dundee, then with members artwork hidden into the buildings. Yuck N Yum logo was on the train station, there was an illustrators artwork on the façade of the DCA. Kind of bringing what is going on behind closed doors out into the open… so fits well with the Popup tour idea!

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To find out what Dundee Popup was all about or to read more reviews & blogs  from the day, click here.

Hello CenSta-ers!

Myself, the Central Station Team and a whole load of other Central Station members are here at the Dundee Pop-up day and so far it’s proving to be pretty interesting. Art mixed with a sort of Anneka’s Challenge ethos, as we jump from venue to venue. Anyway, here i’ll be trying to fit in blog posts of the events and exhibitions I’ve seen.

Just came from the Cooper Gallery to check out the Public Image exhibition and was especially taken by the work by Liu Wei. His video installation was focussed around challenging the censorship of images in China, taking that particularly arresting photo of the person standing in front of tanks in Tiananmen Square and seeing if students of Beijing University remember this event. Their responses are certainly intriguing and makes me think how much we take our freedom of speech for granted, in the Western world.

Another one of the exhibits I enjoyed was the Patricia Esquivias’ work. In a video installation, Esquivias details the connections between King Phillip II of Spain and Spanish crooner Julio Iglesias. Examples of the connections included how many albums Iglesias has sold compared to how much land Phillip conquered. And the fact that Phillip had a traitor son as did Iglesias, in the form of Enrique, who tries to deviate from the Iglesias sound by being trendy (that was my favourite connection). The similarities between the two are strangely strong. It was a wonderfully odd exhibit, delivered in a humourously deadpan manner which put a wry smile on my face.

The event is still on at The Cooper Gallery, from 6th February to the 6th March 2010. Check it out for sure!

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To find out what Dundee Popup was all about or to read more reviews & blogs  from the day, click here.