Tag: exhibition

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Prints of Darkness travels to Dundee

We are pleased to present Prints of Darkness at Matthew Gallery at DJCAD and
look forward to seeing you for a drink and chat at the preview on the 12th
November if you can make it.

Matthew Gallery, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, 13 Perth
Road, Dundee.

More information on our print and record in the exhibition Prints of Darkness

http://www.edinburgh-printmakers.co.uk/gallery/44a.htm

PREVIEW/// 12 November, 5-7pm
EXHIBITION/// 13 November ­ 11 December
Andrew Cranston, Tommy Crooks, Malcy Duff, Duncan Marquiss, Lee O¹Connor, Christopher Orr, People Like Us, Norman Shaw, Edward Summerton, The Lonely Piper, Andy Wake, Mark Wallace.

This touring exhibition, which originated at Edinburgh Printmakers, celebrates the vinyl record as an abiding audio-visual artifact and recalls the golden age of the record cover in the thick of the post-psychedelic, goth-surrealistic, Art Nouveau, apocalyptic landscape explosion, now being revived in a current resurgence of collectable limited edition records with original artwork.

http://www.exhibitions.dundee.ac.uk/programme_coming_soon.html

Generator, the Dundee’s artist-led space, also has an exhibition preview
that night (7-9pm) which you could catch if you are in town: ‘BE THE HAMMER
OR THE ANVIL’, Rachel Adams, Solveig Einarsdottir, Mairi Lafferty, Rose
Ruane.

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This Is Light Music Picture Disc LP

As part of the Prints of Darkness exhibition at http://www.edinburgh-printmakers.co.uk/ from 17 July to 04 September 2010, People Like Us have been commissioned to make a vinyl picture disc responding to the title theme of the exhibition.

This Is Light Music will be available for shipping to you from the second week in August. You can pre-order here. Please note – if you are intending to buy the print that Vicki was commissioned to do, please contact Edinburgh Printmakers through the above website url, since they are offering the record free to the first 20 people buying a print. Prices below in US Dollars include postage and packing.

THIS ITEM IS SOLD OUT WHEN BOUGHT DIRECTLY FROM US. IF YOU WOULD LIKE A COPY PLEASE GO TO THE EDINBURGH PRINTMAKERS WEBSITE AND ORDER FROM THEM. ALL REMAINING ORDERS WILL BE SENT FROM US TODAY (18 SEPTEMBER 2010)

http://www.edinburgh-printmakers.co.uk/

Please note – this LP costs more than some other merchandise you may have bought from us – this is because of the nature of the item, in that the gallery needed to cover costs, etc, plus it costs more to post this kind of item. We assure you we always try and make things available as cheaply as we can!

For more info on the exhibition and how we responded to the task here:
http://www.peoplelikeus.org/2010/people_like_us_new_record_and_print_in_edinburgh_exhibition.html

Dates of Exhibition: 17 July to 04 September 2010
Opening Hours: Weekly Tuesday – Saturday 10.00am – 6.00pm
CLOSED SUNDAY & MONDAYS
Admission: Free
Venue: Edinburgh Printmakers, 23 Union Street, Edinburgh, EH1 3LR
Telephone: 0131 557 2479
Website: www.edinburgh-printmakers.co.uk

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People Like Us new record and print in Edinburgh exhibition

Prints of Darkness Exhibition

You and your guests are invited to the reception for the Prints of Darkness exhibition on Thursday 29 July, 6-8pm.
RSVP to gallery@edinburgh-printmakers.co.uk

Artist Talk by Vicki Bennett (People Like Us)
29 July 2010, 4.30-5.30pm, Gallery 2, Edinburgh Printmakers
Vicki Bennett will deliver a talk about her work in the field of audio-visual collage, through her innovative appropriating and cutting up of found footage and archives.
Admission is free but places are limited so please call or email to book: T 0131 5572479 or gallery@edinburgh-printmakers.co.uk

Edinburgh Printmakers presents its world premiere exhibition of new work exploring record cover art, curated by Sarah-Manning Cordwell, Norman Shaw, and Edward Summerton and published by Edinburgh Printmakers. This exhibition will include original prints by eleven Scottish artists and a new LP of music by People Like Us, aka international award-winning multimedia artist Vicki Bennett.

