Red Gate Residency August 2014 Residents
This month we have nine artists visiting from seven different countries:
Anna Muirhead, New Zealand, Photography/Installation/Sculpture I am a New Zealand visual artist whose practice includes installation, sculpture, and photography. I have a particular enthusiasm and interest in structured gardens spaces and industrial building sites (modern day ruins); these places grasp my imagination and include ideas of colonisation, creation, and destruction. I enjoy using domestic, commercial and industrial materials and re-working these to add to the works’ context and narrative.
My objectives over the duration of the Red Gate Residency in Beijing are to explore our relationship to urban and domestic environment through architectural, man-made structures. These include the walk-bridges that astride the many highways and roads in Beijing, and the manicured gardens and transplanted trees that sit alongside.
The city walk bridges offer a way for pedestrians to navigate the city as a link between. These structures are not only a means to an end, (crossing the road) but also give different viewpoints and perspectives. Can the city walk-bridges, like the traditional garden bridge, also offer a space for pause and contemplation?
Andrea Salzmann, Austria, Visual Artist/Performance/Video http://salzmann.klingt.org Andrea Salzmann lives and works in Vienna. In her last videos “Selportrait / crisis #1” she is a news reporter sitting in a studio and telling headlines from the first financial crash since her birth in 1979 till 2012. In “crisis #2” the big wars since her birth are the topic.
For her residency in Beijing Andrea Salzmann started to work on Jiang Qing - forth women of Mao and main leader of the prolitarian cultural revolution. Starting from a feminist background the interest started in finding crucial women in world history and Jiang Qing is a very dazzle person.
On one side organizing the red guards - making the way straight for cruelty. On the other hand she invented the 8 model pieces - for theater, ballet and opera. “The red women detachment” was just broad casted all over china on last new years eve…So at least her will to be unforgettable is satisfied. Or maybe the people just remember the witch?
I will try to find out more about her and travel to several spots of her live. I will film but I’d also like to make a performance out of that topic.
Anna Hayes, UK, Painting I have been making work stemming from my interest food, the role it plays, its necessity and potential for communication. Dually I want to push beyond the picture plane, and test the nature of paint for the enquiry. It is this sense of painting as an object and the relationship of that object to the imagined world beyond the picture plane that then affirms oneself in the present.
Christian Schellenberger, Germany, Drawing
christian-schellenberger.com
Christian Schellenberger (b. Berlin, Germany, 1980) studied at Kunsthochschule Berlin Weißensee and Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig.
Schellenberger works with drawing. This medium serves not as a mechanism of depicting reality but rather as a way of activating a formative process.
He describes his work in terms of various emblematic expressions that wrestle with each other, move between linearity and language, and ultimately emerge from an antagonism between spontaneity and control. His impetus comes from constant flux: be it travelling or experiencing the everyday world of public space, the individual change of location,mediated by the moving body, forms the basis of this series. At the end of this playful and investigative process of (self) observation are works which, through their formal candour and dynamics, often call to mind familiar structures without, however, directly labelling them as such
Julie Born Schwartz, Denmark, Mixed Media http://www.juliebornschwartz.com, Julie Born Schwartz (b. Chicago, USA, 1981, raised in Denmark) studied at Goldsmiths and Royal Academy Schools in London. Beginning with periods of extensive research and thorough engagement with a social context, particular situation or material, which strikes her, Born Schwartz’s practice is focused on constructing large scale narratives. Often interwoven with an object or a photograph from her own personal life, these narratives evolve together over long periods of time. They find their form in installations employing photography, video and sculpture. "At my time in Beijing I will like to examine and explore the idea of materiality in pace"
Lisa Chandler, New Zealand, Painting http://www.lisachandler.co.nz I am a painter working from Ruby Bay, New Zealand but I increasingly consider myself a global nomad, traveling frequently to research, create and exhibit. My work explores non-places - generic and anonymous global spaces of transition such as airports and subways. In Beijing I will consider the concept of the 'city as in built in layers of time'. I am looking forward to experiencing the complex contrasts between the new and the old.
Morgan Craig, USA, Painting http://www.morgancraig.org Morgan Craig has exhibited throughout the U.S.A. Canada, Europe, and Australia, including OK Harris in New York City, SPACES in Cleveland, the Delaware Center for Contemporary Arts and the Australian National University. Craig has received numerous awards including, the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant, the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant (2007, 2011), and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship for 2006 and 2008. He has also been invited to several residencies including, Cite Internationale des Arts, the Macdowell Colony, Bemis Center for the Contemporary Arts, and Proekt Fabrika in Moscow, Russia. During the fall semester of 2010, he was the visiting artist at the Australian National University. Selections from his work were recently featured in several solo exhibitions, including Marshall University, Emory and Henry College, Elon University and Penn State University.
Tristan Barlow, USA, Painting http://Tristanbarlow.com My paintings are manifestations of experiences, observations, real and invented memories. My work is figurative in nature and relies on a specific sense of space, atmosphere and light. A current of silent tension and deceptive stillness is created through the structural juxtaposition of dissonant and harmonic color and tonal combinations, the compression and expansion of space, and the geometric structure of the picture plane. Tension wavers between the elements’ objective existence and subjective self-perception. Quiet intensity lies in both the disconnect between the characters and the schism between the characters and the environment.
Intentional ambiguity and spatial incongruence build visual tension that enhances the interaction between that of the figurative and spatial, challenging the viewer with visual and psychological notions of solitude and taciturnity, violence and witnessing. I view my role as a painter as one who is constantly in a state of flux, an ever-engaged outsider. It is a sort of nomadic ideal in which I am constantly trying to fill myself with knowledge and experience, pursue the unknown, and allow myself to suspend judgement while considering all possible vantage points. My efforts in this role are essentially sustained through literature and travel. The opportunity to spend a month in Beijing is an emersion into a culture with which I am completely unfamiliar and have very few insights or preconceived notions. For me, this residency is highlighted by the opportunity to make work while engaging with the unknown, grasping for ideas and paradigms beyond my own. Born into a small town in Mississippi, USA, my life has slowly accumulated experiences and gained a more worldly perspective. From Mississippi to New York, Rome, London I have built and changed myself, taking ideas from anything I can get my hands on and filtering that though myself and into my practice. Beijing is an unexpected, important, and drastic step yet in my trajectory. My proposition simply consists of the ambition to make works, specifically drawings and paintings, while engaging with a new environment, allowing myself to become influenced and changed by the experience of the unknown in a spontaneous and fluid manner.
Yianni Johns, Australia, Painting www.yianniartist.com I paint scenes of cities and buildings. Every day I see tons of the Pilbara in Western Australia where I live, departing the country for China. I want to build a body of work responding to this juxtaposition of country via our ore and make paintings responding to what China does with the ore by way of buildings, bridges and other things and connecting it back to it's place of origin visually through paintings. There is a lot of the Pilbara in China.