Reviews unedited | a-n The Artists Information Company

Forest

Fri, 09 May 2008 00:00:00 +0100

[David Miles, Brighton 9 May 2008]
David Miles works extensively with paper, creating mobiles and cut-card works, and so an artist’s book is an almost inevitable development in his practice. Forest was produced for the exhibition Papercuts at Bury St Edmunds Art Gallery in...

Axis Festival 2008 Visual Arts Programme

Wed, 07 May 2008 00:00:00 +0100

[Hanley City Centre, Stoke on Trent 18 April - 3 May 2008]
With a bombardment of art exhibitions, public art interventions and music and video events across the city Axis and AirSpace have given Stoke on Trent a glimpse of how fun and inspiring art in the city can be. In the Gallery: ...

Dead Men?s Patterns

Tue, 06 May 2008 00:00:00 +0100

[Hormazd Narielwalla, London 1 May 2008 - 8 September 2025]
Hormazd Narielwalla wears an elegant polka-dot necktie which might have caused Jeeves to raise an eyebrow, and a bright white kurta under a Burberry Macintosh. His outfit perfectly corresponds to the crisp white and fawn tones of his new book, Dead...

Best of Show: Jenna Watt at National Review of Live ARt (NRLA) 2008

Sun, 04 May 2008 00:00:00 +0100

[Tramway, Glasgow, Scotland 9 February - 9 May 2008]
SOMETIMES IT HAPPENS AT NRLA. YOU’RE SHUTTLING FROM ONE PERFORMANCE TO ANOTHER, DIVING IN AND OUT OF QUEUES, NOT HAVING TIME TO EAT AND BEING CAUGHT UP IN THE MADNESS. THEN YOU STUMBLE ACROSS SOMETHING PERFECT, SOMETHING JUST FOR YOU AND JUST...

Glasgow International: Festival of Contemporary Visual Art

Fri, 02 May 2008 00:00:00 +0100

[Venues across Glasgow, Glasgow 11 - 27 April 2008]
Glasgow International was founded in 2004 and this year’s incarnation offers a theme that is loosely described by director Francis McKee as ‘public and private’. The project has slowly expanded to 40 exhibitions, occupying not only...

Unheimlich

Fri, 02 May 2008 00:00:00 +0100

[Leeds Met Gallery, Leeds 17 April - 17 May 2008]
“Familiar space provides an environment which has unexpected edges.” The Freudian concept of an instance where something can be familiar, yet foreign at the same time is central to Unheimlich, a group show running...

Glasgow International

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0100

[Various, Glasgow 11 - 27 April 2008]
Glasgow International Think about the things that really make life worth living - love, sex, creation, attraction, destruction, wild places - then think of golf. It's disgusting.[1] There was a TV above the...

Ally Wallace, Multi Module

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0100

[Scotland Street School Museum, Glasgow 12 April - 5 May 2008]
Exhibited in one of the old classrooms at Scotland Street School Museum, a Charles Rennie Mackintosh designed building south of the Clyde (the last one he worked on apparently), Multi Module is a ceiling height floor-based sculpture. It is shown...

Excavating England by Carl Jaycock

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0100

[Bracknell Gallery, South Hill Park Art Centre, Bracknell, Berkshire 29 March - 11 May 2008]
What would you think about the iconic images of England? About such icons as the Union Jack, the Palace of Westminster, the Royals, the Beatles, the ever so charming weather or the ‘pound’? How then do we construct a narrative out...

Glasgow International Festival of Contemporary Art

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0100

[CCA, GoMA, Royal Concert Hall, In Transit, Glasgow 11 - 27 April 2008]
I finally got to visit Glasgow's GI Festival after a mix up with my ticket booking, albeit on the last weekend, knowing that I would only get to see a glimpse of the vast array of work on show all over Glasgow town. My first stop was...