Buy This Is Light Music picture disc LP here
http://www.peoplelikeus.org/shop/
Celebrating the vinyl record as an abiding audio-visual artefact, this project recalls the golden age of the record cover in the thick of post-psychedelia’s goth-surrealistic art-nouveau apocalyptic landscape explosion, now being revived in a current resurgence of collectable limited-edition records with original artwork.

People Like Us illuminates this dark visual ride with ‘This Is Light Music’, an exclusive full-length picture-disc album in a limited edition of only 250. This record is available as part of a lavish limited edition boxed-set publication which houses the record and a pull-out poster in a gatefold sleeve, and includes essays by People Like Us and co-curator Norman Shaw. This publication is on sale throughout the exhibition, together with specially commissioned t-shirts and badges by the participating artists.

Download the essay by Vicki Bennett (pdf)
Information here on purchasing a print (pdf)

Dates of Exhibition: 17 July to 04 September 2010
Opening Hours: Weekly Tuesday – Saturday 10.00am – 6.00pm
CLOSED SUNDAY & MONDAYS
Admission: Free
Venue: Edinburgh Printmakers, 23 Union Street, Edinburgh, EH1 3LR
Telephone: 0131 557 2479
Website: www.edinburgh-printmakers.co.uk

Press
Preview in The List
http://www.list.co.uk/article/26790-people-like-us-celebrate-record-cover-art-in-prints-of-darkness/

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Parade to be in group exhibition

In The Long Run: 30 Years of Great Running
By Claire Leona Apps, Vicki Bennett, Suky Best, Ravi Deepres and Michael Baig-Clifford, Graham Dolphin, James Edwards, Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, Julian Germain, Jane and Louise Wilson

Exhibition
Starts: 17th July 2010
Ends: 17th October 2010
Great North Museum: Hancock
Barras Bridge
Newcastle upon Tyne
Tyne and Wear
NE2 4PT
0191 222 6765

Celebrating the 30th staging of the Bupa Great North Run, this major new exhibition explores the history and significance of this enormously popular event.
In The Long Run looks at significant role this event has played in reflecting and shaping the region’s cultural identity.

As well as the well known stories of elite runners, In The Long Run will also explore the huge organisational effort behind the Bupa Great North Run, documenting the event’s community spirit and creating a powerful piece of social history.

Alongside interactive exhibits, memorabilia and star objects, In The Long Run will present artwork from the archives of Bupa Great North Run Culture, with paintings, films, photographs and drawings by Jane and Louise Wilson, Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, Julian Germain, Graham Dolphin and Vicki Bennett, among many others.
A programme of special events and guest lectures, as well as a special Late Show the night before this year’s Bupa Great North Run, will be announced soon.


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Artist Talk at Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle

Archive material plays a central role within the work of artists Vicki Bennett and susan pui san lok, who both present film installations as part of the group exhibition Hit The Ground exhibition at the Hatton Gallery as part of this year’s Great North Run Cultural Programme.
Rebecca Shatwell, Director of AV Festival, will chair this talk at Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle with Vicki and susan as they discuss their latest works. Come along to find out more about how they have engaged with visual archives as part of their practices and receive a complimentary glass of wine.

This event also marks the launch of a new publication celebrating lok’s work Faster, Higher, published by Film and Video Umbrella, which features extensive visual documentation of this major multi-screen installation, alongside specially commissioned essays from critics Adrian Rifkin and Chris Berry.

Event presented in collaboration with Film and Video Umbrella.

