If you are lucky enough to avoid the thousands of bored idiots/perverts/idiot-perverts on http://www.chatroulette.com, you might stumble across this video (scroll to bottom) which I made a couple of years ago. I thought I had put this video into hibernation, but the arrival of a tool like Chat Roulette seemed like a good reason to dig it out again. It will be displayed intermittently every day for the next few weeks. and there is no way you can be guaranteed to see it, but that’s part of the fun isn’t it. FYI Chat Roulette is NOT SAFE FOR WORK. If I come up with specific times to do screenings I’ll post them here, otherwise it’s whenever I am around to press play. Have fun!

Exhibition Opens: Friday, 12 February 2010, 18:00-21:00
Exhibition continues until 21st February 2010.

Location: Galeries d’exposition de l’Ecole, 13 quai Malaquais, 75006 Paris, France

“Le Weekend de Sept Jours invokes the utopian possibilities of art and points towards 20th century ideas about a future leisure society in which the only purpose of life would be the pursuit of unlicensed pleasure and play. Some of the works in the exhibition reflect this past idea of the future in the reality now lived by those whose lives are defined by the freedom to travel and indulge creativity. Others challenge the notion by exposing the structures and processes which keep men and women locked in (a seven-day week) regime of repetitive labour that limits the expression of individual identity. Just as the notion of a seven-day weekend overturns conventional conceptions of time, its articulation as le weekend de sept jours challenges the idea of language as a signifier of culture and nation. Le Weekend de Sept Jours is the nexus through which time, space and art are reconceived as something we were always ready for, and can now look forward to more than ever “.

Clare Carolin, curator of the exhibition

Exhibition from February the 13th until February the 21st.

Artists :
Guillaume Aubry, Alan Butler, Jean-Baptiste Akim Calistru, Frederico Camara, Justin Coombes, Crionha Costello, Nadine Feinson, Benjamin Hochart, Chia-En Jao, Lucas Jodogne, Sarah Jones, Siulan Ko, Claire Makhlouf Carter, Hektor Mamet, Susan Olij, Estefania Penafiel Loaiza, Hephzibad Rendle-Short, Sima Salehi, Patrick Storey, Charwei Tsai

Somewhere in the synapse…

by Alan Butler & Lola Rayne Booth

In a recent essay, the artist Paul Chan describes his memory of the 1990-91 recession in the United States. He describes how everything around him changed, causing various things to happen; adjustments to society were made and then unmade, as life began to go back to ‘normal’. Comparing our ideological belief in capitalism with the Spiritual, he reminds us that the term ‘recession’ also possesses Religious associations. A ‘recessional’ being “the time after church service when the clergy departs and the people who make up the congregation are left to themselves…. The end of the service announces the beginning of another kind of time: no more commands for sacrifice and expressions of faith; no more sermons from the book of Progress”.ⁱ This is a satisfying comparison, because it suggests that a recession can offer us a positive moment; a time for reflection and consideration to where we have been and what we have seen and done, before we prepare ourselves for the inevitable violent attempt to progress our cultures forward once more.

It is this ‘recessional’ space, which is an interesting factor in Magnhild Opdøl’s work. Much of her past creations operated through détournement, sampling pop culture and the equally inspirational and oppressive force that is art history, to create new original works. It can be said that successful appropriations treat all cultures (and their produce) as information and part of an ever-evolving, pre-existing language. In appropriating, the artist does not necessarily need to subvert the original materials (in fact many appropriations perpetuate the nature of their sources), but sometimes the act of sampling is like stepping out of the realm of the maker and reflecting upon the meanings and supposed ‘truths’ which are given to us by history. Sampling could be seen as a ‘recessional’ space, free from authority and cultural dogma. The process of sampling – the re-appropriation of what came before- is analytical before it is creative and constructs a nebulous distinction between producer and consumer. Similarly, a time of crisis becomes a time of opportunity.

