Phoenix Brighton


	Exhibitions ARCHIVE 2008

'EVERYDAY ANOMALIES' Four Artists from Hong Kong

9 February – 22 March, 2008 PREVIEW: Fri 8 Feb, 7 - 9 pm

Everyday Anomalies features existing work and new commissions by four of Hong Kong’s most exciting and active artists:

PAK Sheung-Chuen (b.1977)
Luke CHING (b.1972)
KWAN Sheung-Chi (b.1980)
KAM Lai Wan (b.1980)

MEET THE ARTISTS: Sat 9 Feb, 2pm, FREE
The artists discuss the exhibition, ideas and background informing their work.

Using performative strategies and interventionist tactics the city becomes a site of exploration for the four artists. They observe and highlight the minutiae of everyday life. Whilst their works are often nothing more than subtle interventions and shifts in perspective, they quietly question the habitual codes of behaviour in urban society.

Presented as videos, photographs and objects their practice is driven by a desire to understand their surroundings; how people connect and interact with each other, how they behave in public spaces. Applied to both familiar contexts in Hong Kong and unfamiliar ones during international residencies their works demonstrate a curiosity in encounters and the politics of everyday life.

In everyday occurrences they find little anomalies, moments of chance, the absurd in the ordinary, creating works that are charming and playful. The exhibition presents objects, videos and photographs.

KAM Lai Wan presents a series of works about stars and constellations, an ever present but distant feature of everyday life. Through installations and music boxes she creates three-dimensional and audio manifestations of constellations, enabling the viewer to touch and hear these usually distant shining lights.

Luke CHING’s works are interventions in public spaces. Creating ‘accidental’ occurrences he highlights the limitations of constructed urban spaces and disrupts habitual behaviour. In a new work Shoelaces the artist trails his long untied shoelaces as he walks through urban spaces allowing them to brush by passers-by, playing with the notion of proximity and distance. Moon is a series of photographs and an accompanying video, documenting the ‘accidental’ releasing of a number of ‘moons’ in the form of helium balloon within the confines of shopping malls, it draws attention to the confines of the indoor environment.

KWAN Sheung-Chi is interested in the question of how meaning is constructed and how we might look at things differently. In Lake at the Crossroad, Kwan views a blue crossing on a road in Kanagawa, Japan as a blue lake. Taking the loose pieces of blue gravel he presents them as water spilling from a bowl, continuing the illusion of the gravel as water. Shining a torch onto the blue surface of the crossing at night, he creates the image of the moon reflected on a lake.

PAK Sheung-Chuen is showing a piece initially made for the Busan Biennale, Breathing House, a performative investigation into the everyday living situation of Busan as well as a sculptural investigation into the air-space which is defined as the negative space of the place. The documentation depicts the artist breathing into clear plastic bags using up all the air in the apartment. In Familiar Numbers, Unknown Telephone Pak takes familiar and shifts its context. Numbers from a bus stop and dials the combined numbers, reaching a mobile he then continues to converse with the stranger on the end of the phone. The other two works presented by Pak are itemised till receipts with surprising messages found on them. If the second word of each item is read from top to bottom it says ‘Whoever believes in him should have eternal life’. The other is a love letter the first words of each line read, ‘I am thinking of you’.

All of the artists are active in the Hong Kong arts scene, exhibiting widely and with several of them taking an active role in the setting up of Fotanian studios. They have undertaken international residencies and have been shown internationally. PAK Sheung-Chuen is also a regular art columnist for a local newspaper.

		'Everyday Anomalies' is the second of two exhibitions curated by Sally Lai for Phoenix Gallery. The exhibition is supported by the Arts Council England, South East and Brighton and Hove Council.

		'Everyday Anomalies' is part of CHINA NOW CHINA NOW - the UK’s largest ever festival of Chinese culture – takes place in 2008 to coincide with the Chinese New Year and continues through to the Beijing Olympics. With over 800 events nationwide, CHINA NOW will showcase the very best of modern Chinese society and culture.

		'Everyday Anomalies' is sponsored by the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office

		'Everyday Anomalies' is sponsored by Buffet Island, Chinese and Oriental Buffet Restaurant, Brighton

'PRESS & RELEASE'

Curated by Karin Mori

Exhibition: 26 Apr – 7 Jun, 2008

PREVIEW: Fri 25 Apr 6–8 pm
Artists' Book Fair: Sat 24 May more...

