Laurence Owen, The Elemental Dynamic - Installation views

Laurence Owen: The Elemental Dynamic

27 February 2012 - 24 March 2012

Taking the constrictions implicit in the supposedly childish medium of felt tips to see what might emerge with their garish tones, Laurence Owen makes a series of images which are both disturbing and familiar. He presents us with a skewed rendition of the everyday, appropriating the language of advertising, photographs and holiday brochures to his own ends. Owen calls his felt tip drawings ‘a newsreel of everyday life’, resulting in images that lie somewhere between the fantastical and the mundane.

Laure Prouvost in Conversation, Saturday 28 January

Laure Prouvost in Conversation, Saturday 28 January

As part of the Laure Prouvost in Conversation evening, actor Francesca McCrohon, who plays Betty in The Wanderer (Betty Drunk) gave a reading from Rory McBeth's translation of Kafka's "The Metamorphosis." Prouvost selected particular images, sound clips, and pieces of video during the course of the reading that served to fragment the spoken text and unexpectedly produce new correspondences between word and image.

Laure Prouvost in Conversation, Saturday 28 January

Food at the Company Shed on Mersea Island as a prelude to the evening event

Laure Prouvost, The Wanderer (Betty Drunk)

Laure Prouvost, The Wanderer (Betty Drunk)

Art Exchange window

(Photographs by Matthew Bowman)

Laure Prouvost, The Wanderer (Betty Drunk)

Laure Prouvost, The Wander (Betty Drunk)
Project Space of Art Exchange
(Photographs by Matthew Bowman)

Laure Prouvost, The Wanderer (Betty Drunk)

Stills from Laure Prouvost's The Wanderer (Betty Drunk)

Main gallery space of Art Exchange

(photographs by Matthew Bowman)

Laure Prouvost, The Wanderer (Betty Drunk)

Photograph of the forward-tilting video screen from the rear. Upon stepping into Art Exchange this is the first thing the visitor sees.

Margins: Walking Between Worlds (Part 3): William Kentridge

William Kentridge, Shadow Procession, 1999

"Shadow Procession works with the simple idea of cut and hinged paper figures moving across a back-lit surface to the jaunty soundtrack of What a friend we have in Jesus. But this is a procession that asks its participants to carry their possessions and to walk whether they are young, old, sick or lame. As figures move across the screen, head down reading the bible or newspapers, they walk with obedience and passivity. The ominous feeling that all is not as it seems quickens as the figures become weighed down by their ever increasing burdens, until they are not just carrying luggage:, but one is seen carrying a grand piano, another an entire city. Shadows from shadow puppets add to the sense of chaos and mass expulsion, while also reminding us of the presence of the puppeteer’s presence."

-- Jess Kenny, "William Kentridge: The Impossible is What Happens All the Time"

Walking Objects by Marco Rountree Cruz, 2011

Marco Rountree Cruz (b.1982) is from Mexico City. This excerpt is from an interview that happened after he made his installation at Art Exchange, University of Essex during his stay in England in November 2011.

Zanna Gilbert: You’ve just finished your installation for the exhibition Margins: Walking Between Worlds at Art Exchange. Can you tell me about the idea you had for the work?

Marco Rountree Cruz: It is hard to explain. All my life I have enjoyed walking, it is a very important part of my life actually. Since I was really young I collected trash from the streets and gave importance to the trash, not in a melancholic way, but a sweet feeling, about how an object is just left there on the street. Well, I live in a city, right and it is about how you can give importance to objects by taking them home and treating them like a decoration. When I came and saw the Tacita Dean and Aztec display, and the book there talking about mystic and shamanic stuff, I came with the idea of doing a mystic and shamanic necklace. Usually people hang special things and objects relating to religion on their necklaces. It has this spiritual context, but it is also an issue with fashion and aesthetics, which I really enjoy. I really like conceptual art but I also love decoration. It is funny the necklace thing because I’m also a huge fan of hip hop, remember Flavor Flav, that rapper from Public Enemy who used to hang huge objects like watches, from his necklaces?

Thursday 15 November: Marina Warner gives a talk on Tacita Dean's Footage and representations of the other-worldliness of feet in cultural history and mythology. She comments "Divinely beautiful feet summon up their counterpoise, their opposite, as imagining the soul and its lightness recalls the drag of the body.”

Tacita Dean's work explores the ways chance and coincidence influence daily life while seeking out connections between past and present, fact and fiction. She maps not just the objective world but also our private worlds and traces the complex interaction between the two: real landscapes are layered with inner, psychic landscapes defined by our own desires and obsessions. Dean‘s art is carried by a sense of history, time and place, light quality and the essence of film itself. It moves from this world into the next, tracing the journeys of others along the threshold between life and death. -- Jess Kenny, Curator of Margins: Walking Between Worlds