In Another Place Submissions

In Another Place

"Great Shag" by Ms. Bob Blackwell


"UT" by Delia Brady-Jacobs.


"Look here, look there" by Joonas Sirvio.


"Now that's what I call a man" by anon.


"The Sandman goes to work" by Wendy McGregor.


"I saw Nothing" by Benjamin Fenton.


"UT" by Steve McKay.


"UT" by Alan Thomas.


"Man" by David J Colbran.


"Isis Walking" by Joann Kushner.


"UT" by Colin McPherson.


"Base Chakra" by G.


"UT" by Chris Kerfoot.


"Kick Boxer" by Deb James.


"UT" by David J. Colbran


"UT" by Stephen McKay.


"UT" by Laurence Payot.


"UT" by Alan Thomas.


"Seaweed Man" by Deb James.


"Ever Ready" by Steve McKay.

Only Dream Bombs, Wandering, and the Watercolour War Corres(des)pondent.

On Nadim Karam by Alex Hetherington

Sometimes the best way to get to the truth of war is to switch off your `television, stop listening to the radio, dispense with your online connection, drop the RRS feeds and stay away from the abundance of LIVE coverage with six reports simultaneously commentating on an ever unfolding scenario of bombings, brutalized civilians, borders rewritten, missiles not hitting targets, car explosions and picture galleries of dead soldiers and plane crashes, old men and women in dirty pyjamas being carried by dust and rubble infested family members, politicians in hotel suites guiding us through their armoury of ideologies and our democracy rules ok recitals, their at once-removed blissfully unawareness of the agonized, played with a soundtrack with some aplomb on the piano, Condoleeza Rice. In short get away from the technology and the screen and the monitors and the fast flipping between CCN, ITN and the BBC. And just pick up some paper and a palette of watercolour paints and start painting.

Curating the curious On nomadic, necessary, impermanent, collective, obsessive and spontaneous strategies
The sociable art of Adam Nankervis

by Alex Hetherington

Australian-born, Liverpool-based artist Adam Nankervis works with a collision of tactics, an array of tensions and assemblage, a merger of disputations, negotiations and dialogues and a broad wealth of visual art vocabulary that connects his practice within the territories of artists like Maurizio Cattelan, Kurt Schwitters, Marcel Broodthaers, Kyoichi Tsuzuki, Gregor Schneider, curators like Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnick and the strategy of the artist-led project/ curator/ gallery/ space/ publisher. And similar to Schwitters’ grotto Merzbau, Nankervis’ home is the site for his art: private home, public space, public life, private life, self as institution, life’s work and man as museum.

Asylum’s Turnstile / The Protective Procession

by Alex Hetherington

An asylum seeker can be thought of as status sought by a person physically present within a country, having fled their own on grounds that are detrimental to their person, liberties or well being. Further, the individual must have a well-founded fear of persecution on the basis of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion, if made to return to his or her country of nationality. If the person does not have a country of nationality, then they must fear these grounds upon returning to their last place of habitual residence. One of these five grounds of asylum must be proven in order for the individual to win an asylum claim. Asylees differ from refugees in that the asylee has already entered the country when they are trying to obtain status.

Ballet Mechanique - Ben Parry and Jacques Chauchat.

by Leo Wood

Huge changes to the physical and social fabric of the city of Liverpool are taking place. In reaction to these changes, Jump Ship Rat (JSR), a local art collective, have chosen to explore Liverpool 08’s prevailing cultural theme ‘City in Transition’, and to make an artistic interpretation of Liverpool’s changing urban fabric.

JSR, who have been themselves pushed out of their home by new building developments and as a result do not have a building space to work from, have looked at ways of addressing these changes; finding ways of taking art beyond the city’s interior spaces and onto the streets, extending the notion of temporary public art. Ben Parry, one of the original founders of JSR, says that, ‘to match the city’s development we need to re-invent the way in which artwork is encountered and experienced’.

