Silence, away, work, away, edit, away, video

by Alex Hetherington, 6 Jul 2008

Consciously taken some time away from writing on this site. I have just finished as lead artist, with Rebecca Green, a drama specialist who lives in Santa Fe, a summer school of performance workshops for the Edinburgh International Festival. The themes surround the play Class Enemy ( I don’t want to describe the content of this drama) but we had input for the group from Owen and Mikaela from Fool for A Pretty Face, since Owen is great at improvising songs, from two actors who remained in character almost entirely throughout the first workshop and from a series of motion pictures that we felt had some kind of relationship to the play: so we had scenes from Donnie Darko, A Clockwork Orange, Fight Club, Mr and Mrs Smith, Reservoir Dogs, The Exorcist, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Wizard of Oz… The workshops were great, ideas surrounding improvisation, games with the mics, rehearsed readings, adding disparate materials and performances to camera. The participants were great, open to some very, I would imagine for them, strange ways of working. Edits from the workshop will appear on a large-scale video wall at Rutherglen Town Hall in August, online at the Festival’s site and I believe the Citizens Theatre, where some of the participants engage with their theatre school.

Back at Falkirk, after a tough week. Janie and I are finalizing the print for Garlands and I return to the editing for the video collage for Mineral Park. We will also return to work on the Village Voice which I hope to render as an online publication to include video.

On the writing front, I have a commission to write on Cathy Wilkes at The Modern Institute, more on this soon. It’s for another online publication, this time with the theme of the global art market.

Garlands runs from 9 August until 8 September. More of course on this soon, and more images from the artists.

Here are their biogs:

Anne Colvin is a Scottish artist based in San Francisco where she also runs the project space TART. Her work and exhibition programming have achieved considerable critical acclaim both nationally and internationally. (http://TARTsf.com)

Desirée Holman is an Oakland, California-based interdisciplinary artist. Her process involves fabricating (or, less frequently, appropriating) figurative props, which are manipulated in role-playing games. The work questions what games of make-believe, like the ones created in her work or ones created in multi-user online games or elsewhere, can tell us about our behaviors in the ‘real’ world. Holman was recently awarded a 2007 Artadia: The Fund for Art and Dialogue award. Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues such as the Sao Paulo Museum of Modern Art, Hessel Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; Milan’s BnD, Toronto’s YYZ, The Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art; Berkeley Art Museum and Lisa Boyle Gallery in Chicago. In 1999, directly after completing her BFA in sculpture at CCA, Desirée attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She graduated with her MFA from UC Berkeley in 2002. Her work has been reviewed in numerous times in publications such as Artforum, Los Angeles Times, NY Arts, Artillery, San Francisco Chronicle, and Artweek. Holman is represented by San Francisco’s Silverman Gallery. (www.desireeholman.com)

John Vitale is an American conceptual artist currently residing in Brooklyn, NY. His work has been shown in New York, Chicago, Portland OR, and Miami. John is also the co-editor of ”.......” (Dots& Quotes), a free print/web publication. The first issue was published by the Collective Foundation POD Press and the second issue sponsored by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and distributed internationally.
(www.johnsebastianvitale.com)

Lewis Holleran is an artist, based in Glasgow, who works with light and video, he recently graduated from the Environmental Art department at the Glasgow School of Art. (www.artreview.com/profile/LewisHolleran)

Lucy Keany is an artist based in Edinburgh, she recently completed her MFA from Edinburgh College of Art; her recent publication project Fool’s Gold features a list of international artists working with themes in performance. (www.foolsinprint.com)

Zefrey Throwell is an artist living and working in New York City. Investigating honest communication, in all it’s varied plumage, is his aim. Working with video, radio and painting, he is exploring the connecting points and underpinnings of social discourse. He is a member of two collectives, Red76 and Thin Ice Collective. He loves them both equally and won’t be pressured into picking a favorite. Zefrey works with Gallery 138 in New York and is a regular contributing member to Art Radio WPS1 (PS1 Contemporary Art Center).
(www.zefrey.com)