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Reviews of Press & Release:

an magazine
Gavin Burrows' blog
24 hour museum

Alasdair Willis

Le Dernier Cri

Knust

Knust

Borbonesa Publishing

John Dilnot

reassemble

Chisato Tamabayashi

Mark Pawson

Batool Showghi - 'Fragments' (detail)

'PRESS & RELEASE' is celebration of artists' books and independent publishing, showcasing an intriguing selection of UK and international artists, with work ranging from the profane to sublime. The exhibition provides an opportunity to encounter a range of visions arising out of the world of artists’ books within an imaginative, improvised space dedicated to revealing the artist’s book in a new light.

Sculptor Ben Thomson has completely transformed the gallery space into an environment housing the work of individual artists and publishers, presenting books and related ephemera outside the conventional glass case.

The show includes over 30 individual artists and groups, with an emphasis on limited edition, hand-made work that stretches the parameters of printmaking, mixed media and other approaches, to arrive at highly original and inventive permutations of the book format. Ranging from underground comics to journals, pop-ups, posters, web-based pieces, installations and gate crashers, the work provides a glimpse into the dense and multifaceted world of self-publishing.

Highlights includes John Dilnot’s cabinet of curiosities, hand-cut pages from Kaho Kojima and Chisato Tamabayashi, Batool Showghis’ family albums, Paul Clarke’s gothic childerns’ stories, Mark Pawson’s low-tech hi-fi multiples, Mayan women’s collective Taller Leñateros, and installations by Nicola Dale, found sound duo reassemble, and collaborative trio Borbonesa. The special line up of artists also includes: Frans Baake, Peter Chasseaud, Young-Ju Choi, Karen Constance, Roz Cran, Ann D’Arcy Hughes, Jeff Keen, Lotte Little, Angela McKay, David Miles, Dylan Nyoukis, Oddstock Books, Redfoxpress, Monica Ross, Jim Sanders, Lucy May Schofield, Jonathan Swain, Carolyn Trant and Weproductions. In the south gallery, Alasdair Willis scours cyberspace for self-publishing pioneers and rogues, and fills the walls with his discoveries. Books and other publications are for sale in the exhibition through the Permanent Gallery Bookshop.

Special guests include Le Dernier Cri, an artists’ publishing house in Marseille that generates beautiful and intense, often disturbing limited-edition books, prints, and animations from European, American, Japanese and South American artists.

They are joined by Knust, an artists’ collective from Nijmegen, Netherlands which employs a unique stencil (mimeograph) printing process and champions some inventive ways of producing books, posters, cd’s and wallpaper.

NOTICE: Some of the imagery in this exhibition is not suitable for children, and therefore a small area of the gallery will have restricted access. Elsewhere, children are very welcome but should be supervised by an adult, as many of the books can be handled but are fragile.

Visitors are encouraged to linger in the gallery and take part in a number of special associated activities:

PHOENIX GALLERY TALK
Sat 26 Apr 2pm
Phoenix Gallery, FREE.
An opportunity to meet Caroline Sury and Pakito Bolino from Le Dernier Cri, and Joyce Guley and Jan Dirk de Wilde from Knust. An informal presentation on these two organisations with an international underground reputation.

SCREENING & PERFORMANCE
Sat 26 Apr 8 pm
Westhill Hall, Compton Avenue, Brighton
Tue 29 Apr 8 pm
ICA, London
“Les Religions Sauvages”

Produced at Dernier Cri, the film features a series of short animations by various artists.. Billed as a cult film, it “...tube-feeds its audience a horrific diet of sin, visual saintliness, torture, twisted pitch black humour and perversion for initiated eyes” Pakito Bolino and others will perform a live improvised soundtrack.
Westhill Hall, Brighton £5/£3 conc.
ICA, London £10/£9 conc.
ICA box office: 020 7930 3647
Not suitable for under 18’s..

THE CRITICAL INCIDENT
Tues 13 May, 10 am – 6pm
Phoenix + other venues around Brighton
A day and night of challenging, practical conversations, workshops and events about artistry, innovation, insight, imagination and challenging collusions of mediocrity.
£25/£20 concessions.
Details & booking: www.thecriticalincident.com

BEFORE WRITING: Self-Publishing Workshops
18 (FULL) & 25 May, 1 Jun, 1 - 5 pm
Phoenix
Introduces low-budget, practical techniques for creating the vehicles through which an idea can be made public. Covers making booklets and printed material, web-based communication, and performance.
Run by Bookville: Graeme Walker & Maggie Tran
Per session: £5/£3 concessions
Advance registration required.
Suitable for ages 18+.


Kaho Kojima

Artists' Book Fair: Sat 24 May, 11am – 5pm

As an accompanying event to the 'PRESS & RELEASE' exhibition, the book fair will feature a wide range of artists’ books and independent publications. Over thirty stalls will feature limited edition, hand made books, fanzines, comics, multiples, ephemera and more. Special performances, readings, food and music will round out the event.