Parry has engaged and explored the changing nature of the physical and psychological urban fabric throughout much of his work, seeking to discover, ‘new and unknown territories where art becomes engaged with the social and political realities of everyday life’. But Ben Parry has mixed feelings towards the rapid development of Liverpool, as he says that having no venue to work from has created new challenges for him as an artist and has been liberating in a way; Ballet Mechanique has been born as a result of this.

Collaborators Ben Parry from Liverpool and Jacques Chauchat from Paris, have decided to take their historical practice of working with reclaimed material and kinetic sculpture, out of the gallery and into the street with their sonic junk street machine. A fully charged 1975 milk float picked up from a Dairy Express ‘milk float graveyard’ has undergone a metamorphosis to become an ‘electro-mechanic orchestra’. The float has been built up to a height of 5 meters with an integrated series of mechanical sculptures made from the detritus of the city; discarded objects collected from Mersey Waste’s domestic disposal sites - ‘45 cubic meters of kling, clunk, slash and boom’.

In its alteration, the milk float has become a kinetic cacophony of interlocking motors, pulleys, wheels, cogs and other mechanisms, creating a sound to reverberate through the city. Parry calls this, ‘the animation of objects in anarchic motion in which the spectator experiences the poetic language and song of detritus’, resounding the pace, dynamism, movement and infinite chaos of Liverpool. In recycling the actual waste from the city, the milk float also transforms itself into a conceptual vehicle for urban ecology, reflecting the city as a living organism in a constant state of change and modification.

Following the transformation of the milk float at the hands of Ben and Jacques, its original function can also still be seen as an integrated unit within the new dynamic and complex art machine; the original milk float being itself a part of the ecological system of a city, enabling the process of food production and supply, mapping the urban terrain and exemplifying the concept of the sustainable community inherent in the milk round.

In all these ways, the milk float reflects and represents the past, present and possibly future of the changing city of Liverpool. Yet the irony to this is that as a machine, the milk float is also functionless, a sculpture of the absurd, ‘debris in perfect disorder’. In operation from 14th September, Ballet Mechanique will make its journey throughout the city each day throughout the Independents, offering all those that it meets a surprise encounter and the discovery of the unknown. Ben Parry suggests that this aspect of the piece is important to him; ‘I like the idea of cultural hijack and to stopping people in their tracks’. In this way, Parry’s reference to Dadaism become apparent, a rejection of traditional artistic and cultural values. He regards The Milk Float as an interventionist piece that takes people by surprise, against their active choice to experience art within the safety of an art gallery. This is not a sanctioned artwork. The milk float has a fixed route, reflective of the milk round of old, and Ben likes the idea of building up an audience throughout the duration of the Independents, ’to have people in offices looking out their windows at a certain time each day’. But the journey of the float will also always have an element of flexibility and openness to change. The milk float will create spontaneous and memorable moments in an otherwise routine day. As well as being an artistically innovative and challenging piece, it is also simple anarchic fun. So keep all eyes peeled not to miss it, though this seems impossible, when Ballet Mechanique hits your street, heads are sure to turn.

Ballet Mechanique is on tour in the city throughout the festival

Real Life, the Private and the Public : On Nina Edge

by Alex Hetherington

Liverpool-based artist Nina Edge’s life is her work, in a way that could in principal be related to the ongoing, mammoth Real Life projects of Glasgow-based artist Ross Sinclair. Like him she works with modern motifs, symbols of the institutions that define our lives and institutional contexts, the individual in relation to those institutions and ideas that flicker between the public domain and the private existence, between policy-making, think-tanks of progressive actions, sweeping changes to social dynamics and their effect on life and society. Her array of output in material and conceptual terms is equally broad, from performance to objects, installations to interventions, activated and activist responses and fabric-based pieces and texts. All rooted in a contextual, conceptual response to issues, political circumstances and community-sited actions and activities. These issues and ideas, though, are directly sourced from her own situation not abstracted from objective observations, but from something lived through, experienced and challenged on a day-to-day basis.

I conducted a lengthy conversation with Nina over the phone in preparation for her new piece to be shown during Independents. During the conversation we discussed a number of weighty issues, a number of political changes we have both witnessed since Thatcher and the changes she has made to her approach to being an artist and making art. We spoke also about the terror waged by Britain against itself, of Bush and Blair as masters and defenders of the shareholder, the paranoia devised by the media and our politicians, and the journey that we have gone in recent times from optimism to dismay.

