NOW ANOTHER PROCEDURE IS TO RUN

08-02-18 – 15-03-18

ALLAN HUGHES, MARK JACKSON | GAIL PICKERING | JAWBONE JAWBONE

‘NOW ANOTHER PROCEDURE IS TO RUN’ brings together works employing historical analogue videotape, live transmission and televisual images to explore and critique on the collective actions and self-indulgent desires of contemporary society. The installation will present itself as series of live broadcasts, with live/lived experiences, non-fictional and fictional storytelling that are intertwined within its surface materiality as much as its content which constructs new narrative spaces and platforms. These systems contain political and aesthetic implications that address the subjectivity of popular visual formats and enable reflection of our contemporary relationship with images. The works of these artists probe the overlap, slippage and disconnect between reality and representation.

Allan Hughes (1974-) and Mark Jackson (1976-) are The Blue Mountain, a dreamwork based in the Tyneside conurbation. They recycle souls using triangles inscribed on their arms as a tripartite that leads to creative action. As Senior Lecturers in Fine Art and Visual & Material Cultures at Northumbria University they climb up gleaming edifices: Marl Jackson and Alllan Hughes, paranormal investigators from the 1980s cast in an Anthony Gormley studio. They have wings instead of arms like the Angel of the North but their bodies are small, like miniatures, and they have phocomelia: errors, typos, missing bits, umbilical hernias and projecting brains, because the metal doesn’t flow back on itself when cast with a centrifuge.

Recent visitations have included Blue Mountain Equals Arcturus at The Northern Charter in Newcastle upon Tyne, Blue Mountain at Manchester Contemporary, My Part of Your Home, (curated by Giles Bailey & CIRCA Projects) at Shipley Gallery Gateshead and a material production collaboration with Plastique Fantastique for Shonky a Hayward Touring Show. They will launch their Blue Mountain Starter Set, a set of 28mm white metal miniatures at IMT Gallery, London in April 2018.

Gail Pickering works with moving image, performance and installation.  A key aspect is her use of historical material as staged through voice, mimicry and through the various accomplices and protagonists with whom she has collaborated in her videos and performances. The tension between the moving image and live presence offers an instability that recurs throughout her work in a desire to position it and us within a temporal and spatial present.  In each exhibition of “Near Real Time” Pickering adds and subtracts material and varies the choreography of its installation, at its core performative.

Pickering graduated with an MFA from Goldsmiths in 2001. Her work has been exhibited widely, including Tate Modern; ICA, London; South London Gallery; Centre of Contemporary Art, Vilnius; Magasin Centre for Contemporary Art, Grenoble, France; Kunstverien Stuttgart, Germany; Gasworks and the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Pickering recently had two major solo exhibitions at La Ferme Du Buission, Paris, 2014 and the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, 2014-15 and was nominated for the Jarman Award in 2015.

Nikki Katrina Carroll (b. 1994, Grantham) and Matthew Young (b. 1993 Stockton-on-Tees) are based in Graduate Studios Northumbria, Newcastle upon Tyne.  Artistically they collaborate through their third identity, Jawbone Jawbone.  As habitual re-users of imagery they aim to generate visual motifs that appear in various mediums and forms. Expanding from a simplistic image or conventional belief, they channel a daydream-like aesthetic to influence their decision making.  Through this approach their multidisciplinary works become elements attempting to understand 3D life; whilst playfully reflecting on common sense.

Recent shows include I Can’t Remember the Last Time I Used Cardamom, TESTT Gallery, Durham; Les Boîtes Suede Gallery w/ Slugtown, Edinburgh; Dishwasher Safe System Gallery, Newcastle; Bish Bash Bosh by We The North, The Royal Standard, Liverpool and Deep Down the Ear Canal, Slugtown, Newcastle.

