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21/7/2015

Tree Exhibition

Ikon Gallery, Birmingham

At Home with Vanley Burke

Vanley Burke, born in Jamaica in 1951, resident in Birmingham since 1965, is renowned as a photographer concerned especially with black culture in Britain.

Burke has had numerous exhibitions surveying his career as an artist, and these have sometimes included material from his archive, a vast collection including printed material (posters, flyers, publications), clothes, records, ornaments and countless other items that provide invaluable insights into Britain’s African and Caribbean communities. The religious and political beliefs of black people at home here, their artistic activities, fashions and leisure pursuits, food, health issues and many other aspects of everyday life are all equally of interest to the artist.

The archival items are like photographs in that they are indexical traces of human presence, countless pieces of evidence of actual experience. The collection of them suggests insurance against certain memories being lost, and that there will be a repository of raw material that can give rise to alternative histories. Each item not only gives its own particular account – why was it made, where and for whom? – but also it is evocative of a zeitgeist, an evolving spirit of a time, lived through by the artist, that embodies hope as much as fear, feelings of alienation as much as celebration, active resistance and demands for equal opportunity as much as the enjoyment of new adventures. The collection as a whole is thus greater than the sum of its parts and extremely poignant.

Burke’s archive is partly in storage at the Library of Birmingham, but most of it is to be found in his flat in Nechells, near Birmingham’s city centre, in filing cabinets or boxes or on display. It is an extraordinary interior, a cabinet of wonderful curiosities. This is an exhibition, more or less, of its entire contents – the archive with artworks and souvenirs, as well as decor and furniture, wardrobe, kitchenware etcetera – so that the artist is revealed as a subject of his own enquiry. Vanley Burke’s personal story, involving such a vital archival impulse, is integral to the bigger picture he is making for us, on this occasion with the help of many others.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, priced £18, special exhibition price £15, illustrated with Vanley Burke’s photographs and including texts by Pete James, Curator of Photographs at the Library of Birmingham, and artist/curator Marlene Smith.

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Takehisa Kosugi: Spscings

Ikon presents the first major solo exhibition in the UK by Japanese composer and artist Takehisa Kosugi. A pioneer of experimental music in Japan in the early 1960s, closely associated with the Fluxus movement and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Kosugi is one of the most influential artists of his generation.

This exhibition features three sound installations, including one made especially for Ikon. Combining everyday materials and radio electronics, they involve interactions with wind, electricity and light, making sonic relationships between objects.

Kosugi studied musicology at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music during the late 1950s and was inspired by the spirit of experimentation coming from Europe and the US, while simultaneously intrigued by traditional Japanese music, in particular Noh Theatre, and its concept of ‘ma’ – the conscious appreciation of the in-between-ness of one sound and another. The artist’s desire for spontaneity in his own performances led him to co-found Japan’s first group dedicated to collective improvisation, Group Ongaku in 1960, and later the Taj Mahal Travellers. He became involved with the Fluxus movement, and in 1965 settled in New York, where he collaborated with a number of other artists including Nam June Paik.

Kosugi’s interest had by then shifted from making music towards what he referred to as ‘events’, and he began producing work that formed a tangible relationship between sound and the environment. Experiments with radio electronics were manifested in Catch-Wave (1967), a seminal work which includes several transmitters, radios and a toy slide projector, suspended from the ceiling, close enough to one another to cause audio and visual interference.

Ikon’s exhibition features Mano-dharma, electronic (1967), a work in which Kosugi makes use of inaudible waves – such as radio frequency waves and wind movement – and draws sound from them through the interaction of electronic wave transmission devices and receivers suspended from the ceiling. The effect is enhanced by an oscillating fan and visualised through a video projection of ocean waves.

Interspersion for Light and Sound (2000) is a work which embodies imperceptible movement. A Perspex box is filled with white sugar and/or sand emitting faint crackles of sound and light from the electronics and LEDs concealed below the surface, caused by the acoustic and visual transparency of the granular materials. Kosugi thus shares with us the wonder of accidental encounters and uncertainty created by invisible phenomena at work.

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Julie Brook: Pigment

Julie Brook is an artist drawn to landscape, often making outdoor sculptural interventions and film. These take inspiration from the spirit and actuality of their location – be it the Orkney islands, the Hebrides or the Libyan desert – and are thus expressive of personal experience.

Brook shot Pigment in a cave in Namibia in 2013, featuring three Himba women extracting red pigment; the colour they traditionally rub onto their skin and a colour that she uses to make drawings. The strength and confidence of the physical activity involved and the sheer beauty of the dusty russet atmosphere, illuminated by shafts of golden sunlight, make it absolutely compelling.

Image: Photograph by Vanley Burke

Opening: Wednesday 22 July 2015 / 6.00pm — 8.00pm

Ikon Gallery
Brindleyplace, 1 Oozells Square
Birmingham

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