I’ll Be Your Mirror - Curator David Hancock

by Leo Wood

Since the birth of representational art, people have been painting portraits as a way to represent and understand humanity. And yet as artist David Hancock sees it, our understanding of portraiture is both limited and stifling. Hancock has chosen to explore and challenge the idea of portraiture, claiming that it can be, ‘so much more than a painting of a little kiddie in the living room’. I’ll Be your Mirror, an exhibition curated by David Hancock that features the work of eleven artists, invigorates the idea of portraiture for the 21st Century.

Hancock entered the BP Portrait Award a few years back and was disappointed by the stereotyped way in which the sitters were often depicted. When looking at a portrait he would often feel a sense of detachment from the person on the canvas and as if it was actually expressing more about the artist, ‘The works felt false, as if they didn’t get to the heart of the sitter’.

Portraiture has mostly made as its subject the great and the good, but to avoid this stigma, the artists of I’ll Be Your Mirror look towards a wider group of people, objects and animals in their paintings, to capture a sense of our globalised society at the beginning of this century, taking many different approaches to the concept of the portrait. I’ll Be Your Mirror includes the work of some artists who do not normally or exclusively make portraits, but work has been commissioned especially for this exhibition, by artists including Leo Fitzmaurice and Rui Matsunaga. Hancock’s own painting featuring in the exhibition, ‘I Wear Black on the Outside’, is also a slight departure for him, in terms of his body of work thus far. This painting, his most recent to date, marks the start of a series of works that will focus more specifically on portraits and people, up close and personal, rather than depicting figures
within a broader landscape.

‘I Wear Black on the Outside’ is a painting with echoes of the Annunciation, and is based on a real-life story, sent in a letter to Hancock, about a girl who saved her friend from committing suicide in his bedroom when she came across him wielding a knife. The figures in the portrait are not highly posed; the eye of the artist is that of a hidden observer in the bedroom. Life is breathed into the portrait, also thanks to Hancock’s photorealist technique and skill as a painter.

Ill Be Your Mirror is co-curated by Richard Meaghan, whose work also features here and who helped Hancock curate his last collaborative exhibition, Jerusalem. In this previous showcase, the artists took William Blake’s poem of the same name as a starting point from which to explore the idea and sense of the landscape as it was understood by the Romantics, in all its wild power, with the aim being to create, ‘new worlds with a sense of the poetic’.

Hancock and Meaghan also co-curated an exhibition at the Liverpool Biennale ’04, Le Petit Paysage, translated as The Small Landscape, and exactly that; an exhibit of small landscape paintings by over 25 artists; both an interesting concept and a practical solution to the
difficulties of transporting many artist’s work all across the country for the event.

Other artists featuring their work at I’ll Be Your Mirror include Jemima and Dolly Brown, an artist whom Hancock had admired for several years since seeing her work at New Contemporaries in 1997. Jemima’s pieces are based around the persona of Dolly Brown, an alter ego who started life as a blow-up doll and since has developed and is depicted in many different guises in Jemima’s work. In this exhibition, she turns on its head the long English tradition of 'domestic' portraiture in a series of sculpted and sort-of dismembered Dolly heads in flowery wreathes, all with a hint of 1970’s interior design.

Another artist exhibiting here is Gordon Cheung, who has worked already on several projects with David Hancock. Whilst Hancock was reluctant to include artists who had already exhibited at Jerusalem, Hancock realised that Cheung, though he was more well known for his dystopian landscape visions, was onto something interesting in his portraits of the 'Top 10 Dead Celebrity Earners'; personifying a ‘dead rich list’ of people who could almost be the gods of the dystopian world that Cheung had created in his landscape paintings.

On a different note, Isabel Young make portraits of animals in her work, and in doing so, elevates the status of the animal at the same time as challenging our understanding of what should and should not be an artist’s subject in portraiture. Isabel remembers famous
animals in history, such as ‘Nero’, King James’ lion, and her miniature-style paintings are certainly an interesting alternative to taxidermy.