In her new exhibition, Opdøl’s works continue to echo the past. The past is a starting point, which once analysed and considered by the artist, is built upon and exploited to create new works. A series of small pencil studies of insects are the result of an investigation into pathology. Opdøl’s recurring theme of the cycle of life and death, lead her to create dozens of intricate pencil studies of insects of which can live in human corpses. The list of insects somewhat ‘appropriated’ from the practice of pathology, reveal information about the corpse itself. The pathologist can tell how long the host body has been dead judging from how many generations of egg/insect cycles have taken place. Opdøl’s investigations consider pre-existing information and knowledge, which are themselves an analytical process using pre-existing information and knowledge. This feedback cycle created by Opdøl’s choice of subject/process echoes not only the cycles of the insects, but the cycles which take place when appropriating ideas and applying new meanings or purposes upon them. It is not just in the act of sampling – or applying that sample to a remix – that her art exists, perhaps also there is that tiny synapse between the loops and cycles where Opdøl’s creativity occurs. This synapse contains the artist’s decisions – her creativity – and cements together the physical and the conceptual; a recessional space, which is hidden between subject matter and form.

The cycle also exists in her work ‘The Great Escape’. This taxidermy piece consists of a mouse and Opdøl’s (ex-)pet cat, which has spent the last few years posthumously ‘living’ in the artist’s freezer in Norway. Thawed out and taken to the taxidermy studio, the two animals now playfully co-exist in assiduous stasis. In an uncannily outré moment, the work depicts a mouse, post-gastric, yet unscathed, escaping from the cats anus. Ready to consume once more, the rotation of the startled cat’s head greets the mouse on his rebirth as if to repeat the event once again. It is that recessional moment, mirroring Opdøl’s appropriation in her process. ‘The Great Escape’ depicts that split moment, which is neither the beginning nor end of a cycle – not life nor death, that moment that simply bridges together the two and is just part of their recurring nature. In this way, the artists who work in the area of appropriation can be seen as coprophagic, where the used, found or discarded materials, within the recessional space, become food for thought. Once appropriated, they re-enter the domain for potential remix – part of a cycle where nothing can have definite meaning and is a breeding-ground for ambiguity. Her series of exquisite pencil drawings, which accompany the sculpture, investigate a moment where a cat is tearing apart a mouse, which may or may not be dead, re-iterate this.

The work in Opdøl’s new exhibition, moves away from ubiquitous appropriations and enters meta-physical realms. These works are exercises in exploring systems and cycles of life and death and consequently allow the viewer peer into that gap between the concept and the form where her creative decisions exist. Once these decisions made, they will cause various things to happen, such as ‘meaning’ to be formulated. Regardless of what ‘meaning’ you as a viewer discover, what is revealed in the artist’s process and produce is the relentlessness of these life/death cycles. They are merely part of nature. The artist will continue to appropriate the physical and meta-physical, a life in a sort of recessional stasis; a perpetual state of crisis or opportunity, depending which way you want to look at it.

There’s an article about my favourite subject on the Candy Collective website news today.

Check it out here.

As promised…

Three new video works:

9119 (2009)

Aggrandize to Downfall (2009)

Before and After Shelley (2009)

Pictures/video documentation added for my installation, ‘Can’t You Smell the Smoke in the Breeze‘, currently running at the ICA, Singapore until June 19th, 2009. The 3 new videos, which feature in the show, will be posted up shortly also.

Wrapping up the MA in Singapore in th coming weeks. I have a load of my work from the last year installed in this show. will post pics soon, in the mean time, here’s the show info:

Yo yo!

Some of my work is in an exhibition at Temple Bar Gallery, opening next Tuesday 2^nd June, some really good artists in the show, worth checking out. I’m still AWOL, so I won’t be there unfortunately. Do pop down if you can! Will post some pics if I get some. Right now I am working on a show for the Institute of Contemporary Art Singapore, which opens 19th June 2009. Will post information regarding this as soon as I get my grubby paws on it. Anyway, below is info on the TBG&S show, ‘It Goes On’. (Invite was created by Soft Blonde Moustache!)

It Goes On

Alan Butler, Brendan Flaherty, Eilis McDonald, James Merrigan, Ivan Twohig, Soft Blonde Moustache.

Curated by Rayne Booth

Preview: Tuesday 2 June 2009
Exhibition continues: 3 June – 18 July 2009

It Goes On is an exhibition featuring artists who have graduated from formal education in the past five years. Each of the artists in this exhibition have continued their distinctive artistic practices at an intense pace since leaving college, exhibiting regularly in artist run spaces, self initiated exhibitions, and curated shows. Each of the artists in this exhibition are emerging; still developing their artistic ideas, striving to find a platform and negotiate the pitfalls and obstacles that this difficult career choice brings.