This project is kindly supported by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

BLACK MOUNTAIN

2nd November – 14th December 2017

Cecilia Borettaz | Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti | Andreas Kindler Von Knobloch | Hamish MacPherson  

Screening programme: Redmond Entwistle | Adriana Monti

Black Mountain is a six-week project that uses the gallery space as a platform to bring together artists, researchers, curators and the general public.

The title refers to Black Mountain College, one of the most well known experimental art schools of post-war America, based in a remote area of North Carolina. What made Black Mountain unique was the teachers’ and students’ approach to creative production, often involving collective making and encouraging overlaps between disciplines including dance, architecture, painting, theatre and music.

The faculty of professors were all highly regarded practitioners in the fields of art, music and architecture such as Josef Albers, Buckminster Fuller and John Cage among others. They shared a strong, common interest in the processes of experimentation, considered in its broader meaning of both empirical scientific method and ‘experience’ which involves knowledge and skills.

Those aspects of Black Mountain’s legacy seems to be reflected in the contemporary self-organized (free!) schools and alternative education models in contemporary art, where utopian structures and radical ideas have been tested and reframed through the experience and experimentation of the artists, students and researchers involved.

In this framework, is it possible to turn a gallery space into a living, metamorphic exhibition that allows artistic processes to be visible and open to changes and engagement? What can we learn from a collective experience of sharing knowledge? In our current environment of instability, inequality and misrecognition of the role of the arts, education and critical thinking – this project aims to be a starting point for a further reflection about the importance of artists initiatives and their impact in the local community.

Overturning the notion of the traditional exhibition, invited collaborators will work in Catalyst Arts using this period as a micro-residency, developing site-specific commissions that will generate a series of publicly engaged workshops, talks and screenings.

Download the full public programme here.

Andreas Kindler Von Knobloch will be the first to take residency in the space. Andreas is a Dublin-based artist whose practice embraces collectivity and participation through the creation of structures, objects and spaces that question material and social relations. ‘We Build a Framework’ is a new project developed for Black Mountain. Drawing inspiration from steel framework construction –  a contemporary system of building that allows for maximum internal flexibility and open space – Andreas seeks to find parallels between the organisational structure of Catalyst and architectural support systems. Though a public, hands-on-event Andreas will explain and demonstrate with the participants the working principles of the structure and its potentials combinations.

Hamish MacPherson is a London-based artist who uses ideas and methods from choreography and dance to think about politics. He makes workshops, non-digital games, performances, writings, images and other things in dance, visual arts, academic and community contexts. While in Catalyst, he will lead ‘In which we prepare for…’, a series of workshops focused on ‘prepping’ – the process of preparing for an unknown, imminent future.

Cecilia Borettaz is an artist based in Brussel working with painting, printmaking, installation and storytelling. She will use the gallery space as her studio for one week, where she will experiment with new materials and techniques for her ongoing project ‘Dissolution of Abstraction’. The studio is meant to be a place of exchange for the audience, who are invited to take part in the artistic process. During her micro-residency in Catalyst, Cecilia would lead an artist talk about her practice, where she will present ‘Perhaps by fate, perhaps by choice’, her theoretical research on a personal family archive.

Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti is the final contributor in Black Mountain. Lucrezia is an independent curator and co-founder of the research-driven, non-profit space CLOG, based in Turin, Italy. Her current focus of research is the recent overflow of alternative education systems in visual arts, questioning its relevance and meaning in the contemporary art context. Through a series of public discussions, screenings and collective readings Lucrezia will deepen and expand the themes of attention, anarchist epistemology, metanoia, speculative poetics, and fugitive studies.

The last event in the exhibition’s public programme is a screening showcasing artists’ moving image works about specific educational experiments, such as 150 Hours Programme (Italy) and the first years of CalArts (Los Angeles, USA). ‘Scuola Senza Fine’ (1983) by Adriana Monti and ‘Walk-Through’ (2012) by Redmond Entwistle, which spotlight how current pedagogical models and their relationship to new forms of social, political and economic environments have emerged since the 1970s.

This project is kindly supported by Arts Council of Northern Ireland.