I’ll Be Your Mirror is exhibited in a corridor space, on the 6th floor of the Gostin Buildings, Hanover Street, nicely placed between the Tate and the Adelphi. Slightly haphazard maybe, but is in the very nature of Independents to investigate the use of alternative ways to exhibit as all precious gallery space is used up at the Biennial. In an alternative exhibition space, with alternative approaches to the portrait; this should be an exciting event.

'I'll Be Your Mirror'
6th Floor Gostin's Building
16th Sep - 26th Nov

Cape Farewell : Art and Climate Change

by Peter Hagerty

Does citizenship demand responsibility? Historically social responsibility has revolved around the local polis in the maintenance of control and order, but today the sphere of concern is global and while the creationists, the multinationals and the oil companies in particular conspire to undermine and evade their responsibility, the inconvenient truth found at the earth's poles is now incontrovertible.

Simply stated the relationship between the levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperature are directly related and the evidence from planetary scientists is clear, the earth's oceans are undergoing a period of warming not seen since the beginning of the
Holocene; the relatively warm period we live in that has existed since the end of the last major ice age 12,000 years ago. Furthermore the dramatic recent rise in carbon dioxide levels parallel the period of human activity since the industrial revolution, an inconvenient
truth indeed for those who only see "growth" as the route to a happy society. The likely outcome of this business as usual "growth" economy is a predicted three degree rise in temperature; not much you might think but the consequences for the likes of the people of
Bangladesh and other low lying areas (e.g. Cambridge, England) will be devastating.

The artist, curator and expedition organiser David Buckland considered the role that art may have in raising public awareness of climate change "How do you approach climate change through art and the artistic process?" he asks "you can't make art directly about carbon dioxide levels, the challenge instead is to look for an emotional response, rather than an informative approach". It was from these thoughts that The Cape Farewell Project was born and in 2003 Buckland invited a group of artists and scientists aboard the schooner Noorderlicht in a voyage to the western coast of the Arctic, his invitation required no commitment, other than to crew the boat and was simply an offer to "come and see this and maybe it will affect your future work". Some artists responded on their arrival to the spectacular Arctic environment, the sculptor Antony Gormley and the architect Peter Clegg carved huge blocks of ice, the sound artist Max Easterly hydrophone in hand explored the depths of the Arctic ocean, while others like the writer Ian Mc Ewan returned home to ruminate and reflect on how he could incorporate his experience in any future novel. The sculptor Rachel Whiteread subsequently filled the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern with hundreds of white cubes for her piece "Embankment" (2005) which she describes as her "cast of a glacial plain".

Subsequently there were two further research expeditions to the High Arctic and currently works by a number of artists who have been part of the Cape Farewell project can be seen in Liverpool and these fruits of Buckland's initiative give ample testimony to his wish that the artist's approach should be an emotional response rather than a didactic exposition on the science of climate change. The work of Heather Ackroyd and David Harvey in the Liverpool Conservation Centre is an example of artists reflecting on their Cape Farewell experience in their use of a Minkie Whale which had been washed up on the English coast near Skegness as their material. The mammal's corpse is the source for their beautiful and monumental momenti mori "Stranded" (2005-06) in which they finally dress the dead white whale bones with encrustations of alum crystals resembling ice; we can not fail to be moved by the beauty we negligently destroy.

At the Walker Art Gallery three matt boxed digital films by Nick Edwards explore the unique land and seascapes of these northern regions, in his piece "80deg 05'N : 16deg 44'E" (2006) Edwards records the fantastic contrast between ice and sea, and in a second work "Ultima Thule" (2006) clouds slowly drift across the fantastic polar landscape in a rarely seen long take of time based landscape photography. Also at the Walker, Gary Hume's "Hermaphrodite Polar Bear" (2003), rendered with his trademark enamel paint on aluminium provocatively shocks us into seeing how we selfishly wreak havoc on the environment and it's wild life, in this instance horribly mutating the sexuality of these creatures so loved by children.