The title It Goes On is a reference to a quote by the poet Robert Frost*. In the context of this exhibition it refers to the fact that artists will continue to make art which satisfies their own concerns and interests, influenced by or regardless of outside stimuli such as galleries, curators, and international art trends. This show is also intended as a snapshot of what is going on in a particular city at a given time amongst a certain generation of artists. These young artists work comfortably within the vast range of possibilities brought up by new media and the internet, and they are highly aware of how their work fits in to the international landscape of contemporary art. Despite recessions, wars and global crises, there will always be a new wave of emerging artists waiting in the wings to take over from the current crop. Art, like everything, goes on.

Alan Butler is interested in exploring the ways in which we experience global culture. Through the use of appropriation and remixing of cultural artefacts and icons, Butler combines the disparate lineages of items to create new ideas and ‘truths’. Butlers work for ‘It Goes On’, The Image Factory, is a painted diptych that simultaneously exists as a conceptual art work connecting art, mass production, the media, consumerism and art history in a convoluted web

Brendan Flaherty’s paintings look at issues of man’s place in nature and his need to employ his own system of order on the world. Flaherty paints on heavily reworked canvasses, meaning that the paintings go through several evolutionary stages before completion. He is interested in conventions that form around the making of paintings, how motifs and symbols are employed and how they determine the reading of an image. His work taps into the continuous historical lineage of image making. He references recurring ideas and archetypes, how different generations and cultures respond to similar themes.

Eilis McDonald’s practice incorporates installation, painting, video, animation, sound, computer and Internet based work, with an emphasis on humour, spirituality, pop culture and visual energy. For this exhibition, McDonald will be showing a series of animated .gifs entitled ‘Reflections’. Using an online ‘water-effect’ generator McDonald added animated reflections to found online images, providing them with a sense of stillness, reverence and absurdity while referencing the ‘dirtstyle’ aesthetic of the early days of homepages and amateur internet design. Like much of McDonald’s work, the piece evokes nostalgia though visual languages, trinkets and technologies of the recent past and enthusiastically embraces an unrefined folkart sensibility.

James Merrigan’s practice is focused on the idea of the event, and how we, as an audience, capture or read the event. He fabricates these events from videos and paraphernalia that are crudely cut fractions of a bigger happening. Merrigan’s work centres around ideas of crisis, horror, ritual, and the fear of banality. Against this backdrop, his main goal is to transform the normal or sincere into a narrative that is potentially hazardous.

Ivan Twohig’s work operates at the convergence between fine art, architecture, design and pop culture and is often made in response to the pressures such classifications have upon young artists attempting to locate and position themselves in the world. Twohig has always been influenced by architecture and the relationship between the natural and built environments. The work is made using architectural computer programmes to create origami-like paper sculptures, which he constructs with the help of the numerical formula or instructions provided by the computer programme.

Soft Blonde Moustache is a collective of four artists, Nessa Darcy, Mary-Jo Gilligan, Julia McConville and Aileen Murphy Since they graduated from college in 2007, they have been meeting regularly in order to make art together in a collaborative drawing and singing process. During their drawing sessions, they converse, improvise and play; responding to each others marks and ideas. Unpolished and scrappy paper is a starting point for the contour of a line. Drawings emerge out of responses and also out of accidents that the artists claim. They work together aside from their individual practices not just in order to make art, but to play, interact and exchange.

*‘In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: It goes on.

‘LASALLE’ (2009), Ink and Adhesive Vinyl on Paper, 200cm x 150cm.

Yo… only throwing one piece into this show… if you are in Singapore and can stand to look at the work of 600 students, do pop along (here’s my piece above – now you don’t have to go). Might do a blog on the http://www.monstertruck.ie/blog later this week with pics of some interesting graduates.

THE LASALLE SHOW ‘09

Preview: Thursday, 21 May 2009, 7.30 pm
Exhibition continues daily until Sunday 7 June 2009. (11am-8pm)

LASALLE College of the Arts,
1 McNally Street,
Singapore