Screenings, installations and presentations by Zigor Barayazarra, Kate Herbert, Ismael Iglesias, Job Ramos and Aikaternini Gegisian + live music by Arctic Circle (www.myspace.com/arcticircle)
Dates: Friday 25th April - Sunday 11th May 2008 12 – 6pm (Gallery open Thurs – Sun)
Associated events: Screenings/presentations on Thursday May 1st and Thursday May 8th
(please go to www.plan9.org.uk for further information)
Venue: Plan 9, Bridewell Island, Nelson Street (public entrance on Bridewell Street) Broadmead, Bristol
Artists: Amy Feneck, Kathleen Herbert, Nim-Jo Chung, Job Ramos, Esperança Cobo, Aikaterini Gegisian, Gisela Motta and Leandro Lima, Jack Southern, Juanan Eguiguren, Zigor Barayazarra and Ismael Iglesias.
Curated by: Nim-Jo Chung
We Used to be Painters– the title, a contemplative lament to a lost solidarity, a nostalgic slur heralding trophies and medals of prestige for those that pronounce it. We Used to be Painters underlines how artists have tried to assimilate rapid developments in the media available to them. By doing so the exhibition demonstrates changes in how we make, keep and view moving image.
This exhibition will examine how moving image based work has been affected by it’s own disposability. The selected artists approach this question in a number of different ways. Is urgency in artistic production necessary, when thousands of clips can be easily stored and accessed on a hard-drive? How does the overwhelming presence of visual mass on the net change present day attitudes toward making this type of work? Relegated in some extent to invisibility, does the artist in fact find certain advantages and strategies in the “ordinariness” encompassed by creating moving image?
In very different ways, Kate Herbert and Amy Feneck acutely assess the significance of the act of recording. Both desire that something special and unique remain intrinsic to the moment of capture, but both know that they are creating fiction.
In her on-going project Runner, Amy Feneck explores the aesthetic, poetic and lyrical experience of different European cities through the act of running.
Kate Herbert’s films invoke subtle and enduring emotions - a nearly endless physical journey through a subterranean tunnel seen through the camera, accompanied by only the sound of the walkers’ footsteps. One is witness to how paralyzing the everyday action of filming alone can be.
The video works of Catalan artist Job Ramos present oneiric fragments of sound and image from stories told through an internal logic understood by an author, who has at his disposal an endless accumulation of images.
Ismael Iglesias, the only painter to be included, will install a temporal work in response to his two week residency at Plan 9 prior to the exhibition. In a recent exhibition in Sala Rekalde, Bilbao, Ismael presented Garage Social Club, a life size re-representation of an underground car-park using oil paint. Using traditional medium, the artist conveys romantic sentiments of futility and seduction reflecting imagery taken directly from the fonts of new technology.