 

Buckland, a photographer by origin, explores in an installation at JMU's 68 Hope Street gallery the use of fragmented collodion negatives, the photographic film of the earliest polar explorers, in an evocation of an Arctic ice flow. Elsewhere Buckland uses colour photographs to record text authored by the Canadian author Gretel Ehrlich, an early sailor and contributor to Cape Farewell, whose words Buckland subsequently video projected onto ice flows, their titles include "Burning Ice" and " Sadness Melts" words which hover between the literal and the metaphysical; the frustration of the hopeless in the face of pending catastrophe.

How then do other artists respond to this pressing concern? On the evidence of this years global International Biennials it is simply business as usual, the artists jetting around the planet with the other uber professionals and tourists. Of course many contemporary artists, like society at large, invest in recycled materials but few directly address the most pressing question of our times. I remarked upon this absence of work dealing with climate change to a secondary school teacher who replied that among her young students "it is the most common theme in their work".

Why then is there such a gap in thinking between the generations? Age is supposed to bring wisdom but perhaps we could start the baby boomers education with a carbon inventory for every artist's exhibition, and given the apparent poor level of literacy among this
generation we could adopt a colour coding as used by the supermarkets in labelling their hazardous but edible food. Green for "Minimal Damage", Amber for "I'm trying" and Red for "Eco terrorist".

'Cape Farewell : Art and Climate Change'
At various locations in Liverpool
Walker Art Gallery, William Brown St.
The Conservation Centre, Whitechapel
Liverpool JMU 68 Hope St
Albert Dock
Liverpool Anglican Cathedral

16th Sep - 26th Nov

The Art Organisation (TAO) : On Gregory Scott-Gurner

by Cecilia Andersson

On Michelle Wren

by Tim Birch

“I went to Goldsmith’s but I don’t really think of myself as a Goldsmith’s graduate.” Michelle 'Mosh' Wren laughs –the first of many knowing smiles flashing across her bright, open, youthful face. Instant intrigue: not only did ‘our Mosh’ attend the trendy art school she got a First.“I only applied for it as a last choice,” says Michelle, candidly. “My tutor at school said ‘why aren’t you applying there? –Go on’. I was like ‘oh whatever’, turned up and found out it was a really good art college.”
And the First? “Yes. I think it bowled a lot of tutors over. It was really unusual.” Michelle, some might cynically say, looks like an art school dropout. It makes her achievement at Goldsmith’s all the more sweet.

“I do photography,” she says gesturing to a scale model of a theatrical proscenium arch, in cardboard, peppered with pictures. “This piece has fallen apart now –it wasn’t made very well but this is my world. This is New Cross [the location of Goldsmith’s].” She points to photos: “This is an amazing punk club… it used to be a massive, dirty big pub it’s amazing. They refurbished it all one year. I superimposed this graffiti from the Berlin Wall on there…”

A quick proviso. Mosh is a solid talker. Yet somehow she manages to get through a lot of words without shouting or breathlessness. “This was about reclaiming the space and making your world your world and how like everything was changing all around us but we all used this space for what it was.” The down-to-earth spirit and the girl-next-door quality are natural to Mosh. In art terms, she invokes the maverick spirit running throughout art history, enlivening and enriching it. It all makes for an infectious blend.

Zestful Michelle embodies the urgency among some artists to stand up and be counted –to be a signpost for yourself and your soul rather than a weather cock blown about by the whimsical ways of lifestyle choices, regeneration, globalisation, war, you name it.
“At uni, for the first two years I was unconfident –I was trying to do things to please the tutors. I was a bit of an underdog there. I’d only ever read The Daily Mirror when I went there because my mum bought it, do you know what I mean? And all of a sudden you’re on this course at Goldsmith’s and I was getting The Guardian every week and stacking them up to read like novels.”

That knowing smile breaks again. “It took me two years to realise you are what you are Michelle. And so I did that in my last year and half of the tutors were like ‘what are you doing? Michelle stop it.’ Everyone had glossy prints on nice mount board and mine were all like cut up.” Of course, rough drafts can have greater impact for their honesty. Refreshing too is Wren’s avoidance of wearing her Goldsmith’s first as a badge or stake on those elusive sirens recognition and success.

