Central Station » school

David Frew

guest — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 07:30:57 +0000

Rainy Day by Glasgow School of Art student, David Frew.

Waldorf School

guest — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 07:35:50 +0000

Waldorf School by Glasgow based Architecture student, David Fleck who started the Tesseract project, a collective of students who are passionate about engaging people with humanitarian issues through creativity.

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Where I Make: Pogo Books

guest — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 08:18:41 +0000

Claudio Pfeifer has worked as a photographer and video artist in Germany. He now publishes art books and zines in Berlin. Here is were Claudio creates…

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Claudio Pfeifer lives and works in Berlin in different fields of visual arts. After studying Photography & Video at Art School, he moved to Berlin to study Cinematography at German Film School. His Photographic work is abstract, constructed and focuses on movement in still images. He has shot several experimental short films, documentaries and also worked as Director of Photography for Feature Films and Music Videos.

For the past two years, Claudio Pfeifer has been publishing art books and zines with an emphasis on photography. He founded the Publishing House PogoBooks which is the tangible representation of a very vital existing community of young artists.

PogoBooks understands itself as part of a long and rich tradition of other DIY projects and self-publishers. This includes offering publications at low costs. In this way, PogoBooks has already managed to publish 40 titles since 2010.

“This kind of publishing requires handiwork and heart. Nonetheless, the books have to be affordable. That’s what Pogo means to me,” says Pfeifer.

Find out more:
Website | Flickr | Facebook | Twitter

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‘Where I Make’ invites readers behind the scenes of artists from many disciplines to share photographs and a little insight about where they create their masterpieces. See more from the series here.

Where I Make: Alastair Cook

test — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 12:24:28 +0000

Alastair Cook is a lens-based artist working in fine art photography, portraiture and film. His award winning film and photographic work is driven by his knowledge, skill and experience as a conservation architect: the work is rooted in place and the intrinsic connections between people, land and the sea. Alastair trained at the Glasgow School of Art then fled the country, returning after a dutiful spell in London and a more relaxed time in Amsterdam; he now lives and works in Edinburgh.

So. I make here. It looks small when captured like this, almost cornered. My first admission is that I used this as an excuse to tidy the maelstrom driven mess it had become. An image of the Victorian terraced house I live in in Leith may be more appropriate as I inhabit the house with the full-time full-throttle artistic-endeavour that drives so many of us: the house is my place of work, not just this studio. I drift through the house, switching switches and drinking coffee, making cake and kneading bread, thinking. When I do sit in this space, it is with such focus and drive that the work comes fast. I edit, cut and write here. My films come to life here and settle here; still images taken on film or glass or tin come into focus here.

The wall behind us is a window to a Victorian cottage garden, sun dripped or rain drenched, it accepts the extremeness of Edinburgh’s weathers and refuses to stop propagating. The other wall is the wall of objects, it suffuses my influences. The opposite wall is blank, white, a nothing, a space to stare at.

So what can you see? All present and correct: a MBP, some Swedish furniture, a Super 8 camera. The intertwined glass and metal objects are from a residency I completed at North Lands Creative Glass in Lybster in May this year where I cast glass: this sea-worn wrapped-steel loop comes from the beach at Whaligoe in Caithness; I cast it in glass whole, the result the yellow and black piece on the left.

With regard to photography, I mostly don’t exhibit digital, I dance around the fringes of fine art photography, of analogue photography, of making images not taking them. Having said that, in Lybster I pursued my interest in Collodion wet plate photography, developing a kilned ambrotype process, which I will pursue further this year with the aid of a formative influence, Carl Radford. What I mean by kilned ambrotype is that we spent careful time preparing glass photographic plates using a Victorian technology and then I threw them into a kiln at 600 degrees. The results were astonishing, delicate and amber-bright.

My most recent exhibition of fine art photography, Analogue Decay, was shown at the Howden for a month over Easter; it is a collection of new analogue work, celebrating the disintegration and imperfections of this near obsolete process and the unique painterly images it can produce. The pieces are not digitally manipulated and were shown at full negative ratio. The best I can hope is that this is seen as honest work.

My room is now a midden again. I love it.

Currently, Alastair has a series of 12 short films in the Edinburgh Festival, as part of Kevin Williamson’s Robert Burns project, Not In My Name. The films intersperse with Kevin’s rote recital of Burns more radical, untagged poems. The second part of its run in the Edinburgh Fringe is from the 24th – 28th August 2011 at the National Library of Scotland, at 7pm each evening.

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Art Pistol

guest — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 10:12:28 +0000

Something for artists, art lovers and art newcomers

Art Pistol is a new online art gallery that also runs pop-up gallery shows and a commercial art consultancy. This December will see their first 2 pop-up gallery shows opening in Glasgow that will put artists in front of different audiences in new environments. We couldn’t get any more info for you just yet, but be assured that they are working with some big names you all know. It’s not too late to get involved with these shows, see below, plus they will continue on a more regular basis and visit other areas next year too.

The business, launched this year by 2002 Glasgow School of Art graduates Ali Smith and Suzie Carter, provides a flexible platform for undiscovered, emerging and established UK based artists from all disciplines to sell their work. Art Pistol recently made Shell’s ‘Hot 40′ List for the most innovative new businesses in the UK as a result. It is about creating an exciting collection of work that appeals to all tastes and budgets so that all artists, art lovers and people that are new to buying art can get involved.

They are proud to have initially based the gallery around local talent, but equally proud to now work with over 200 artists from across the UK. They can profile more artists because they’re not restricted by space, which makes their commission very low and brings down the cost of artwork as they don’t have fixed business overheads for gallery space and so on.

