Ben Kinsley
Yvonne Buccheim
David Blandy
Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard
Johanna Billing
Kate Murphy
William Hunt
Mary Cremin
An exhibition of 7 international video artists whose work offers an extensive and in-depth exploration of the various possibilities of the crossover between popular culture and video art. The works play with global codes and canonized images that are integral to the collective memory.
Curated by Mary Cremin
Artists: Ben Kinsley, Yvonne Buccheim, David Blandy, Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard, Johanna Billing, Kate Murphy and William Hunt
Green On Red Gallery presents SONIC YOUTH an exhibition of 7 international
video artists whose work offers an extensive and in-depth exploration of the
various possibilities of the crossover between popular culture and video
art. The pieces navigate a variety of sources including the history of film,
iconography and a wide range of references to popular culture. The works
play with global codes and canonized images that are integral to the
collective memory.
Documentary itemization, self-questioning and cultural sampling are
videographic practices which the artists use to react to the construction of
the everyday. An interest and participation in popular culture especially
music represents an important component of their oeuvre.
Ben Kinsley's GESICHTSMUSIK is a musical self-portrait. All the sounds were
produced with his voice and body, and through meticulous editing and
layering, an audio-visual composition was created. Yvonne Buccheim, Herder¹s
Legacy presents amateur singers from 5 different countries (Germany, France,
Ireland, UK and USA) in front of a white background eliminating all visual
indication of the place of recording. This audio-visual creation inspired by
Herder¹s song collection from 1773 becomes an open field of research into
the visibility of cultural identity within songs. David Blandy uses video,
performance and comics to address how identity is constructed. Blandy¹s
piece The White and Black Minstrel Show, using the character of the White
and Black Minstrel (an inverted Black and White Minstrel) to do ³live²
lip-syncing to songs like ³I¹m Black and I¹m Proud² and ³Is it because I¹m
black?². This clownish figure, with a ³whited-up² face, has come to embody
Blandy's cultural confusion in this post-colonial world. Iain Forsyth and
Jane Pollard's film project File under Sacred Music takes as its starting
point an infamous video that documents a live performance by The Cramps for
the patients at Napa Mental Institute, California, on 13th June 1978.
Forsyth and Pollard began by re-enacting that legendary performance in order
to film and remake the rarely seen video document. They consulted closely
with a number of mental health arts organisations, before inviting members
from Core Arts, Sound Minds and Mad Pride to attend the performance and
filming, which was staged on a specially constructed set in the Institute of
Contemporary Arts Theatre in London on 3rd March 2003. Johanna Billing¹s
Magical World is a collaboration made with a group of children from a
cultural centre outside Zagreb, Croatia. The direct subject is the
children¹s rehearsal of a song originally written by the black American
singer Sidney Barnes in 1968. "The song called Magical World, speaks of
personal transformation with both pride and melancholy, conflicting emotions
that coexist here, as often in life. This reference to transformation gives
a clue to a possible metaphoric reading of the work, filmed as it is in a
relatively young country that is trying to conform to European Union demands
while establishing its own fragile national identity". (Charles Esche) Kate
Murphy's narrative style in her documentary pieces Britney Love highlights
an 11 year olds aspiration for her future as a celebrity. In her second
piece, she revisits her at the age of 18 where she talks about her
motivations and aims. William Hunt¹s Even As You See Me Now employs video as
a means of not only documenting but investigating and testing his own
physical and psychological limits as he performs.
Preview: Thursday, June 26 6-8 pm
Green on red gallery
26 Lombard Street - Dublin
Free admission