“I could have a job at the BBC now.” She laughs again. “But I don’t crave that… I didn’t really want my photo took.” She laughs further at The Guardian and The Turner Prize. It’s rare to find in a young artist, the knowledge that in terms of its solipsism, its blinkered view of popular and high culture, the right-on left can hinder things just as much as the catch-all, bad old right. “Me and my friends used to work in FACT… we had a great time… people used to walk around in suits in there, thinking they were really important.” [She drops into an impersonation of an art world snob cum knob swollen with self-importance, complete with smarmy, all-knowing, post-everything grimace].
“This is my problem with the Biennial. It’s just really not attractive to the people. All these other people come down just for the night and say, ‘oh yes, art’. But what they want to be doing is getting the people down here from the city –and actually being like ‘this is a massive festival on your city’… like Adam [Nankervis, who has quietly convened museumMan]. He was the first person who said to me you can come and do what you want here –he let us put parties on here… Everyone else puts up obstacles –you can’t fly post anymore unless you pay the Council to fly post for you.”
Back to art. Michelle picks up a tiny shrine, which she’s built into a matchbox, in homage to “a hero” -a soldier who stood guard at his posting during Pompeii. It’s an odd story of blind servitude but, also, one of naked loyalty and commitment and resolve. The ability to see the other side to a story sets Michelle apart from many young artists.

I am ultimately led to Michelle’s signature piece. “I made this for this exhibition,” she declaims, “it’s like a poem and you follow it round.” We look at the medium sized wall-based piece –again a kind of shrine. “It’s about what’s happening in Liverpool at the moment… you know I didn’t really want to contribute to the Biennial –I just think art can be really self-indulgent sometimes.” True. And a fitting cue for my own brief self-indulgence. My absolute favourite object that Michelle has influenced (arguably a more precise term for her activity than made) is a Rubik's cube -the coloured panels have been covered with sections of the Liverpool A-Z. A curious thing happens when you hold this in your hand or toy with it awhile trying to reconfigure the messed up cityscape. The simplicity, the clarity of the idea comes through the medium, the object, the handling (hers and yours). It may well remain missed by most critics and audience alike but, in my view, it's one of the best pieces across both the official and Independent Biennial.

Michelle’s art could be disparaged easily for its literal impact, its playfulness, and the reliance on the 'easy' media of photography. But her art actually operates in an intriguing way, pulling in two distinct directions: her pictures display vision as well as reportage. "Nice new apartments get built everywhere but no one can live in them… and there's this old theme park in Liverpool, it's incredible. At the end of my [visual] poem everybody goes to live in the old theme park and rebuilds the city."
The cynical might sneer: the faux revolutionary radicalism and idealism of youth etc. But there's soulful sincerity to Michelle and her work. "Basically the road where I live is getting knocked down [She flicks a hidden switch and a spotlight reveals the road itself]." She talks on as we look at the rubble, juxtaposed with images of regeneration.

She summarises: "We're the capital of culture and everything 2008 but I live on the streets where they won't get any benefit. There's all this money that the council are investing, they're saying they're investing in tourism so the people from the city can work harder to make the city a nicer place for people to come to." She rumbles on.

Art's a blast with characters like Michelle in it. Her matter-of-fact style is quite charming. And her curious, excitable mind has made its mark on my own. All too soon it’s time to go, but not before Mosh tells me of a fanzine she publishes with friends. “It's called Pigeons, Flies and Fleas sub-titled The Revolution of the Uncounted.” Count me in.

I hope one day The Guardian and the BBC and, yes, even the Turner Prize 'discover' Michelle. But if they ever do, Michelle will not need their credentials as she'll be too busy building upon her own –the ones she’s establishing right now in the Independents Biennial 2006.

‘Ode to the Capital of Culture’
museumMan
25 Parliament Street, L1
15 September – 26 November 2006

On Max Zadow : Abled Artist

by Tim Birch

"I haven't got an art degree and there is a certain amount of snobbery around that… I came to this through work first of all as a journalist with BBC News & Current Affairs."