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Essay by Drew Daniel

Just What Is It That Makes People Like Us So Different, So Appealing?
Drew Daniel

Just What Is It That Makes People Like Us So Different, So Appealing?
Drew Daniel

From “Beware the Whim Reaper” (1995) to “Abridged Too Far” (2004), Vicki Bennett has a way with execrable puns. Confronted with the task of theorizing about what informs and unites the bewildering multiplicity of her life’s work creating painstaking, hilarious and disturbing assemblages out of sound, language and moving image as People Like Us, the title of hers that catches me by the throat is an oldie but a goodie: “Pompous Circumstance”. Wit’s last minute detour off the golden road to cliché, puns take a piece of shared culture and suddenly tweek it into a personal shape, creating something new by revealing what was already there. Inverting Alexander Pope’s formula for poetry (“what oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed”), puns reveal a latent possibility within the given: what oft was expressed but never, until now, brought to thought. Puns are a kind of “black art” that throws received values into reverse: if good puns are bad, then the worst are the best. Ideally, you should be groaning and laughing at the same time. Fair is foul and foul is fair.

Risking a descent into pompous circumstances indeed, the occasion of this retrospective exhibition reverses Vicki’s direction of flow and prompts us to take her sound and video work seriously, and asks us to try to place her work in the context of an ongoing sea-change in how creativity is understood. Pompously put, the artistic re-use of found material confronts us anew with the enigma of creation. Up-ended by indirection, we can only half-see the artist at work in the capricious decision to smash and grab. Looking at the results when the glue has dried and the files have been rendered, can we do any more than catch the shadow of a hand in mid-flight as it grasps and folds a found form, clicks “Crop”, hits “Save”? Trying to catch up, we might ask some simple questions: why isolate and preserve these fragments? Why this piece, placed exactly here? Why this element and not others? Is this a work of love and preservation for what is disappearing, or an act of mockery at the expense of the found? Are we meant to recall the vanished whole, or to see this isolated quanta of material as newly self supporting?

Faced with mounting evidence of collage’s omnipresence and the increasing banalization of cutting and pasting as components of every form of content-management software, it may hurt more now than ever before to return to the old, awkward question: is this creative?

Yodeling in the valley, the fragment oscillates between emotional pitches. When T. S. Eliot wrote “These fragments I have shored against my ruin,” he figured modernist fragmentation as a melancholic funeral rite, a minor key lament at cultural collapse sung against the headwind of history. The irony is that his flimsy barricade of found fragments of popular songs and overheard conversations and quotations proved surprisingly durable; far from a last gasp, it was a breathtakingly successful demonstration of the energies of a new, combinatorial poetics. Jump-cut from Eliot to Dada. Like the public torture of the corpses of suicides in medieval Europe (designed to purge the village of an evil selfishness through a gratuitously “meaningless” display of cruelty), Dada snippetry started as a hostile surgical intervention into a moribund and self-canceling society. The marginal chancers at the Cabaret Voltaire may have thought that their cut-ups of official rhetoric were the final harrowing of necrotic ideological tissue, but Dada collage inadvertently accomplished a revivifying transfusion into the post-war artistic bloodstream. Avant-garde art practices of mangling and attacking and distorting the detritus of mass culture birthed a portable technique of collage that proved all too adaptable to the posterboard and the advertisement and the radio jingle and the TV spot and the viral web campaign. Such are the ironies of what John Ashbery termed “acceptance culture”; the smothering bosom of official sanction muffles the howl of critique with a pillow of puff pieces. For further evidence, consult the PLU track title: “Cushions can Kill”.

