calendario eventi  :: 

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29/7/2004

Two exhibiitons

The New Art Gallery Walsall, Walsall

Futurology: The Black Country 2004
at The New Art Gallery Walsall
30th July- 12 September 2004

Barby Asante - Dave Beech - Nick Crowe & Ian Rawlinson
Hewitt + Jordan - Simon Poulter - Becky Shaw

Futurology: The Black Country 2024 is a project by artists Andy Hewitt and Mel Jordan in association with Creative Partnerships, Black Country and New Art Gallery Walsall.

The project aims to examine the current social, economic and political conditions of the Black Country in order to imagine the future.

We have invited six artists to work with groups of young people from the West Midlands to consider the legacy of Creative Partnerships in the wider context of culture-led regeneration.

The project will demonstrate innovative, research-based and participatory models of art practice. The working process and any works generated as a consequence will be presented within two gallery spaces at New Art Gallery Walsall. Here the visitor will see information related to the project contexts and will have the opportunity to offer their own views on the future of the Black Country.

All artists represent a range of innovative approaches to working in the public realm and are all key figures in current UK art practice. The works explore ideas about the future and ask questions about what we value or what we might want to change. The concepts that emerge may be idealistic or critical, positive or pessimistic, imaginary or practical.

Barby Asante is spending time with a group of pupils from King's School, Wolverhampton, going ten-pin bowling, ice skating, sharing leisure time as process-based research that aims to gain some insight to their ambitions and aspirations and the ways in which these are mapped through consumer choices. Dave Beech is interested in the possibilities for empowering the young people through their command of language, helping individuals express something effectively through a letter that has the potential to make a difference. Nick Crowe & Ian Rawlinson are purchasing a strip of land on a local Christmas tree plantation to be entrusted to a group of pupils at Deansfield School, Wolverhampton. Simon Poulter is producing vinyl graffiti to frame the view through a gallery window with regeneration terminology in addition to re-appraising the use of IT at Castle Special School, Walsall replacing market leaders with free downloads and manipulating software in an attempt to override the dominant ideology. Becky Shaw is working with a group of technology students to examine the school's potential within commercial enterprise, exploring the possibilities for school pupils to function as a workforce in employment (as well as in training) considering their viability in doubling-up as a factory or hotel.

The exhibition will document these processes and present their results as points of departure rather than outcomes. As artists curating the project we aim to provide a public forum for discussing the role of art in supporting a sense of possibility within social and political thinking.

During the exhibition, a public talks programme in the gallery space will bring guest speakers to discuss the issues raised through the artists' projects and the project contexts; Citizenship and Authority, Work and Progress, Property and Ownership. Speakers will include artists, academics, representatives of public organizations and agencies, politicians, trade unionists. A symposium and publication will discuss the relevance and significance of this approach in the Spring of 2005.

For further information, please contact the Gallery reception on 01922 654400.

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Dryden Goodwin
DRAW IN/DRAW OUT
at The New Art Gallery Walsall
31 July - 12 September 2004

DRAW IN/DRAW OUT is a major solo show by the young British artist Dryden Goodwin that draws together a number of keynote pieces dating from the last three years. Encompassing large-scale video and sound installation, photography, drawing and film, the exhibition (which gives a first UK staging to a number of newly-completed works) highlights the artist's preoccupations with urban and natural landscapes and with human perception and interaction.

Like much of Goodwin's work, the exhibition explores the cusp between contrasting states, investigating notions of presence and absence, interconnection and isolation, serenity and disquiet.

Pulsing across the ‘wraparound' membrane of eight encircling projection screens, Goodwin's panoramic video and sound installation, Dilate (2003) acts as the centrepiece of DRAW IN/DRAW OUT. In a series of episodic sequences, Dilate expands and contracts our perceptual horizons, heightening the viewer's awareness of physical and psychological space. Panning in and out of significant details of an immersive 360 degree scene, it reflects how our shifting sense of self informs our perception of space and vice versa. Faced with an open vista of a majestic natural landscape, we can feel liberated, isolated or paralysed; as part of the city, anonymous, identified or alienated; in the domesticity of our homes, safe, confined or overwhelmed; in a virtual network, empowered, remote or victimised. Dramatic and multi-faceted in its flow of images, Dilate also has a strong sculptural presence in the gallery, allowing the work to be approached from a distance and viewed both from inside and outside the formation of screens. The shifting sound-scape fuses audio captured on location with additional orchestration by the artist.

Dilate was co-commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella, Manchester Art Gallery and The New Art Gallery, Walsall.

In an adjoining gallery, a series of monochrome works spanning 2001-2003 are shown for the first time. In these, Goodwin accentuates the experience of the individual in the all-consuming surroundings of the city. Two Thousand and Three (2003), a 16mm black and white film loop with accompanying light box table, is the most recent in an on-going series of 16mm film loop installations begun in 1996. On each of the individual film frames, a different person appears, photographed during the massive protest marches against the war in Iraq, in London, in 2003. On the one hand, on the projection screen, the viewer is bombarded by the frenetic forward march of almost subliminal images; on the other, studying the separate frames on the light box table with a small magnifying loupe, they can form a more intimate, contemplative engagement with this series of discrete individuals. A teeming composite of details and fragments, it vividly captures the sense of individuals converging, a part and yet apart.

In his photographic drawings, Capture (2001) and Cradle (2002), a feeling of ‘intimate anonymity' emerges as Goodwin uses the point of a compass as a drawing device to scratch a net-like matrix of lines into the surface of different scale photographic portraits of unsuspecting passers-by in the streets of London. Similarly, the delicate large-scale pencil drawings, Aiport (2001), Station (2001) and Street (2001), offer a sparing yet involving depiction of the isolated anonymous figure in space.

For further information, please contact the Gallery reception on 01922 654400.

Dryden Goodwin (b.1971) studied at The Slade School of Fine Art and lives and works in London, UK. He works with different media including installation, video, film, sound, drawing and photography. Recent exhibitions include Clandestine at the 50th Venice Biennale (2003), The Cathedral, BALTIC, Gateshead (2003), Reality Check, Photographer's Gallery and British Council, London (2002), and solo shows, Reveal, Lacock Abbey, Wiltshire (2003) and Closer, Art Now, Tate Britain (2002). In 2002 Goodwin created the artwork and directed the first music video for Aqualung's Strange and Beautiful album.

Film and Video Umbrella have published a monograph publication on Dryden Goodwin's work to date to complement this new commission and tour as part of the Minigraph series. An accompanying DVD will be produced at the end of 2004.

Image: Dryden Goodwin, Installation shots from Gallery Frahm, Copenhagen, Denmark, 1999

The New Art Gallery Walsall
Gallery Square
Walsall

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