The Life and Times of Milton Keynes Gallery
dal 14/4/2010 al 26/6/2010
Segnalato da
14/4/2010
The Life and Times of Milton Keynes Gallery
MK Gallery, Milton Keynes
In response to an invitation from Milton Keynes Gallery to make an exhibition celebrating its tenth anniversary year, Mark Leckey and Martin McGeown are collaborating on an exhibition which has been composed from material sourced from the Gallery's archive.The resulting work embodies a distinctive playfulness and inquisitive curiosity into the dynamics - architectural, spatial and aural - of the gallery, town hall, factory, bank and asylum.
Curated by Mark Leckey, Martin McGeown and Milton Keynes Gallery
In response to an invitation from Milton Keynes Gallery to make an exhibition celebrating its tenth anniversary year, Mark Leckey, winner of the 2008 Turner Prize, and Martin McGeown, Director of Cabinet Gallery, London, are collaborating on an exhibition which has been composed from material sourced from the Gallery’s archive.
This is an attempt to capture the atmosphere of a classic British institution with rudimentary pictures. Its formal qualities coincidentally reference the gridded Master plan of the host city Milton Keynes.
Not simply documents of places, they explore the poetic and continuing possibility of private reflection. Images that represent the chaotic forces of sex and money. The resulting work embodies a distinctive playfulness and inquisitive curiosity into the dynamics - architectural, spatial and aural - of the gallery, town hall, factory, bank and asylum.
These are the actions in a given space at a given moment in time, re-presented to the audience in a given space at a given moment in time. The surroundings are not simply a neutral place that hosts the work of the artist, but the raw material from which it emerges and takes form.
Eyelids and acacia thorns, a puddle, a leaning rail, a pruned tree adorned with snooker cue tips. Baptisms at sea, penguins in a zoo and the chrysalis-like forms of cast aluminium tents. Gathered and patterned, like compressed clusters on the body’s inner landscape, or a sequence of echoes and reflections.
As the construction grows and extends, it begins to become part of the space that it inhabits, taking on the characteristics of the host environment, mutating over existing structures.
At the end, nothing of the intervention remains; the materials are cleared away, the original space is returned to its former self and all that remains is photographic evidence and memory.
Mark Leckey & Martin McGeown, 2010
Mark Leckey and Martin McGeown have created two new films that ‘sample’ the Gallery’s documentation of past exhibitions and events, curating, or cutting, an exhibition from the recorded history of the space. The curators have also enlisted cartoonist Lee Healey to contribute additional interpretations.
Mark Leckey works with found and appropriated art. He is interested in the relationship between art and technology and the position of Milton Keynes at the forefront of pioneering communications strategies, whether through the code breakers at Bletchley Park or remote learning at the Open University. He was born in Birkenhead in 1964 and graduated from Newcastle Polytechnic in 1990. He rose to prominence in 1999 with Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, a survey of Britain’s underground club culture from the 1970s to the early 1990s. He has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally. Leckey lives and works in London and is currently a Film Studies Professor at the Städelschule, Frankfurt-am-Maine, Germany.
Martin McGeown founded Cabinet Gallery with Andrew Wheatley in 1992 and has curated numerous shows, including PopOcultural, South London Gallery, 1995 and Lovecraft, CCA, Glasgow, 1997 and most recently an ongoing project entitled 120 Day Volume, A Pallazo Gallery, Brescia, 2009-2010.
Milton Keynes Gallery opened in October 1999 as the city’s purpose-built venue for exhibitions of international contemporary art. Admission is free. Since 2009, Milton Keynes Gallery has organised over 50 exhibitions of contemporary art including diverse figures as Gilbert & George, 1999, Andy Warhol, 2001, Archigram, 2003, Phil Collins, 2005, Shirana Shahbazi, 2006, Pascale Marthine Tayou, 2007, Cathy Wilkes, 2008 and Marcus Coates, 2010.
For further information and images, contact Rosie Jackson
Press & Marketing Coordinator on 01908 558 302
or r.jackson@mk-g.org.
Preview: 15 April, 6pm – 10pm
Milton Keynes Gallery
900 Midsummer Boulevard, MK9 3QA
Gallery Opening Hours Tuesday - Friday 12noon - 8pm
Saturday 11am - 8pm, Sunday 11am - 5pm
Admission free