Jump-cut to Richard Hamilton. Post-war fragmentation accelerated the centrifugal separation of the positive and negative powers unleashed by cutting up and reassembling culture into both an atomic optimism and an atomic pessimism. If anything could be harvested, shattered into fragments and then recreated for the sake of new art, then the entire archive (sound, image, word) was a standing reserve waiting to be taken by force. Unfortunately, thanks to the accelerating technology of nuclear warfare, this was also true of our own bodies: we were all going to be split apart and reconfigured against our will, and soon. William S. Burroughs’ nostrum “Cut into the present and the future leaks out” figures both the Pandora’s box of potentiality for recombination initiated by a self-consciously mature cut-up aesthetic and the radioactive fallout of anxiety and fear unleashed by a society which had cut into matter itself at its most basic level. We are still living with the results, as lurid narrative scenarios of the endlessly imminent total war choke present reality with a toxic cloud of futurity. Bennett revisits these fantasized bomb-sites and loops them, literally, in the “fort/da” game she plays with animated renderings of atomic explosions that wallpaper the backgrounds of the tank-faced, bighaired women in her video piece “We Edit Life”. Caught in the headlights of these macabre and hilarious people, with each improbable spit curl and passing facial tic replayed and looped into a digital tableaux vivant, we are embarrassed for them and yet find ourselves withering slightly under their artificially steady maternal gaze. In Bennett’s work, the past isn’t suddenly modernized by digital tools, but seems instead rendered even more saturated with the creepy alterity of its very pastness: the syrupy orchestral swells, campfire sing alongs, and outmoded fashions and forced smiles that she assembles and recombines aren’t so much preserved from the ravages of time as they are powerfully fermented in them.

The ability to cut up and transform found material would seem to constitute the ultimate post-modern runaround from older models of artistic expression as a self-revelation. Trading character and depth for a jigsaw surface, collage can seem like a cheap shot detour from being answerable for the self within the work. And yet there is something weirdly self-exposing about the cumulative results of Bennett’s excursions into the mass media archives; the obsessive return to certain images and sounds across decades of work grants them a weirdly personal quality, the fetishistic investment of a cargo cult of one that recognizes the deity of Rod McKuen and Dolly Parton. If it’s so funny, why does it make us feel so awkward? Bennett’s work registers a hot flush of manic exhilaration in the sheer powertrip of her sure technological command over her source material, but it pills the sugar with a certain lingering aftertaste of despair at the failure of the aspirations within the material she collects. If the surreal humor of her work at its lightest suggests the comic English anarchism of Monty Python or Richard Hamilton, the quotidian grimness of her work at its darkest suggests the mordant English miserabilism of Philip Larkin or Mike Leigh. Far from proposing a utopian or psychedelic “other world” of festivity in which to escape from the drabness of the everyday, after prolonged exposure to the alchemical work of Vicki Bennett, we see and hear our own everyday world as one big joke which is already cut to pieces. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry.

Works Cited
William S. Burroughs & Brion Gysin The Third Mind New York: Viking Press, 1978.
T. S. Eliot “What the Thunder Said” The Waste Land and Other Poems. London: Faber and Faber, 1972.
Alexander Pope “An Essay on Criticism” Collected Poems. London: Tuttle Publishing, 1991.
This essay was commissioned by alt.gallery to coincide with “People Like Us: We Edit Life” – a Retrospective of the work of People Like Us, which ran in the gallery from 16 May-12 July 2008. Documentation can be found on the gallery site and here:
http://www.peoplelikeus.org/2008/documentation_of_the_people_like_us_retrospecitve_at_altgallery.html

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Documentation of the People Like Us Retrospective at alt.gallery

Documentation of the People Like Us Retrospective at alt.gallery
alt.gallery (entry via alt.vinyl) 61/62 Thornton Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 4AW.
http://www.altgallery.org/
16 May-12 July 2008