Gothic / Things That Go Bump in the Night

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0100

[Fieldgate Gallery (ended) / Cafe Gallery Projects, London 2 April - 4 May 2008]
Dark Materials A taste for a sumptuous kind of darkness has resurfaced in contemporary art. Leaning towards the grotesque, but with a seductive turn that separates it from the abject, this is Romanticism’s twisted cousin: the most recent...

Trephine Me

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0100

[The Macbeth, London 14 - 28 April 2008]
Andrew Walter, a recent graduate of the illustration programme at Kingston University, is exhibiting some drawings in the upstairs rooms of the arty Hoxton pub, The Macbeth. They first look old fashioned: pen-and-ink, monochromatic and...

Unheimlich

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0100

[Leeds Met Gallery, Leeds 18 April - 17 May 2008]
It always surprises me that we are so habituated to the everyday stuff of existence that life does not seem strange to us most of the time. There is probably a good evolutionary reason for this as experiencing the Uncanny on a regular basis...

Unheimlich

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0100

[Leeds Met Gallery, Leeds 18 April - 17 May 2008]
Unheimlich is usually translated as Uncanny. Freud wrote an essay on the subject during one of his rare forays into aesthetics. His basic thesis was that something that disturbs, or even horrifies us, is not the opposite of something safe and...

The 5th Berlin Biennale - When Things Cast No Shadow

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0100

[KW Institute for Contempoary Art, Neue National Gallery, Berlin 15 April - 15 June 2008]
5th Berlin Biennial Off I trotted to the 5th Berlin Biennial, to find out what it was all about. It is spread over four sites, the Mies Van Der Rohr designed Neue National Gallery, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, the Schinkel Pavilion, and...

Left but a Trace: Sissi Farassat and Gregor Neuerer

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0100

[Cornerhouse, Manchester 1 February - 23 March 2008]
The three prints that make up Gregor Neurer’s New Tenant (2001) piece depict empty domestic environments, capturing the subtle marks left behind where we can only imagine furniture once stood. The aesthetic is minimal but the dark traces, of...

New Generation Arts Festival

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0100

[Birmingham, Birmingham 5 - 12 June 2008]
NGA Birmingham – 5th – 20th June www.newgenerationarts.co.uk Last year I had the good fortune of visiting the graduation show at Birmingham City University, at the time I remembered seeing a number of works that...

GIFT - An exhibition by The Ideas Exchange

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0100

[OVADA , Oxford 5 April - 24 May 2008]
GIFT showcases work by The Ideas Exchange, a group of artists working in and around Oxfordshire. The ‘gift’ theme expresses the group’s commitment to exchange and reciprocity. On entering the gallery the viewer immediately...

'Land's End' Ruth Claxton

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0100

[Ikon , Birmingham 2 April - 18 May 2008]
Review by Charlie Levine The kitsch space ship has landed at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, where the first museum exhibition by local artist Ruth Claxton is currently on display. ‘ Land’s End ’ is a complex...

Museum of Native Oak (MONO)

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0100

[The Manchester Museum, Manchester 19 January - 27 April 2008]
Jacob Cartwright and Nick Jordan, two artists collaborating for the Alchemy fellowship at the Manchester Museum, draw upon both cultural and natural history in their practice, with an emphasis on myth and folklore. The exhibition is part of an...

Life In Death: The Victorian Art Of Taxidermy

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0100

[The Booth Museum Of Natural History, Brighton 16 June 2007 - 15 June 2008]
It is interesting how a specific exhibition detailing the life’s work of Edward Thomas Booth: huntsman, collector of specimens and curator, is being shown at a time when taxidermy seems to be re-kindling as a desirable medium, rather than...

Perform Every Day by Joshua Sofaer

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0100

[Artists' Book, Brussells 1 January 2008]
At times, the line between the critical and the cathartic gesture can become blurred. There is sometimes little to distinguish the self-consciously resistant or creative action from a ‘coping mechanism’ or some other form of...