Participants…

Alice Smith - Bracket Press www.bracketpress.co.uk
Angela Mckay www.phoenixarts.org/artists/artists_angelamckay.htm

Beatrice Haverich www.beatricehaverich.com
Book Art, Andrea Hill www.bookarts.uwe.ac.uk

Candida Lacey www.myriadeditions.com
Carolyn Trant www.carolyntrantparvenu.blogspot.com
Cathy Streeter

Frank Eye

Gavin Burrows

In to Art www.intoart.org.uk
Irma Irsara www.oleary-isara.com

James Evans www.myspace.com/noncontactable
Julie Caves www.juliecaves.moonfruit.com

Kate Blevgard and friends
Kato Catling www.Kcatling.co.uk
Knight comics

Leslie Wilson Rutherford www.leslieworks.co.uk

Lonely Pandas, Karoline Rerrie www.lonelypanda.com

Lorna Crabbe

Lucky Dip (collective)

Mark Pawson www.mpawson.demon.co.uk
Mike Russell

Nicola Jackson www.nicolajackson.net

Paper Tiger Comix, Sean Duffield www.dirtysquatters.com/papertiger
Paul O’Connel www.soundofdrowning.com
Peter Chasseud www.peterchasseaud.blogspot.com
Peter Poole www.thestereobrothers.com
Pig Hog Press www.pighog.co.uk www.thesouth.org

Reassemble www.reassemble.co.uk

Sumi Perera www.loopartists.co.uk

Tozzy Bridger www.tozzybridger.co.uk

University of Brighton Illustration Students

28 June - 12 July 2008 Preview: Fri 27 June, 6 - 8pm

CULTURE BUNKER

An installation by Mike Stoakes looks at the relations between art, status, identity and power in the art world. The gallery is reconfigured as a bunker, as opposed to a “white cube”, and the figure of Hitler is appropriated as a model for a fictitious artist, not only because he represents “the other” as an exemplar of negativity but also because he was a failed artist and comes ready packaged with a relationship to power and the idea of aesthetic politics. The project is comprised of a series of works with interconnecting themes that resonate with each other when installed together.

LIKE / DISLIKE

A video by Gary Barber.
"During the Open Studios weekend in October 2007 I converted my studio space into a video booth with a simple question posed to the passing visitors, ‘state one thing you like about your face and one thing you dislike’. This question was to encourage the contributors to engage with the video camera.

The set up was a monitor linked to a wide angled Sony PD100 video camera, so that people could take control of how they were represented. The booth was set up for 14 hours, which has been edited down to 18 minutes of footage. As a filmmaker, I am always choosing both the composition and framing of my subjects, and this project has taken me one step closer to creating an honest re-presentation of those people who contributed to this film."

Gary Barber

PRINTS & BOOKWORKS

work by John Dilnot.

'TECTONIC TRACES' 2 Aug - 30 Aug, 2008

Joshua Uvieghara

Dagmara Rudkin

Marion Charles

Paul Senior and Dave Parker

Trevor Simmons

Paintings, drawings, mixed media works and slide projections that challenge our perceptions by presenting alternative ways of seeing and interpreting visual cues. Familiar materials and images metamorphose into shifting, fractured landscapes, leaving the viewer free to explore the fissures and fault lines that open beneath their feet.

Joshua Uvieghara sees his work as a means of exploring personal issues around philosophy, religion, and social interaction, using painting, drawing and installation as the vehicle for his ideas. He draws upon photography, film stills, found objects and other materials, and employs collage as a means of bringing these disparate images and ideas together within a single work. His approach provokes the viewer into finding new ways to “read” the picture, in order to reconcile the tensions inherent in these ambiguous images.

Dagmara Rudkin’s paintings are heavily influenced by her Polish / Roman Catholic background, and also emerge from the celebrations and rites of passage told by European mythology. Made from layers of partially concealed figures, shimmering pigments, and scratched, clotted and twisted fabrics and surfaces, they try to capture the indefinable transition between joy and melancholy, sleep and death, childhood and adulthood.

Marion Charles constructs three-dimensional, stage-like tableaux from which she develops drawings that explore space and narrative. Single figures are used as motifs that appear repeatedly, creating a dynamic structure and narrative that runs through the body of work.

Paul Senior and Dave Parker project images that bring together characters and settings to tell a story, one which the viewer will invent by creating their own personal narratives. Sources include old family photos and figures from history and folklore, which are combined with images of contemporary Brighton. The artists then introduce physical elements that disrupt or transform the imagery: rust, crystals, fluids, and the actions of mark-making and concealment. These processes exert a subtle alchemy upon the imagery, imbuing it with depth and mystery.

