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My experience as a volunteer invigilator at ArcadeCardiff

Professional Studies 1   VH2S028 05/10/16 – 05/04/17

Unit 3b, Queens Arcade, Queen Street, Cardiff.

As part of my Professional Studies placement I worked for 50 hours as a volunteer invigilator for ArcadeCardiff Gallery (Location – Unit 3b, Queens Arcade, Queen Street, Cardiff, CF10 2BY).  I chose ArcadeCardiff because I wanted to experience working as an invigilator for an artist-led gallery project space. The gallery director Robert Kennedy’s ethos is for an artist-led contemporary project space in the centre of Cardiff which provides a place for upcoming and established artists to experiment, test out ideas or show new work and get feedback as part of an ongoing idea or project.

Most of the projects tended to be interactive, working with the public on many levels and reaching out to new audiences all the time. All the projects shown to the public are free and the public are encouraged to interact with the work and the artist.

Rob Kennedy aims to show the very best of contemporary art practice, interactive, digital and performative art.

I enjoyed engaging with public, informing them about the artist(s) and their project/exhibition. The feedback was most interesting and sometimes quite surprising.

View of the Queens Arcade from ArcadeCardiff

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After&Before Richard Higlett

08/03/17 - 25/03/17 

After and Before draws on Richard Higlett’s fascination with the ideas and writings of the Irish polymath J. W. Dunne. In various papers and consolidated in An Experiment with Time (1927) and The Serial Universe (1934) Dunne discusses the notion that time is not linear and dreams are made of fragments of the future. Dunne’s work runs parallel to theories on quantum physics and suggests we can mentally travel to other points in time and be physically present in them. Dunne’s ideas have informed popular culture most notably in Richard Matheson’s novel Bid Time Return (1975) which was made into the film Somewhere in Time (1980) and most recently in The Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang which was adapted into the film Arrival (2016). This take on time travel and perception is referred to directly in a text in the space which suggest it as a photocopy from a magazine yet to be published. As an activity, the gallery will contain 20 unhung works stacked against the walls. These are waiting for any viewer to hang and curate the exhibition themselves. Once the work is hung and the moment is acknowledged, the paintings are quickly returned to a stack as the pack is reshuffled. The result is an exhibition in flux as installation and presentation becomes a cyclic process with outcomes intentionally brief and the idea that anything is finished or resolved is questioned. The 20 monochrome paintings refer to the chromatic mean colours of the planets and moons in the solar system. This suggests that there is an order to these immovable truths as they are at different distances from the Sun. In not revealing the linear order of the paintings, the system is defined by the viewer and opinion replaces truth or factual evidence. Higlett is also interested in the location of ArcadeCardiff in a Shopping Mall and views the exhibition as a ‘prop’ or simulation of an actual exhibition, just as the adjacent shop change their displays. Alongside After and Before, Higlett will be creating a free download edition, a digital typeface based on particles of dust and dirt. When the gallery is closed he will be documenting other shows; the alternatives he could have displayed instead. This sideshow will be documented only on line.

A young gallery visitor relaxes after hanging her chosen arrangement.

https://richardhiglett.wordpress.com/2017/03/10/in-dust-after-before-download/

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Richard Higlett

http://www.walesartsreview.org/in-conversation-with-cardiff-contemporarys-richard-higlett/

Richard Higlett’s work involves bringing meaning and value to practices that maybe considered acts of folly. This involves the creation of works in many mediums including sound and literature.

A strand of his practice looks at work that is non-visual, as opposed to invisible, which involves making sculptural objects that do not demand to be directly observed and may be witnessed by only a small number of people. This idea informs recent pieces that look at actions in life which we may view as incidental and yet still being intrinsically creative.

Artist Richard Higlett talking about his project After&Before at ArcadeCardiff

A talk on the ideas behind the installation at ArcadeCardiff was held at 2pm on Sunday 26th March 2017, the day after the exhibition was closed and during the de-install.

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Rory Duckhouse

What makes this landscape beautiful? What makes those portraits so picture perfect? 

18/01/17 - 11/02/17

‘Our way of seeing is a language that has been learnt through centuries of exposure and reinforcement and continues to be created through how we are told to make images. Photography is a way of controlling and managing our environment and the way we represent our world makes it safer and easier to understand. This series looks at this notion of control and asks ‘what is beautiful?’ an idea that is never truly defined but has a central role in our way of understanding of imagery’. Rory Duckhouse

Rory Duckhouse private view 20th January 2017 6-8 pm ArcadeCardiff.

Rory Duckhouse is an artist, writer & collector of images based in Cardiff, Wales.

 He regularly contributes to online magazines such as photomonitor.co.uk, Aesthetica & thisistomorrow. Rory’s photographic work is concerned with how the photograph is perceived as a document and the role it plays as a record of an event over time. Using found and vernacular imagery, Rory appropriated images reveal how a layering of time influences the veracity of the image.

 Rory graduated with an MA in Photography: Contemporary Dialogues from Swansea Metropolitan University. He has gone on to work for arts organisations including Ffotogallery, Volcano Theatre company, diffusion festival of photography & currently works as an exhibitions assistant for the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea.