Artists can sign-up here to submit work to the online gallery, which could also earn you an invite to participate in the pop up shows. Christmas is a great opportunity for artists to expose their work to a whole new market in people looking for gifts, so all submissions are invited and you don’t need to be based in Glasgow to get involved. If you’re not an artist but would like to be on their mailing list and get the latest info you can subscribe here.

If you would like to discuss your submission, potential pop up space, consultancy work, buying art or simply ask a question then email info@artpistol.co.uk or call 0141 416 1232.

Nice and High

guest — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 09:39:09 +0000

I refuse to believe that programmers at the Film Festival didn’t plan Tuesday night on purpose. It was only when I picked up my tickets that I noticed I was going to see the Howard Marks biopic Mr Nice, and stoner-comedy High School on the same night. I don’t know if I’m being paranoid, but I did feel like someone somewhere was stifling a giggle at that bit of programming genius.

High School was good. A decent comedy starring the motley crew of Adrien Brody, Colin Hanks and Sean Marquette (who reminds me a little too much of Jonah Hill), it’s about two kids who get the whole school stoned in order to pass a random drug test imposed by fuhrer-tastic Principal Gordon. It has the right amount of good, evil, funny and downright dumb to keep an audience happy, but sadly, after Mr. Nice, it kind of felt like hearing a teenager say that Stephanie Meyer invented the vampire (when clearly it was Joss Whedon). Howard Marks’ autobiography, Mr Nice, did much to popularise the plight of the stoner in nineties popular culture, and no doubt helped to inspire the rise of the stoner-flick, from Half-Baked to Pineapple Express, so that it took this long to be captured on film is highly unusual.

It is the fruit of many years spent struggling with the BBC over how best to tell a story about a man who’s most famous achievement was smuggling vast amounts of marijuana into the country over the course of about fifteen years. The director, Bernard Rose, doesn’t speak about the BBC’s involvement with any regret, though, and said in a Q&A after the film that everyone at the BBC wanted it to be made, but the representation of the subject matter simply relied too heavily on the politics of the party in power at the time.

The film that comes before us now is BBC free (as they eventually sold the book rights on), and Rose has done a beautiful job with it. This is a story about drugs that isn’t about drugs. Rose instead chooses to focus his attention on Marks’ life, his relationships, his friendships and his family. He is an honest and decent man, who just happens to smuggle drugs, in large quantities, and deal with the IRA. He has a family and a wife, and does his best to provide for them. There are points throughout the movie where Marks is successful and wealthy, but gets too drawn in by the thrill of the job, and these are followed with the appropriate fall from grace. Though he is sly, and at times irresponsible, he pays his dues and we are left liking the character. To be honest, he seems pretty, well, nice.

Rhys Ifans plays Marks effortlessly, and it is only when they were introduced side-by-side that I realised how alike they look. Ifans and Marks are longtime friends (ever since Ifans asked Howard Marks to sign his pack of skins at a Super Furry Animals gig), and apparently they had decided long ago that Ifans would be the one to take up the role should Mr Nice ever be immortalised on screen. David Thewlis also features, as IRA man Jim McCann. His performance is stellar, and he has never been farther than Remus Lupin, let me tell you. The film is worth watching for his performace alone.

Rose also plays with the visuals in order to communicate the years that pass on screen. He said very pointedly that ‘titles on screen are a lazy way to direct’, and so in Mr. Nice, the texture of the film changes as the film progresses. As Rose made clear, ‘the only record that we have of this time is the visual artefacts we are left with’ and so our concept of the past is shaped by these. The film begins in the late fifties, in grainy black and white, then, when Marks sparks his first joint at Oxford University, the film turns to the beautifully rich colours that 60s and 70s cinema are famed for. The format also changes accordingly throughout the film (though I can only properly classify the last few), and by the end of the film, it could be shot on contemporary DV, with stark naturalistic lighting and that pin sharp/still home-made DV quality. What is odd about this film is that it is the fabrication of historical artefact. This is a movie adaptation of an autobiography, which simulates media no longer use in order to emulate an era we have record of only through film and archival footage, which is a wholly simulated medium in itself.

Okay, I have talked myself into a hole and it is late, so I am going to open this one up to the floor.

What do you feel are the implications of imitating a era-specific film format to create a work of autobiography, that is also fiction?

Does this somehow change the underlying message of a film, or can it be employed simply for aesthetic purposes?

How do you feel about the biopic versus documentary debate? Should I just be quiet and enjoy the movie?

You decide!

Parallel Schools, Other Educations

genny — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 16:47:54 +0000

(Image:MANYSTUFF, MOSCOW – PARALLEL SCHOOL)

I’ve written at various points over the past year about the tremendously exciting parallel school, (a student-led augmented educational experience), as it has shadowed my own emerging interest in the field of alternative education. There are a couple of issues that i think are important about this;

The initiative starts small, and uses social network tools to connect with likeminded communities, but is built on the dedication and energy of a small group.

In line with the ‘open community’ myth of the net, it still appears to be dealing with a core demographic of similar people, though they may come from different countries and cultures, and be geographically dispersed.

It is aligned to a traditional educational institution but is not bound by it.

In itself and its existence, it is a political act, and directly questions the creeping commercialism of education.

Most of its work appears to currently be self-referential, (about the act of ‘design’ and the process of education), and it will be interesting to see if it moves into other areas.

It is fantastic that at a time when most art colleges are going through the business-as-usual degree shows, groups of students are self-organising in this way.

More resources on alt/self/parallel/future education, knowledge (and related areas) here – (sorry for the sloppy formatting):

www.unitednationsplaza.org

www.staedelschule.de

facultyofinvisibility.tinka.cc

College

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