Trevor Simmons is concerned with the act of drawing a line: the tension, concentration and sensations that accompany this obsessive activity, and the resulting terrain of planes, angles and ravines that emerge. Figures, landscapes and childhood memories feed into the hypnotic imagery that tests our sense of physical and visual equilibrium.

	SOUTH GALLERY Creative Courses Programme 2008–2009 Work by tutors, including:
	Chris Gilvan-Cartwright (illustration)
	Isobel Smith (puppets)
	Vicky Melody (video)
	Alvaro Collar (video art with mobile phones)
	Bunty AKA Kassia Zermon (Vocal Improvisation)

Scenes from the Tectonic Traces PREVIEW ...

Fri 21 - Sat 22 Nov 2008, 11am - 5pm

'METAMORPHOSIS'

'Metamorphosis' A new video work by Jonathan Gilhooly, showing at Phoenix as part of CINECITY 2008.

Private view: Friday 21st November, 7.30 - 9.30pm

PHOTOGRAPHY EXHIBITIONS
4 Oct - 6 Dec 2008

'INCIDENT' Photographs by Sarah Pickering

(North Gallery)

'White Goods', Sarah Pickering

The images are of purpose built environments that have been set on fire as practice exercises for Fire Officers to extinguish. The blackened spaces reveal traces of human presence – marks where fingers have dragged across surfaces and bodies have rubbed past objects. Rather than the charred piles of debris expected to be seen in a burned out building, these locations are strangely pristine. Objects are schematic and approximate as they are designed to be repeatedly burned, and have to retain a distinguishable form. The spaces catalogue potential sites of fires and resonate as an echo of an event. This is photography that draws attention to the photograph – the dark areas often appear where lightness should be, creating a slippage between negative and positive; the matt surface of the print echoes the carbon-covered surface in the spaces; the photographic trace a record of multiple moments – anticipating the future and referencing the past.

In Pickering’s work the scenarios that are set up as part of training exercises can only be imagined by the viewer of the photographs. We have a cultural obsession with simulation, preparedness and controlling and predicting the future. There is a tension between what is perceived as real and what is actually real, and how we relate to extreme events such as war and disasters (eyewitnesses often describe their experience as “like a film”). Pickering is interested in the separation of the real from the imagined, and the complexities in negotiating and representing this.

Incident was organised in partnership with Brighton Photo Fringe 2008, and was selected through a UK wide open submission call for mid-career, lens based artists. The panel included David Chandler, Director of Photoworks, Brighton; David Campany, writer and critic; Clare Grafik, curator at The Photographers’ Gallery, London; and Karin Mori, gallery manager at Phoenix Brighton. Special thanks to Gordon MacDonald.

www.sarahpickering.co.uk

The Incident series is a body of work produced as Artist in Residence at the UK Fire Service College from 2006-8.

The set of photographs in black and white document the spaces that are used to simulate emergency incidents in training exercises.

Preview
Fri 3 Oct, 5–7pm

Artist talk
Mon 3 Nov, 6pm

'ENTRE-DEUX': From Picardie to East Sussex
4 Oct - 6 Dec 2008

(South Gallery)

Meet the artists: The exhibitors from 'Entre-Deux' will discuss their work and the Exchange Project during 'Open Phoenix Brighton', 11- 12 Oct, Studio 4C2, 11am - 5pm.

Jim Cooke

Nigel Green

Liz Hingley

Phoenix French partner Diaphane present the work of six photographers from Picardie and Sussex. The selected artists had a week to produce a body of work and to offer a personal response to the sites visited. The resulting photographs were shown at the Galerie Nationale de la Tapisserie de Beauvais in the spring of 2008.

Equipped with his camera and fishing rod, Jim Cooke followed the entire length of the Somme. Nigel Green rediscovered the Picardie region from the angle of post-war reconstruction, and Liz Hingley encountered children in the village of Montreuil sur Breche, capturing their images in black and white. Visiting England, Claire Dignocourt immersed herself in the Ashdown Forest, transforming it into a fairy tale landscape of colours and textures. Benjamin Teissèdre recorded the experiences and uncertainties of a wanderer in the form of a quasi travellers’ journal, and Adriana Wattel continued her coastal journey, this time along the English side of the channel.

About Diaphane
Association Diaphane is based in Montreuil Sur Brèche in the Picardie region of northern France. Its mission is to increase the audience for photographic art in the area through its education, exhibition and residency programmes, and also by publishing limited edition books. Diaphane is supported by the Regional Council of Picardie, the General Council of the Oise, the DRAC Picardie, and the Rectorat of Amiens.