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‘Vexations’ (1893) by Erik Satie

On September 9, 1963, the American composer John Cage was the first to insist that staging Erik Satie’s (1893) “Vexations” was not only possible but essential. No one knew what exactly would occur, which is part of what enticed Cage, who had a lust for unknown outcomes. The performance commenced at 6 p.m. that Monday and continued to the following day’s lunch hour. Cage played in twenty-minute shifts with a group of eleven pianists he dubbed “The Pocket Theatre Piano Relay Team.” They included the dancer Viola Farber; John Cale, soon to be a co-founder of the Velvet Underground; and the experimental composers David Tudor, Christian Wolff, and David Del Tredici. To complete the full eight hundred and forty repetitions of “Vexations” took eighteen hours and forty minutes. The New York Times sent its own relay team of critics to cover the event in its entirety, while the Guinness Book of World Records dispatched an official to certify this as “The Longest Piano Piece in History.” In the aftermath, some onlookers were bemused; others were agitated. Cage was elated. “I had changed and the world had changed,” he later said.

James Ellis of Weeping Tudor Productions at ArcadeCardiff (26 November 2016) performing his ‘Vexations’ marathon, a fundraising event for OCD UK that celebrates Erik Satie’s anniversary year with performances of the longest keyboard work in history – a short musical idea intended to be repeated 840 times!

Artist Leona Jones recites stories written by anonymous OCD sufferers.

Erik Satie’s ‘Vexations’ was written in 1893, when the composer was left devastated following a relationship break-up. The woman who left him (model to artists Toulouse Lautrec and Renoir) Suzanne Valadon, was not only his first girlfriend, she turned out to be his last. To add insult to injury, she had left Satie for an investment banker. For the professionally impoverished composer, this was very vexing indeed.

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beep  Wales International Painting Prize 2016

16/11/16 - 23/12/16

A Touring Exhibition.   

16 November - 23 December 2016 at Arcade Cardiff

Beep was launched in 2012 and takes place every 2 years: Bi – ennial exhibition of painting = Beep.

Beep will return in 2018. Beep is an offsite project run by elysium gallery www.elysiumgallery.com 

Taking place at different venues every two years, Beep supports imaginative and vibrant practice in contemporary painting.

’This must be the place I never wanted to leave’ aims to explore notions of perception, memory and belonging grounded in a place, space or time in the medium of paint. The recognition of ‘the place I never wanted to leave’ (and may have left, by will or necessity) becomes a profound awareness of the elusive nature of objective reality. In longing for another place and time suggests a longing to restore totality of being. 

Review:

http://www.planetmagazine.org.uk/planet-online/224/not-only-surface-but-skin

Artists exhibiting:

Sinead Aldridge | Tom Banks Winner | Sam Chapman | Philip Cheater | Michelle Conway | Tom Down | Ilona Kiss | Arron Kuiper | Anna McNeil | Eifion Sven-Meyer | Fran Williams | Camilla Wilson | Beep People’s prize winner Daniel Crawshaw

Beep private view held on 16th November 2016 6-8 pm ArcadeCardiff.

Installation view. I enjoyed my time invigilating for this show and as the time got nearer to Christmas, the gallery became quite busy.

Installation view. 

Installation view.

Beep 2016 The People's Prize winner Daniel Crawshaw.

Beep 2016 Main prize winner - Tom Banks with his painting Metavita II

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Blow Up Cardiff

Richard Bowers and Ric Bower  31/10/16 - 05/11/16

ArcadeCardiff collaborated with Cardiff Contemporary, a citywide festival celebrating the best in contemporary visual culture over a four-week period (20/10/16 -19/11/17). A Cardiff Council initiative, the festival has been developed in partnership with Cardiff’s visual art, design and architecture communities. It recognises the city’s wealth of creative talent and activity, and promotes Cardiff as a platform for a collective, creative vision. The Blow Up Cardiff project exhibited from 31/10/16 - 05/11/16. 

Blow Up Cardiff is an extension of a piece Richard Bowers presented at Chapter's Experimentica Festival in October 2016, that reworked Antonioni's film Blow Up, forming part of the joint-exhibition Blow Up Cardiff with Ric Bower. 

Bowers created an alternative version to mark the 50th anniversary of the film and Bower’s produced the photographs, roughly translating the film's locations to those of a similar nature in Cardiff.

Installation view of Blow Up Cardiff at ArcadeCardiff. Bower’s photographs hold a lot of data. They are taken from a high angle and give the view that an ordinary surveillance camera would achieve but with a very high level of detail. 

Bowers took Bower’s panoramas, cutting small segments from them - some three hundred mini-compositions - chosen by eye to ensure that they felt deliberate and that the segments were identified for reasons of composition, colour, texture, contrast in materials or a point of detail.

The video explored how representations of reality (particularly photography) has limited power to communicate information about their subjects.

“I produce works that I personally want to see and hear. That might seem a trite statement, but I make work for my own entertainment as much as for anyone else. I like the work to refresh itself and surprise me”. Richard Bowers