alt.gallery is pleased to announce the first retrospective exhibition of work by People Like Us (aka Vicki Bennett).
ARTIST INFO
For the past seventeen years British artist Vicki Bennett has been an influential figure in the field of audio visual collage, through her innovative sampling, appropriating and cutting up of found footage and archives. Using collage as her main form of expression, she creates audio recordings, films and radio shows that communicate a humorous, dark and often surreal view on life. The exhibition will focus on the concept of collage, showing an edited selection of her work, including twenty album releases, numerous singles and remixes, live sets, seven films and over a hundred and fifty radio shows. These collages mix, manipulate and rework original sources from both the experimental and popular worlds of music, film, television and radio.   People Like Us believe in open access to archives for creative use, and have made work using footage from the Prelinger Archives, The Internet Archive, and A/V Geeks. In 2006 she was the first artist to be given unrestricted access to the entire BBC Archive. People Like Us have previously shown work at Tate Modern, Sydney Opera House, Pompidou Center and Sonar, and performed radio sessions for John Peel and Mixing It. The ongoing sound art radio show ‘Do or DIY’ on WFMU has had over a million “listen again” hits since 2003. The People Like Us back catalogue is available for free download hosted by UbuWeb.
MEMORY STICKS

Every week during the exhibition a different collection of special downloads from the People Like Us archive will be available from the gallery, bring your memory stick along for a free take away!
ESSAY BY DR DREW DANIEL
A specially commissioned essay by Dr. Drew Daniel of Matmos accompanies the exhibition. Download pdf here. Drew’s essay can also be linked to here

Download a larger version of this flyer here
Download the poster (featured top right) here
The exhibition also included a framed essay by Rick Prelinger on The Virtues of Preexisting Material. Here is an excerpt:
On the Virtues of Preexisting Material
© Rick Prelinger 2007
Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution License
1 Why add to the population of orphaned works?
2 Don’t presume that new work improves on old
3 Honor our ancestors by recycling their wisdom
4 The ideology of originality is arrogant and wasteful
5 Dregs are the sweetest drink
6 And leftovers were spared for a reason
7 Actors don’t get a fair shake the first time around, let’s give them another
8 The pleasure of recognition warms us on cold nights and cools us in hot summers
9 We approach the future by typically roundabout means
10 We hope the future is listening, and the past hopes we are too
11 What’s gone is irretrievable, but might also predict the future
12 Access to what’s already happened is cheaper than access to what’s happening now
13 Archives are justified by use
14 Make a quilt not an advertisement
Download a pdf of the full text here, or link to the essay here.


The exhibition will also launch a new CD curated by Vicki Bennett for Sonic Arts Network called ‘Smiling Through My Teeth’, a compilation of humorous music and sound art.

SPECIAL EVENTS
People Like Us Special on WFMU
Thursday 15 May, 11pm-midnight (UK time) www.wfmu.org/playlists/ER – To celebrate the exhibition opening Ergo Phizmiz hosts a People Like Us Special on his show ‘Phuj Phactory’ on WFMU, both on terrestrial radio and live internet stream.
People Like Us Talk and Screening
Friday 16 May, 7:30pm
Star and Shadow Cinema, Stepney Bank, Newcastle
Vicki Bennett presents a selection of films by People Like Us.
The Late Shows: Smiling Through My Teeth CD Launch
Saturday 17 May, 7pm-11pm
alt.gallery
www.altgallery.org

The Late Shows form part of NewcastleGateshead’s world-class festivals and events programme. www.thelateshows.org.uk

Many thanks to Rebecca Shatwell for inviting us to do this retrospective, it was great fun to work together. Rebecca is now director of AV Festival.

Continue reading “Documentation of the People Like Us Retrospective at alt.gallery”

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Work, Rest & Play at Millennium Galleries, Sheffield

Earlier this year Vicki completed a 3-screen A/V piece called Work, Rest & Play; for Lovebytes, and we now can tell you that it will be presented by Lovebytes with Millennium Galleries from 7th November 2007 to 15th February 2008 in the foyer of Millennium Galleries in Sheffield. After this point we want to make it available for film festival distribution, like previous works.

People Like Us – “Work, Rest & Play” [2007]


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Work, Rest & Play – a musical film by People Like Us

People Like Us – Work, Rest & Play (2007) is a video triptych exploring the themes of labour, leisure and industriousness.